How Does Blogging Affect Your SEO?

Just Google it. We’ve all heard that before, right? Google is still peoples number 1 port of call when they have a question. This means no matter what website you have, you need to be showing on this search engine if you want people to see it. And that can be difficult!

One very helpful thing you can do to improve your chances of showing up higher on Google’s search results page is to start writing blog content for your website. 

Does blogging really help with your SEO?

Yes. Yes it does, but not completely by itself. Blogging is great for SEO as it helps with different ranking factors on a website and it add content to a website (one of the key Google ranking factors). Having a regularly updated blog with high quality content on topics that are relevant to your website and to your target audience, can make a huge difference on how your site performs in search engines.

Here are the six main reasons why.

1. Keeping your website fresh and up to date

When moving through the internet and finding different sites you will occasionally come across websites that haven't been updated in years. These are the websites that people tend to avoid as it may be that the business it represents has gone out of business altogether or the information is just outdated and no longer correct.

This is also a big no-go from Google’s perspective. Google doesn't want to send it’s browsers to sites that have stale information. Sites that are regularly updated, signals to Google that they are alive and showing fresh content regularly. It also causes the search engine to algorithms to re-index your website more often, thus firmly keeping it on it’s radar. 

Updating your home-page everyday is neither practical nor a good business move, so a blog is a good way to keep constantly adding new content. 

2. Keeping people interested

The number one priority for Google is to provide the searcher with the information that they are looking for in the hope that they will come back to use Google’s services again. If someone clicks on the first link for a search and then clicks off it straight away to go back to the search page, it tells Google that this result wasn’t helpful to the person performing the search. But this works both ways. If someone spends a longer period of time on your site it helps google to deem that site more relevant to the search. 

While Google haven’t outright said that the amount of time spent on your site is a correlation to the ranking factors, they have made statements that outline it should be something that we pay attention to.

In turn someone that comes to your website to read a blog is inherently going to spend longer on your website. This becomes even more the case when the blog is lengthier and more full of information.

3. Blogging can help you to target long-tail key-words

A lot of people when they first start trying to improve their seo will try to aim initially for the most relevant keywords for your business. For example if you sell picture frames, you’d like to show up first for the search ‘picture frames’. While that  goal is nice, unless you're the biggest photo frame company around, chances are you will struggle landing that infamous top spot. SEO is very competitive. 

The most viable options for most people would be to try to rank for the more specific keywords that people may be looking for. These are known as long tail keywords and they can be an extremely important factor when optimising your SEO. A large percentage of search terms are at least four words or longer and these can often be difficult to try to fit in your product page. But they are the perfect terms to write about in a blog post. So leading back to the example, ranking for just the term picture frames will be difficult, but targeting the term ‘large multi-picture holding frames’ by writing a blog post will be  a lot more achievable. It will also still attract people that are looking to buy photo frames. 

4. Opportunities for internal linking

A portion of SEO is a search engine being able to tell how relevant your information is and how useful it would be. A good way to give the right signal that your information is useful is to link it to other relevant sources of information. You can do this by linking your work to other websites that are relevant or by internally linking it to other areas of your own website. Failing to include internal links on your website is one of the most simple SEO mistakes you can make. And it's something you should not be failing at as you can create the content yourself to link things to. 

While there are some good internal linking opportunities on just the main pages of your site, the supply isn’t limitless, the more you can link things to different pages on your site the better. This is where blogs can come in very helpful.  But this doesn't mean you should go wild on everything you post, 3-5 links per blog post is usually a good average number to aim for. 

5. More opportunities for linking

Internal links are definitely a good starting point but one of the hardest parts of SEO is earning external links from other websites (also known as back-links). Gaining these will be difficult but a good quality, informative blog will definitely help. These external links are important as they help Google to deem your website as helpful and trustworthy. 

When writing blogs you fill your site with multiple pages of informative information. Thus giving other websites a reason to link your site to theirs and validating both sites in turn. 

6. Connecting with your audience 

When someone reads a post that they enjoy, they are far more likely to share it, usually via social media, and in turn drive more traffic to your site. They’re also more likely to come back more often to read other blogs that you have posted. Repeat visitors and a higher amount of traffic again helps Google to realise that your site is important and provides useful information. 

While this is great for your SEO it is also helpful in the general success of your business. People becoming valuable followers and regular visitors to your site is ultimately the goal here.

A blog is a great way to create those connections and to let your relationships with people flourish and ultimately help your business grow.