The first blog was created in 1994 by Justin Hall as a platform for publishing his writing.
Since then, blogging has grown exponentially as a way of sharing information with the world. It’s also widely used in digital marketing as a way of boosting exposure to branded web pages and using it for the purposes of search engine optimisation.
With the right expertise, blogging can carry your business to new heights of exposure!
What is Blogging for SEO?
Blogging for SEO is the process of creating content that is optimised for keywords, as well as providing expert, authoritative, and trustworthy (EAT) information that is useful to your readers, in order to help you climb the search engine rankings.
Blogging is a great way to solve customer queries by directing customers to services that you provide that will solve their problems. Similarly, if you’re not ready to start your own blog, you can collaborate with bloggers and have them link to your website within their content.
So Why Is It Useful to You?
SEO blogging comes in two forms, and both are useful for your traffic, conversions, and rankings. You can use your internal blog to build trust with your readers and answer their questions. You can also use external blogging, such as blogger outreach, to create a web of backlinks different sites that lead back to your website – boosting your brand exposure and creating a trail that potential customers can follow.
An advantage to using blogs as a platform to present your content is that they have a wide-reaching, and often international readership. Followers can habitually subscribe to the blog and create email alerts that will allow them to follow new content easily when its freshly uploaded.
Providing informative, keywords rich content can show ensure your blog posts show up in Google searches, giving your website exposure to potential new customers who can convert into valuable sales.
The more new and EAT friendly content you have, the more Google will recognise that your website is functioning, up to date and a valuable resource to its users, and this will in turn help it to rank higher.
Additionally, potential customers are also much more likely to view your website as trustworthy if they judge the content to be up to date, maintained and well-researched.
If customers read a high-quality blog, they are also much more likely to re-post it or share it on social media or another blog site, sending traffic back to your site. The voice and form of a blog is deliberately crafted to be informal and relatable, while still being informative, to create as much interaction as possible.
Blogs are also typically social media friendly. Links can be shared to Facebook and Twitter particularly easily. In fact, the shareability of blogs is a major advantage from an SEO standpoint, as it means that your views can multiple very quickly, giving fast results for analysis.
How Does it Work?
Blogging for SEO involves skill and research to make sure that targets for clicks are being reached.
A large part of this involves researching keywords carefully – these will be inserted into the content so that Google bots can find them when crawling the page.
Google will then judge the blog post as being the most relevant to the searcher, and it will then rank higher in search results.
Understanding the searcher’s intent is also key to making sure those keywords hit their intended marks. These keywords will allow you to rank higher in Google results, as the higher number of keywords and the higher quality the content, the easier it is for Google to rank the site.
However, more important than keywords, is ensuring that the content of the blog is useful and informative, otherwise Google may feel that you are keyword stuffing causing your rankings to suffer.
Good content will then ultimately make a call to action to the reader, encouraging them to engage with the site content in some way – by clicking the links, or signing up for alerts or newsletters if they enjoy what they read. Many blog software platforms like WordPress have plugins or widgets that will allow you to install a call to action.
With blogger outreach and blog collaborations, you should source blogs according to your business needs, and what kind of audience is being targeted. The content should then be carefully crafted, considering the keywords needed to for maximum impact.
Why Do I Need it?
Without SEO optimisation, your website may struggle to the traffic you need to sustain a business presence online.
The estimated number of webpages that Google has indexed runs into the hundreds of billions, which means that fine-tuning content is essential to getting a website the exposure over competitors.
It’s estimated that the click through rate for position 1 on a Google results page is 43.32%, whereas position 4 is typically 19.38%. There’s a big difference in the small details, so getting the ranking up as high as possible is preferable.
If you are a blogger who is hosting blog posts containing outreach links, you will also boost the ‘dwell time’ on your pages. This is measured as the amount of time that a person will spend on your page, before exiting. You should be typically aiming for 2-4 minutes of dwell time per page, although as different pages will have different lengths, purposes and readability, this is not a hard and fast rule.
Overall, blogging is an excellent way to increase traffic to a business website in a way that is subtle, but effective for working in tandem with Google’s algorithms.
The way in which blogging content is crafted around your business means the reader is called to click on the embedded links as much as possible so ensuring that you take the opportunity to link internally is essential.
If you’re looking to boost your blog content, then our team of writers can help you out. Discover how Content Marketing services can benefit you.
