The world of digital marketing is always changing, with businesses constantly searching for ways to increase their online presence. Blogging is a popular method, but you may want to know how effective it is before investing time and effort. In this article, we’ll take a look at whether blogs actually make a difference for SEO and what factors determine possible success.
Key Takeaways
Blogs have the potential to increase SEO by:
- Providing fresh, indexable content.
- Targeting relevant keywords and queries.
- Attracting backlinks.
- Boosting domain authority.
Getting the most out of these blogs is crucial, so focus on new topic ideas, consistency, and optimised content, to put your best foot forward.
So, Do Blogs Actually Increase SEO?
Yes! Long-form content, like blogs, gives you a number of opportunities to increase the SEO of your website. Below, we’ve summarised some of the main benefits of using blogs as part of your marketing strategy:
Fresh And Indexable Content
The Google algorithm sees quality content as one of the most important SEO factors. If your blog is informative, relevant to the search intent, and of a high-quality, it’s much more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
You’ll want to make sure that your content is up to date with the most recent available information, especially if the topic is constantly evolving. Blogs are also a great way to keep your website active. The more active your site is, the more likely it is to be crawled and indexed by search engines more frequently, thus increasing your chances of ranking.
You can find out more about these processes by reading our helpful blog: “What Is Crawling And Indexing In SEO?”
Targeting Relevant Keywords And Queries
Every new blog that you create is an additional page that has the opportunity to rank for a targeted keyword or query. This is particularly important when it comes to long-tail keywords, as they may not fit naturally into the shorter content of your main website pages.
The content found elsewhere on your website, like a service or product page, may be static and remain the same for quite some time. Blogs allow you to continuously expand the information you offer to your users while giving you the ability to optimise easily if the relevant keywords change.
Our expert team has put together some of our top tips for adding keywords to your website, which you can take a look at here.
Attracting Backlinks
We mentioned earlier that relevant and quality content is held in high regard by search engines, but it can also help with another important ranking factor. Backlinks are also one of the strongest ranking factors in SEO, and blogs are extremely effective at attracting them naturally.
By showing expertise in a particular topic, your website is more likely to become a go-to source of information and be cited by other sites in your industry. Blogs also often fall under the category of ‘evergreen content’, meaning they’ll remain relevant for longer, continuing to attract backlinks in a way time-sensitive content won’t.
Why not read more about this idea in one of our recent blogs – “What Is Evergreen Content?”
Boosting Domain Authority
Domain authority (DA) is a ranking score developed by SEO tool Moz. There are a number of factors that influence your website’s DA score, including sector relevant content, high quality information, and natural use of keywords. An increased DA is a good indicator that you’re taking the right steps to improve SEO, despite it not being a ranking factor in itself.
DA is also helpful in comparing the performance of your website to that of your competitors. You’ll get a quick overview of which sites are performing better, and then you can take a closer look at how those sites are implementing the tactics we’ve mentioned.
Check out our blog “What Is Domain Authority And How Can I Increase It?” to find out more.
How Do You Get The Most Out Of Your Blogs?
There are a number of ways that blogs can increase your SEO. However, these will only be effective if you implement them correctly and strategically. Here are a few of our favourite ways to get the most SEO value out of your blogs:
New Topics
You need to align your content with the topics users are currently searching for. Whether this be currently trending topics, or frequently asked questions in your field, keeping your content relevant is super helpful in boosting SEO.
By coming up with new topic ideas regularly, you’ll also start to cover a number of subtopics in your field. This strengthens your ‘topical authority’, which Google favours and leads to better rankings.
Posting Regularly
Keeping your website active and content fresh is key to increasing how often your site is crawled. Regular crawling of your website is important because it ensures search engines are updated with the latest content on your site. This means that indexing is more accurate and your chance of ranking for a wider range of keywords increases.
Take a look at our blog “How Many Blogs Do You Need To Write For Your Website?” for more information about posting regularly.
Keeping Content Up To Date
The information on some blog topics is constantly changing. In order to stay relevant and match what users are searching for, you’ll need to update your blogs to keep them current. This doesn’t mean you have to rewrite the blog in its entirety, however. Keep an eye on the performance of your pages and optimise the content within blogs when they start to lose relevance.
Our blog “How Often Should You Refresh Content For SEO?” can give you a better insight into optimising your content.
Valuable, Original Content
The information your blogs offer is likely to have appeared somewhere else on the internet, but, if you don’t add your own insights and opinions, you’re unlikely to rank above existing blogs.. Adding your own expertise and valuable advice – also called ‘Golden Nuggets’ of information – to content will put you above your competitors.
In recent years, it’s believed that Google has implemented a metric called ‘information gain scores’ to inform rankings on SERPs. This would mean that Google now has a way to calculate how unique your content is compared to other pages in that topic area, and uses that metric to rank your content based on this score.
Your content is likely to rank lower if the information within it isn’t unique, so this is where writing E-E-A-T content comes in. Use business specific information, like customer reviews, feedback from employees, or product data, to write content informed about actual customers and their experiences. Your competitors won’t have the same information, so you have an opportunity to provide fresh content.
Share Blogs On Social Media
Another great way to encourage traffic to both your blogs and your website as a whole is to share existing content on social media. By using different channels to advertise the content on your website, you can reach a larger audience that may not have found it otherwise.
Social media links to your content, whether they’re from your accounts or others, don’t count as backlinks. This is because most social media sites mark links as ‘nofollow’, meaning link authority is not passed on to your website. Sharing content on social media does benefit your SEO, however, by driving traffic to your site and increasing content visibility.
Use Blogs As Part Of A Wider Marketing Strategy
It’s clear that blogs play a huge part in increasing your SEO, but they’re much more effective when used alongside a number of other measures. Among other things, you’ll also want to take a look at your website’s technical SEO to help your blogs rank better, which includes aspects like:
- Improving page speed.
- Eliminating duplicate content.
- Setting up structured data and schema.
- Locating user experience (UX) issues that may have negative effects on your website.
Blogs are a good starting point, and you may feel confident enough to write them yourself. However, these additional steps can get confusing; you may want to think about hiring an SEO agency.
Take a look at this blog to find out more about how an agency can streamline the process.
Increase Your SEO With Wildcat Digital
Blogging is just one of the many ways to increase SEO, and coming up with an effective strategy can be intimidating. If you’re struggling to know where to start, why not let the experts at Wildcat Digital lead you in the right direction?
Our talented SEO team will put together a comprehensive strategy to help you punch above your weight online, so get in touch for a free consultation today!
Amy Varley
SEO Executive
