There is no doubt that as the web increasingly becomes the go-to marketing platform for small businesses, content has become the centre of attention. It’s an affordable way to keep visitors on your site and establish your brand as the expert in your industry. Being able to produce quality content on a regular basis can lift you up your rankings in search results as well. Google has made it clear that they are wanting websites to deliver informative and well-written content in order to be at the top of the results. We are now living in the age of content.
Content and blogging often go hand in hand. With this in mind, we’ve compiled our favourite reasons why blogging is good for SEO.
Target Long-Tail Keywords
Blog posts are meant to be timely and offer additional information that static web pages can’t do. With this, you can target more niche topics. Long-tail keywords are highly specific search terms that are more than the common two or three-word queries. There tend to be fewer searches done for these terms, but there is also much less competition for them in the search results. And it is this lack of competition that can give you a leg up on your rivals.
Long tail keywords are also a wonderful way to help answer common questions that your customers might have. For example, content for a bike shop’s blog could be How to Adjust Your Disk Breaks or 7 Ways to Stay Safe When Cycling at Night. These are topics that don’t necessarily generate a lot of visits and don’t fall under the products or services offered, but they add value to the visitors to the site. In addition to this added value, you are targeting longer search terms and diversifying your content to reach a broader audience.
Easily shareable
The key to good blog content is to be informative and timely. These two elements are also what makes for great shareable content. We’ve written in the past about the effect that social media has on search engine optimization and your blog content is exactly what you should be sharing with your fans in order to grow your network and diversify your traffic sources. If you’re creating content that your fans like then they will turn around and share it among their networks, spreading your message far beyond your own reach and exposing your brand to new people.
Fresh content brings users and search robots back
The goal of SEO is to get eyeballs to your website. In order to do that, you need to offer reasons for users to keep coming back. Blogging is a relatively low-cost way to promote and get traffic to your website.
Google and Bing both consider high Click-Through Rates (CTR) as an important indicator of how useful a link or webpage is and therefore will rank that page accordingly. In addition to this, the fresh content and the links that go with it bring the Search Engine Robots (SER) to read over your new content more frequently. Fresh content essentially tells the search engines that “Hey look at us, we’re doing stuff!”. The new content acts as a signal to the SER’s to scan your website and the search engines will, in turn, reassess the rankings of those pages.
Allows you to rank on Blog Search
Google has a little-known search feature that will scour the web only for blog content. And Google is not the only one offering this. There are several blog search engines that only deliver this blogged content. Being listed on these other search engines not only opens you up to new traffic sources but helps set you as an authority on your subject. The more opportunities you create to appear in these different search results, the more traffic it will bring to your site, and the better Google will rank you in the search results.
As more businesses move toward a content-focused marketing strategy, the higher the need for a well written and highly optimized blog becomes. Using SEO techniques in your blogging efforts will certainly give you the advantage in getting your content seen by more people.
What are your thoughts? Do you have certain tricks you use in your blogging that’s bringing you success? Share your comments below!
