How having a blog on your website helps your SEO
While there are actually many reasons to have a blog, today we’re focusing on how having a blog on your website helps your SEO.
Before we get into that though, did you know that having a blog can help you:
- Establish your business as experts in your field
- Drive targeted traffic to your website
- Understand what your customers want and need
- Get visible with your ideal customers
But the big reason to have a blog on your website is to get some SEO love.
Yep, blogging is one of the best things you can do to improve your SEO.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Otherwise commonly referred to as your Google ranking – where you land when someone searches for the services or products your business offers. For example, if you search Marketing Consultant Albury, and Starfish Marketing appears first in the list of results our SEO is working pretty well because our “Google ranking” is number 1.
Note: SEO is different to SEM (Search Engine Marketing). SEM are your paid ads, the results that have a little Ad beside them.
While having a blog isn’t considered a ranking factor for SEO, blogging helps with a number of things that are important ranking factors such as longtail keywords, length of time on your website, links and fresh content.
Let’s have a look at those factors a bit more.
Longtail keywords
Blogging can help you target your longtail keywords. My blog from 2020, “6 freebies to help you get on page one of Google”, has a simple explanation of keywords and longtail keywords.
How does having a blog on your website help your SEO?
Well, the more content you have on your website, eg your blog, the more opportunities you have to include keywords and longtail keywords to help with your SEO.
Length of time on your website
Having a website that search engines, like Google, think is a good website, means your SEO is going to improve.
A good website is one that search engines think deliver valuable and helpful information and/or products.
Keeping people on your website for longer tells search engines that the content on your site is of value, that it’s helpful.
So, the longer people stay on your site, the more the search engines think that your site is helpful for visitors – because they are spending time looking at your content. And they (the search engines) will reward you for having a helpful site by “moving you up the ranks” so to speak.
Links
So much of SEO is about links. The more links you have within, and to and from your website, the more search engines see your website as trustworthy and delivering content that is helpful. And, as mentioned before, having a helpful website helps move you up the search engine ranks.
Having a blog that provides valuable and helpful information also improves your chances of other websites linking to your website. This is because the information you’re providing could be valuable to their readers. And those other businesses, those other websites are focused on delivering value to their customers. So, they look for other blogs to share information with.
These types of links are called backlinks, and while they are harder to achieve, they definitely help with your SEO.
Then there’s internal links. Internal links help your readers easily move from one page to another. This helps your website visitors stay on your website longer and you can use the links to support your target keywords too.
So, when you write a blog you can include links, internal ones to other pages on your website, and external ones to other websites.
Fresh content
Have you ever gone to a website that is immediately obvious it hasn’t been updated in years?
What impression does that give you? Let me guess. You immediately lose some trust in that business and are, therefore, not likely to do choose their services or products.
So, keeping your website up to date with fresh content is important from a customer trust perspective.
It’s also important from an SEO perspective.
As mentioned before search engines want to deliver up-to-date, valuable, and helpful information from trustworthy websites.
If your website is updated regularly, it demonstrates that you have fresh content and are therefore a trustworthy business, delivering products and services that are helpful.
Fresh content also gives the search engine algorithms more reason to index your website more often.
What’s indexing? In really simple terms it’s when the search engines look at your site.
So, the more frequently you update your website, the more frequently a search engine will stop by to visit your website. And, when search engines look at your site more frequently, it helps you achieve higher rankings based on the content you provide.
Having a blog is a simple way of adding new content to your website on a regular basis.
When you have a blog that’s updated regularly with high quality blog posts, on topics relevant to your audience, it can make a huge difference to how your overall website performs in the search engines.
Have a strategy
Of course, having a blog on your website isn’t as simple as throwing up a few words every so often.
It can seem like a good idea to just dive in and start writing, but you really need to have a strategy behind your blog.
Think about what you want your blog to achieve, who are you writing (blogging) for, how regularly you will (or need to) blog, how will you promote your blog, how will you repurpose your blog, etc etc.
Blogging is just like every other marketing activity – you need to have a strategic approach, set goals, review and measure against them. With the right strategy, a blog can help you improve your website SEO as well as support your other marketing activities.
