Using Your Blog To Boost SEO

Many businesses don’t understand the value of building blog content on their website. Often asking questions like why do I need a blog and how can a blog help my business? The short answer is the importance of blogging is driven by one of the key ranking factors for all search platforms – good quality content!

For this reason, when looking to build a stronger online presence and improve organic search rankings, good content is in fact the most important factor in any SEO strategy. Your blog can be a major contributor to creating fresh content that covers all relevant search terms and phrases, provides useful information on all aspects relating to your industry and answers any questions potential searchers/customers might have.

What Is The Purpose Of A Blog?

While everyone is on board with social media these days, many businesses have yet to realise the value of creating a professional business blog. Historically, this attitude likely stems from their original use as a more personal platform for individuals to chat about their latest holiday or new car. However, business blogs now hold their own as a convenient place for building a strong resource of quality content.

The driving factor behind the purpose of a blog is that search engines prefer fresh, top-quality, longer-form content that is useful to its searchers (answers their search queries). In a nutshell, this means that websites that are regularly added to and updated with longer textual content will more naturally get better rankings in search results as it triggers performance signals used by search engines to determine if your website is active, relevant and trustworthy.

It pays to keep in mind that a blog is also about providing value (improving user experience), think of your blog as essentially aiding your potential customers in making their purchase decision. Blog articles work towards drawing potential customers in.  

Top 5 Benefits Of A Blog

Still not convinced blogging is for your business? If you want to put a different spin on the name, you don’t have to call it a ‘Blog’. Call it ‘News’ or ‘Articles’ or ‘Resources’ or anything you want – it’s the functionality that makes it so useful. Here is a quick summary of some of the top benefits of creating a blog on your website.

1. Boosts Traffic. Publishing fresh, helpful content leads to increased organic website traffic from search engines and AI search, making it easier for customers to find you.
2. Added Link Building Opportunities. Generation of organic outgoing, internal and incoming links (also good for rankings).
3. Improved User Experience. Blogs are an easy way to communicate and provide value to your customers, improving user experience and working as a low-cost marketing tool.
4. Targeted Local SEO. Provide convenient and targeted locally optimised content (great for local search rankings)
5. Better Brand Awareness. Sharing knowledge and expertise allows you to establish your business as an authority in your industry, building trust and credibility around your brand.

What Is Good Blog Content?

Populating your website with strong, keyword-driven words is easy enough, but with so much fresh content being posted every day, not only for SEO but also for digital marketing purposes, you need to go the extra mile to stand out. Read on for our insight into creating good blog content that is useful and sharable.

• Something That Creates Value For People. Taking a people-first approach will always set you on the right path, offering your customers and readers something that will increase their value for money, product satisfaction or profits, such as a guide or a tool is perfect.
• It’s OK To Have An Opinion. For example, when a new Google update comes out, there are always tons of blogs all parroting practically the same information (particularly when written by AI tools). If you want to bring in new traffic surrounding a new topic, offering a different take on it is the best course of action. Having a point of difference is a good incentive for readers to choose you!
• Solves A Problem. Sharing your industry-specific knowledge of your products/services and customer base to identify key issues and provide a solution is the key to this one. This could be a software recommendation, a guide or even an instructional video embedded in the post. Be useful and tackle specific issues that you know will be of value to your customer base.

What A Blog Doesn’t Do

Blogs are not magical, they are not going to instantly drive up your rankings, or suddenly make customers buy from you. A blog is simply an excellent tool (one of many) within your broader digital marketing toolbox. Here are a few other common misconceptions about blogs.

• Personal vs Business Blogs. There is a difference between personal blogs and business blogs. A business blog is not the place to provide a description of your latest holiday or what you did over the Christmas holidays. Keep content relevant to your customers’ needs.
• Blogs Are Not For Selling. A business blog is used to educate, inform, inspire or entertain your audience, it is not there to sell a specific product. Don’t push your products blatantly, people dislike this kind of post and won’t trust your advice as an authoritative source.
• Quality vs Quantity. A common misconception about blogs is that the more articles you publish, the more traffic you will get. While regular posts are essential, quality always wins over quantity.
• Writing For Your Customers. While including references to the wider audience is good, please don’t overdo it by trying to appeal to the masses. Stick to what you know and become the expert on your specific industry, and you will have better success.

10 Blog Writing Tips For SEO Driven Content

Blogging is also a great way to provide extra information to potential customers – all of that stuff that doesn’t quite fit into the context of the main website. However, setting up a blog on your website is the easy part, creating good content and figuring out what to say is sometimes a little trickier. Of course, hiring a professional SEO Content Writer will ensure you get the maximum benefit from your blog - but you could also have a go yourself! Not sure where to begin? Take a look at our top 10 tips for creating high-quality and engaging content for your blog.

1. Select Relevant Topics. Always aim to create content that offers some useful advice, tips or explanation to the reader. Choosing topics relevant to your target audience and common search phrases is a great place to start.
2. Target Your Reader. Direct your writing/tone to your ideal customer and what they would want to know.
3. Add Links (Not Too Many!). Always link to other reputable industry websites and also relevant posts/pages on your site with contextual keywords where possible (this makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl your site while also promoting pages internally).
4. Include Keywords. Include appropriate keywords in the blog title and content, no keyword spamming.
5. Use Informal Language. Blogs can be informal, friendly and even a little opinionated. In fact, with AI writing tools dominating the content landscape, informal language can be a good point of difference.
6. Add Graphics And Pictures. Scrolling pages and pages of plain text are guaranteed to repel readers, always break it up with some good quality pics, infographics or diagrams. Don’t forget your image alt and title tags.
7. Cross-Post To Social Media. Be sure to highlight your post on social media channels to improve engagement.
8. Title It Like A Searcher. We all instinctively know what to type into search engines to try and get the most relevant and accurate results, so apply this to your blog titles. Phrase it as closely as you can to a likely search phrase.
9. Words Over Pictures. It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but unfortunately, search engine algorithms are not known for appreciating art. They can only read the text on the page.
10. Offer Industry Insight. Google loves nothing more than expert advice and insight. So offering up targeted industry-specific and informative text on a complicated subject or insider tips is a great place to start!

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Blog Content

Once you’ve come up with a quality, engaging article for your blog and posted it, you may think your work is done. However, leaving it at this point is like taking all that time and effort and running it into a brick wall. Instead, you should continue to push and promote content in a variety of ways, so that rather than having to continually create more, you can strengthen and amplify the stuff you already have. There are a number of ways you can do this.

1. Social Media Promotion

Most websites with a blog will already know the benefits of sharing to social media, and may even have a system that does so automatically after each post. However, there are many different factors that come into play when it comes to the success of a socially shared post. Look at which times give you the best reaction, and consider staggering your posts across different social media networks for a “slow burn” promotion. You can post the same article to a social network more than once, but be careful of spamming up people’s feeds – this tactic works best for covering opposite time zones.

2. Aim For Visible (…but subtle) Calls To Action

The perfect call to action is always a balancing act between being visible enough for your readers to notice and subtle enough that they aren’t put off. As a general rule, unless you are using your blog aggressively for marketing purposes, don’t use pop-ups as they detract from the content and disturb the viewer's concentration. A great compromise is placing your call to action at the very bottom of the page, keeping them short and sweet - and make sure they are centred around your keywords.

3. Optimise Existing Content

Most blogs will have a huge backlog of old content that isn’t necessarily optimised for today’s SEO standards. Having been around a while, it is likely these pages have metrics and search prevalence attached, which still makes them valuable as they are the pages people will find through searches and links. So, instead of discarding them and losing their value, revise, update and restructure to make sure they are written to assist in meeting current SEO guidelines and trends. Insider tip – don’t change the URLs!

4. Be Mindful Of Article Length

To get the best results in today’s Google and AI Search environment, you ideally want articles longer than 1200 words at a minimum. Working towards optimum lengths of between 1200 and 2000 words is ideal. Google is definitely rewarding higher quality content, and length is one of its signals for determining quality. So, if you have the time and resources available, it’s worthwhile regularly creating more comprehensive signature content pieces that more deeply explore a topic and add lots of value.

5. Ensure Clear Navigation

Use straightforward menus to guide users to where they want to go. Find the most popular topics and sections of your blog and provide easy access to them. The best navigation has as few categories as possible, don’t leave pages hanging out on their own, all pages on your website should be reachable within 3 clicks.

Ensuring your blog content meets Google’s quality guidelines will naturally improve engagement and organic rankings over the longer term. Plus you have the advantage of more natural content marketing and keyword optimisations. Want to improve your online marketing strategy and create a blog that’s going to give your business a head start? Get in touch with the experts in SEO at Digital Influence today!

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