The benefits of building your audience by introducing them to useful content are invaluable. A planned and organised blog strategy will increase engagement across social platforms, generate traffic through email marketing and build trust for your brand.
A major benefit of blog writing which is often looked past is how (if planned properly) it can benefit search engine optimisation. Here are the reasons why you should be writing blogs to benefit your SEO and some essential tips to maximise your efforts:
- Blogs will keep people engaged with your website content for longer
Google will reward you for this. The main objective of a search engine is to provide people with answers/useful content for their query. Google uses multiple metrics to determine whether the content is useful, but one of these is the amount of time spent on a website or specific page. Also, it’s important to make sure that content is relevant to achieve this objective.
- BERT (A recent Google Algorithm update in 2019)
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (yes, I know that sounds complicated). The algorithm update works to help Google answer longer, more conversational queries more accurately. One of the easiest ways for your website to adhere to this is by using blogs. Write blog content which answers questions that your potential clients/customers are searching for. Once you get these users on-site, you can also use other sophisticated digital marketing techniques such as the Facebook Pixel and Google Ads Cookie to put these people into audiences and continue to remarket to them.
- A great way to find content ideas – Answer The Public
Type in your specific industry or subject topic on Answer The Public and it will give you a wheel of questions that are frequently being searched for on the web. Not only is this an incredible tool for finding content beneficial for SEO, but it also lets you know information that’s important to your target audience. By utilising this you can increase engagement, develop the persona of an industry leader and grow website traffic.
- Internal Linking
Use your blog articles as an opportunity to link to other useful pages on your website, this will promote additional services within the content and improve website usability. Another large part of SEO which often gets paid less attention is linking! Failing to include internal links within your website can be detrimental. While you will be able to do this from page to page on your website already, frequently writing blogs which include links will help internal link building flourish.
- Blogging keeps your website regularly updated
This is again great for SEO. Google does not want to point its users to outdated information, therefore takes into consideration how frequently your website is edited. While making frequent edits to general content may be difficult, unrealistic, and pointless if your services remain the same, blogs are a great tool to make sure this gets updated regularly.
- Blogs help you optimise long-tail keyword phrases
Long-tail keyword phrases can sometimes be difficult to optimise your meta information for or include frequently in the main page content. These searches likely do not attract as many average monthly searches as some of the shorter, less specific keywords that you are trying to target, but ultimately are relevant to your business and should be included in there somewhere. For example, we’d be looking to target the phrase “Digital Marketing Agency” and easily include this within the content on our website, but the competition for this phrase will be far higher than “Search Engine Optimisation company based in Wales”.
When you start to look at the SEO benefits of blog writing it will help you devise an effective strategy, better engage with website visitors, and increase traffic.