Writing blog posts for your website is a good way for improving SEO, as long as you’re regularly uploading blog posts and they include high-quality content that’s relevant to your audience. Uploading blog posts to your website may seem like a simple tactic but they can make a huge difference to how your overall website performs in the search engines.
There are a few reasons why you should think about adding blogs to your strategy in 2023:
Keep your website fresh
If you happen to stumble upon a website that clearly hasn’t been updated in years, then you may instantly lose some trust in the information that you’re reading. Google will crawl websites and deliver users to websites that have information available that’s fresh and current. If you can keep your website regularly updated with new blog posts then Google will understand that your website is still alive, offering users fresh content. Regular blog posts are also great as it gives search engine algorithms more reason to index your website more often. Rather than optimising your homepage, have a blog section within your website and use this as a tool for keeping Google on your radar over a long period of time.
Improve how much time users spend on your page
The number one priority for Google is to provide people with the information that they’re looking for. If you’re searching for something and you click on the first link you see and find that the first result wasn’t helpful, immediately leaving the website, then that will tell Google that the first result wasn’t as helpful as they thought. However, when someone clicks on a result and remains on your website for a good amount of time, that tells Google that this website is helpful for the users. If someone visits your website via a blog post that has shown up in the search results then this will give them more reason to stick around and navigate through your website. SEO researchers have found that websites with longer, more comprehensive posts tend to perform better than websites with shorter blog posts.
Help target long-tail keywords
When people are starting to improve their SEO they want to aim for the most relevant keywords for their business. For example, if your company sells garden tools, you want your company to show up on page 1 for the term “garden tools.”
However, unless you’re the biggest garden tool supplier in the country, you’re going to struggle to land a top spot for that search term. For most brands, you should be looking for longer, more specific keywords that people are searching for that are relevant to your business. These are known as long-tail keywords and are extremely important for any SEO strategy. Did you know that half of all searches are for terms that are four words or longer? They may seem a bit awkward to fit onto your product pages, which is why they are great for blog posts. A store that sells garden tools can use their blog posts that provide information on terms like “best garden tools for the summer” or “what are the best garden tools for pruning?”
You won’t attract as much traffic as “garden tools” does, but these phrases will attract people in your target audience who are garden enthusiasts. If you can make it onto page 1 for these search terms then you’ll get way more traffic from these topics than you would on page 5 or 10 for broader, more popular terms.
Opportunities for internal linking
A lot of SEO is about making links and the easiest ones to create are internal links. Including internal links on your website is one of the easiest ways to guide users from one page on the site to another. While you can probably find opportunities across your website to include internal links, as soon as you start publishing blog posts, your opportunities will really blossom. The more pages you add to your website on various but related topics, the more opportunities you have to naturally link those pages to each other.
Connect with your audience
If your audience reads your blog post and they love it, then they are more likely to share it, whether that’s via social media or just with friends and family, thus increasing traffic and gaining trust. As soon as you start gaining lots of traffic and more people coming back to your site repeatedly, Google will notice that people like your website and will raise your authority in their algorithm.
From an SEO perspective, a blog is a fantastic way to connect with your audience and start a continued relationship with the people you want to reach, while ranking for relevant search terms.
Check out our blog posts and find out other great ways to help benefit your website as we approach 2023.
