Blogging and SEO Go Hand in Hand
Many prioritise social media over blogging within their business content strategy as they believe blogging to be an outdated medium, however the purposes of each are different. Despite many being sceptical, when blogging is utilised correctly, it can offer many benefits that match or even exceed social media use, especially in a B2B context. Blogging can help improve your SEO by increasing your website’s visibility in search results, driving more traffic to your website, and can establish your business as a credible authority in your industry, all of which result in increased lead conversion.
In this blog we will explain to you the link between regular, relevant blogging and effective SEO. demonstrating that if you aren’t prioritising blogging within your business’ content marketing strategy thus far, now is the time.
What is SEO?
We are always told about the importance of SEO when it comes to website design to help potential customers find your website, but firstly to understand why blogging benefits SEO, we need to understand what SEO actually is.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs) by optimising its content and structure. The goal of SEO is to rank higher in search engine results for relevant keywords and phrases, ultimately driving more organic traffic to the website, increasing the effectiveness of your website conversion.
It is beneficial to undertake SEO optimisation activities as this will improve the user experience of your website by ensuring the pages are crawlable by search engines and that the content is relevant and useful. By using SEO to create more user-friendly websites, this can help to increase user engagement and increase the likelihood of returning users.
The SEO Process
The process of SEO can be broken down into several key elements:
Keyword Research
Understanding the keywords and phrases that people use to search for products or services like yours is the first step in optimising your website. Keyword research will help you identify the words and phrases that your target audience are using to search for information online, and to determine which keywords are most relevant and valuable to your business.
On-page optimization
On-page optimization involves optimising the content and structure of your website to ensure that search engines can easily understand what your website is about. This includes optimising the title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and content of each page to ensure that they are keyword-rich and accurately describe the content of the page.
Off-page optimization
Off-page optimization involves optimising elements that are not on your website but can impact your website’s ranking, such as building quality backlinks from other websites. Backlinks are an important factor in search engine ranking algorithms as they signal to search engines that other websites consider your content to be valuable and relevant.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimising the technical aspects of your website, such as ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, has a fast load time, and is secure. This includes optimising your website’s code, making sure your website is accessible to search engine crawlers, and ensuring that your website is protected from cyber-attacks.
Relevant Content Engages the ‘Right’ Eyes
Blogging is a great way to showcase your expertise, credibility and knowledge to your target customer base by sharing industry news, business updates, and other relevant content.
But how does this relate to SEO?
Well, blogging is great for SEO because:
- It Increases website traffic, increasing the number of potential customers accessing your website
- It allows you to regularly post fresh, relevant content on your website, which search engines will perceive as a sign of trustworthiness. The more pages a website has, the more opportunities it has to rank for different keywords and phrases.
- It allows you to target specific keywords and phrases. By including relevant keywords in blog post titles, headlines, and throughout the content, businesses can signal to search engines that their website is relevant for those terms.
- It allows you to drive traffic to a website through the use of internal and external links. By linking to other relevant pages on a website, businesses can help search engines understand the structure of their website, and by including links to external sources, they can indicate that their website is a credible source of information.
- It allows you to share your company’s expertise by providing a platform for businesses to share their expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. This helps to enhance brand awareness and establish your company as a reputable source of information.
Start Blogging: Steps to Set Up
We understand that it can feel daunting when first getting started blogging on your website.
Here are a few steps that you can take to break down the process into manageable stages that can be incorporated into your content strategy to stay on top of the blogging process.
1. Purpose
Determine the purpose of the blog and the message that it needs to convey. This will help to guide the content of the blog and ensure that it is relevant to your business and target audience.
2. Keywords
When using blogging to increase SEO effectiveness, research keywords that are relevant to your business and target audience and utilise them within the blog copy, and ensure to include meta tags, alt tags, and header tags, to ensure that the blog will improve search engine visibility.
3. Content Calendar
Plan and organise the blog content by creating a content calendar. This will help to ensure that the blog is consistently updated with fresh, relevant content.
4. Engagement
To utilise blogs to increase conversion and encourage return readers, engage with the audience by including a call-to-action and allowing comments on the blog.
5. Marketing
Make use of your marketing channels to promote your blog. This will help to increase visibility and drive traffic to the blog.
6. Repurpose
Reuse blog content as marketing content within other channels and vice versa (eg. one blog post can be broken down into several useful social posts). This will simplify and aid the content creation process.
Don’t Fall Into the Third Party Trap
To really benefit from your blogging efforts it is essential to ensure you allocate the necessary resources to share regular, relevant content. To make the process more efficient and simpler, we are seeing third-party blog hosting websites growing in popularity. However, despite the reduction in maintenance associated with utilising these websites, did you know publishing your blog using these platforms reduces the impact of your blogging efforts?
Limited control over the design and layout
Using a third party site for blogging limits the control over the design and layout of the blog. This makes it difficult to align the blog with the unique branding and message of the business, essential as some viewers may access your blog without previous knowledge of your brand. Consistency in website design, including the blog aesthetic, is essential for brand recall and awareness.
Reduced SEO effectiveness
Third party sites do not offer the same level of SEO options as a self-hosted blog. Rather than driving traffic to your own website, you are focusing traffic towards the third party, significantly reducing the ROI of blogging efforts.
Analytics
As traffic is pointed towards the third party blogging site and away from your own website, you will be unable to gain information regarding visitor blog activity. Information regarding blog performance and other valuable insights allow you to evaluate what blogging activity is the most successful and to direct focus towards similar content.
Dependence
By using a third party site for blogging you are dependent on the third party site’s performance, and existence. If the third party discontinues its service, it can be challenging for your business to maintain your blog. Similarly, as using a third party can often mean the business doesn’t own their blog content. The blog content can be lost if the third party site changes its terms of service, deletes the content, or blocks the business from access.
Blogging for Business
In conclusion, blogging is an essential component of any SEO strategy. By creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging blog content, you can increase your website’s visibility, attract more traffic, and ultimately drive more conversions. When blogging for SEO, it’s important to consider the keywords you’re targeting, the structure and organization of your content, and the overall quality and relevance of your blog posts. Regularly updating your blog with fresh and relevant content can help keep your website relevant, establish your authority within your industry, and ultimately improve your search engine rankings. With the right approach and a commitment to quality, blogging can be a powerful tool for driving traffic, attracting new customers, and boosting your SEO efforts.
However, some businesses may not prioritise blogging due to the additional costs of regularly updating their website. In this case we recommend using a WaaS (websites-as-a-service) provider, such as Creatify. Creatify’s website development and maintenance package includes unlimited revisions, allowing businesses to update their website with additional blog content as often as they want at no additional cost.
