Chances are you’ve heard the phrase “Content Is King” a time or three. While this is certainly true, it still has a lot of small business marketing managers wondering what type of content will drive the most traffic to their website, or improve their organic rankings on popular search engines?
Over the course of the last 25 years or more business marketing strategies have evolved in lock step with the internet, with some marketing tools and trends coming or going out of fashion. Over the course of the last decade or more blogging has turned into one of the strongest pillars of an effective search engine optimization strategy through content marketing. Especially for small businesses that want to get noticed.
If you’ve been looking for a way to boost your business website’s SEO, then it might help to take a closer look at the inherent value of blogs.
How Blogging Boosts SEO
There are a lot of ways that blogs can be deployed to optimize your website’s SEO. To understand how to use them as part of a larger marketing strategy it helps to take a more granular look at their benefits.
Improved Visibility
The content inside a blog can show up in search queries on popular search engines as well as snippets. A carefully worded blog can be an effective tool to help generate more diverse search results than what your evergreen website content has to offer.
When your blog’s content generates a snippet or answers a common organic question it can help your website rank much higher than the competition. It’s especially helpful if you are a smaller company trying to boost your market share against larger competitors in your niche.
Boosting Ranking From Keywords
Keywords play a critical role in how a search engine ranks your content. Effective keyword research helps you use important key phrases for maximum results. These are common words or short phrases that are strongly related to a specific topic. When people enter them in a search engine, it improves your organic ranking.
A Higher Volume Of Indexed Pages
Modern day search engines like Google are incredibly savvy. They use sophisticated algorithms to assess how credible and trustworthy a site is. Remember that their goal is to offer up reliable information to website visitors. One of the very important criteria these algorithms use is to see just how many indexed pages a website has.
By having a higher volume of high-quality pages, you are essentially sending a message to Google and other popular search engines that your site is a superior source for quality information. However, simply having a massive website with static pages that never change doesn’t attract these algorithms. So, quantity on its own simply isn’t enough.
When your business website uses a consistent blogging strategy, it demonstrates activity, which catches the attention of popular search engines, and encourages the bots that influence the ranking algorithms to index more pages over time. While it’s not an overnight success, consistent blogging can go a long way toward improving your ranking over time.
Blogging Makes It Easier To Acquire Backlinks
Building backlinks is another highly effective way to improve your ranking as it helps demonstrate to Google and other popular search engines that you are a trusted source for information. Backlinks from guest bloggers, industry influencers, and experts in your field tell search engine algorithms that your content is of the highest quality and backed by industry leaders. This has the net effect of improving your websites ranking in the short as well as the long-term.
Better Internal Linking
On a functional level links exist as an essential aid in website navigation. As time goes on, and your consistent blog volume increases your site will naturally develop more internal linking. This helps bots to crawl your pages more effectively, and review content. This works in tandem with the way increased site activity draws a search engine’s attention.
As time goes on this increased volume of internal linking and consistent site activity can significantly boost your ranking on popular search engines.
Blogging Improves The User Experience
Marketing research has shown that visitors will click on and return to websites that offer a robust user experience. This goes beyond a sea of technical text and a few flashy graphics. Users want information that is hard to come by anywhere else or that answers an important question in a timely manner.
Search engines are keen to this trend and they prioritize sites that offer users a unique experience or one that engages visitors with information rich content. In this way, blogging allows your company to do this in a creative and engaging way. This might include things like infographics in a blog, in depth informative blogs that answer key questions or content that helps users better understand how to make the most out of your products and services.
Blogging Helps Build Industry Authority
When you are blogging on a variety of key topics in your industry or service niche you are offering up value to your site visitors, loyal customers and the bots that crawl your website. Comments, reviews and other interactions on the blog page itself also help demonstrate activity. This is why so many blogs and podcasts will say things like “If you have any questions or comments let us know in the comments section.”
When someone does comment or interact with a blog, make sure your alerts are set up and you are ready to respond in a positive and engaging manner. This not only boosts your reputation with your users, but it also demonstrates activity, quality and value to popular search engine algorithms.
Customer Retention
Blogging helps attract new visitors to your site and your content encourages them to convert into new customers. Valuable content, as well as things like responding to comments and questions can further help boost your long-term customer retention. This also increases referrals and recommendations that might appear on your site or other sites, which can get noticed by search engine algorithms.
Blogging Can Boost Your Social Media Presence
Social media marketing and an effective SEO strategy go hand in hand. When you write a blog with rich content or one that provides good information, it increases the chances of that blog being “Shared” on one of many social media platforms. This will go a long way toward driving new users to your site, which can turn into comments that boost your ranking as well as potential sales.
