It’s very comforting to know that no matter what questions we may have, Google will always be there with its search engine to help us.
Honestly, we’d imagine it would be hard to find a person who has never used Google, apart from those who don’t really use the internet (but even this is a very strange concept.) But for us, we need to talk about Google from the perspective of digital marketing, where it becomes an incredibly powerful tool for businesses to promote themselves.
Right now, we’d like to talk about one powerful tool all of us have to improve our organic search rank: blogging. Hear us out.
Does it help?
Oh, and how! But by blogging, we don’t just mean having a blog and posting on it every now and then.
Blogging is an important SEO strategy because it can help with a variety of different ranking factors Google looks at when it decides what websites should appear in the search result pages. If you have a blog that’s based on a content strategy and update it regularly with high-quality posts relevant to your audience, it can be quite beneficial for you.
While it’s not exactly known what Google looks at when it decides the rank, from experience we know that it is generally interested in providing users with
Relevant information to their queries;
Good user-experiences.
And blogging is a very good way to appeal to Google’s relevancy preferences, but there’s more to that.
Here are some of the main perks for blogging.
1. It Keeps Your Website Updated
Any content marketer knows how important current, fresh content is for quality websites. However, we can also admit that sometimes you just don’t need to change the content you have on a particular platform. So, what do you do?
Your blog. You create blog posts and offer audiences informative articles on different topics from your industry. Google sees websites that have no new activity as outdated, and it doesn’t recommend them to its users because it doesn’t want the audience to discover outdated / stale information. But if you blog on a regular basis, you are telling Google that your website is active and can be trusted with reliable information.
2. You Can Reduce Your Bounce Rate
When a user gets on your website but doesn’t stick around long, it means they either did not find what they were looking for, or they did not like their overall browsing experience on it.
At least for the first issue, blogging is a possible solution. If you provide high-quality blog posts, people will spend more time on your website, reading the articles, checking out other posts, or even looking around to find out more about you.
3. Blogging Lets You Target Powerful Keywords
Back in the days, all you had to do to tell Google that your webpage is relevant to a query was to use a particular keyword over and over. This is now called keyword stuffing, and if you’re detected using it, you can end up on Google’s blacklist.
However, you have a legitimate chance of using valuable keywords in blog posts, including long-tail keywords. These are longer, more specific keywords that mimic or reflect what a user might search for in Google.
For instance, a normal keyword phrase for this article would be “SEO tips for blogging, ” but the long-tail version is “how does blogging help SEO.” Some long-tail keywords can be difficult to fit somewhere else in the content, as the product pages, for instance. But blogging fixes that issue very elegantly.
4. It Helps You Improve Your Internal Links
A good chunk of SEO has to do with links, and blogging can allow you to fix or improve your internal ones. Internal linking is important to help people navigate better through your pages, as well as make sure they spend more time on your website.
Let’s say you write an article about organic SEO, and talk about the difference between paid and organic SEO. If you also have an article about paid SEO, then you should link to it. Maybe our readers will also want to find out more about that topic, and instead of looking for it themselves (which, most likely, they won’t), you guide them directly to it.
5. It Helps You Build External Links too
Blogging can get you to a point where other websites from your industry look at you as an authority voice. If you constantly come with high-quality articles, reviews, and commentaries, others will start linking to your blog, and you can benefit from more visitors.
And it sends Google a very clear message that you are a thought leader in your industry, and that your website is authoritative. And if others in your industry believe so, then users can only gain from reading your blog, right?
Tips for Improving Your Blogging Content
As we said before, just having a blog on your website won’t make much of a difference. If you want to start blogging in the hopes it improves your SEO, then you’ll need to plan a few things.
Here are a few useful tips:
- First, you need to identify those subjects your audience is interested in, and the ones that are relevant to your business. This is the first and most important step. You can use various tools to identify these subjects, like scrolling Quora or even just writing in the Google search bar to see the suggestions.
- Think of a posting frequency and stick to it. Also, take into consideration your resources – how many articles can you realistically create in a week? Maybe it’s one a day, maybe it’s just one every 3 days. But, try to stick to this schedule.
- Hire/work with skilled writers. Blog posts must be high-quality, engaging, with catchy language, and present the information to the point. Not everyone can do that, so it’s best to look for a writer or content marketers to help you.
- Avoid duplicate content. It can hurt you, and it’s more worth your time to provide original blog posts than take ones from other websites. Duplicate content is different from copied content, in the sense that you don’t steal it, but you have an agreement or are allowed to publish it (like in the case of press releases).
- Don’t forget about the meta descriptions of the posts. Clearly mark the headings, body, and other elements of the text, to allow Google to read your text.
Promote your blog post outside your website. It’s vital to use social media, email marketing, or other means to promote your blog content.
Back to You
Blogging is an amazing way to improve your search engine rankings, but because it’s an organic method, you should know it may take some time before you see the results. But don’t get discouraged if the thousands of extra readers don’t come in overnight – create some buzz around your blog posts and results will soon follow.
For additional help on blogging and search engine optimisation techniques, contact Australian Internet Advertising now!
