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How does blogging help SEO?
You’ve come to the right place to find out.
Like most things in life, websites need a little regular tinkering to help them gain and maintain visibility in search results. Think of them like a garden; a little watering every week helps everything thrive. Well, if your website is a garden, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, is the water. SEO helps your website grow and that in turn increases visibility in search results and ultimately brings in more visitors.
SEO is something you can’t ignore if you have a website and want it to perform well. Whilst search engines like Google don’t reveal everything, they’re looking for to help rank content, we do know their crawlers look for certain parts on a page. There are lots of things that a professional SEO writer can help with when it comes to some more technical bits that will help a website gain visibility. There are also some easier, more basic things that everyone can do to improve a website’s SEO.
What does blogging do for your website?
Aside from showing your clients and audiences that you know your industry, blogging attracts more people to your website from much further afield online. Creating regular content gives you something to share in newsletters, on social media, and on other platforms where you engage with your audiences or customers. It demonstrates knowledge and expertise and expands your website domain which is great for SEO.
It also helps with:
Refreshing your website
Google loves fresh, new content and will favour a website that has recently updated or published content over one that hasn’t. By adding regular blogs, you’ll be refreshing your whole website in Google’s index which helps increase the opportunities to be shown in search results. Result!
Targeting keyword phrases your audiences are searching for
Doing some basic keyword research to find out what people are searching for will help further your blog’s reach. Use keyword phrases in your blog title that can be found for free in search results (think; People Also Search) or use the site Answer The Public where queries people have searched will show. Using these will help optimise your new blog to target popular searches.
Keyword research is often a larger project that agencies / SEO professionals can help with but if you don’t have the budget, using free tools such as Google Trends can give you a good insight into the kinds of phrases people are searching for. If you’re feeling particularly technical, why not log in to your website’s Analytics or add Google’s Search Console and find out what keywords people are using to get to your website.
Gaining more visibility online
This is an important one; the more you publish and blog about, the more chances your website has for showing in search results. Blogging means you’re covering more topics, in turn gaining more visibility for a wider audience. Blogging also gives you the chance to share content on other platforms like social media, helping it gain more visibility amongst audiences you may not have reached yet.
Gives you more opportunities to build internal links
As well as improving and expanding your website, blogs also give you the opportunity to strengthen your internal linking.
Internal linking is key to having an optimised site for two reasons:
- Google Crawlers can easily navigate through your website and index even more content, and,
- Users can navigate to another interesting/ engaging piece of content keeping them on your website longer, so the average time spent and pages visited increases, helping with overall website performance.
A double win!
And external links
In the SEO world, gaining links is important and blogging gives your website the opportunity to gain external links too. Having a strong backlink profile is another key indicator for Google when deciding to list relevant content in search results. By creating engaging and good-quality content, other websites (such as third parties and industry-relevant) will find your content and link back to it!
Indexing visual content you share
We don’t just search for written content so make sure your blogs reach video and image search results too. Alt text is key to optimising visual content and helps improve your visibility in image and video search results too.
Having an accessible website is another key factor in strengthening your SEO and it’s one many websites miss. When you publish a blog with imagery, video or even sound, make sure they have their own descriptions and titles with keyword phrases your blog is targeting.
Alt text also makes your content accessible, essential for anyone using screen readers or other bits of technology to search for information. Having an accessible website is another factor that helps with SEO as Google considers it one of the many key ranking factors.
Some other tips that help with SEO
Whilst regular blogs are great for SEO, there are some other things you can do to help your website rank well without investing in a full-blown SEO strategy.
Using metadata to repeat your keyword phrase
Every page, article or blog on your website will have a section in the content management system (CMS) that lets you create metadata to help with optimising. Metadata doesn’t directly help ranking but it does improve usability which does help SEO (it’s a confusing science!). They’re also the ideal place to start with your keyword phrase and you can repeat the keyword in the description, URL, and header of the page of a blog.
Metadata is the content marked within code called HTML that search crawlers read and understand so they know the topic of the page. Based on this, the crawler will position content that’s most relevant to the search query, starting at the meta title.
Meta titles are the first piece of content people see in search results so if you use a keyword phrase you know people are looking for, they’re more likely to click through onto your page/ blog. Meta titles are restricted to 55-60 characters in length, so make them count!
Meta descriptions are also displayed in search results but don’t really add to any ranking factor. It’s the opportunity to describe what your blog is about or what your page covers, tempting people to click through. Use your keyword phrase here too for consistency.
How you structure your content
As well as metadata, other on-page SEO factors such as headers and sub-headers will help search crawlers spot keywords and phrases that can help the content rank. Your CMS will have header and sub-header options that will place HTML code around the words and help boost visibility further down the page.
The first header, known as an H1, is your blog or article title and should contain the same keyword phrase as you’ve used in the metadata and URL. Consistency with your keyword in the places that count will help inform search crawlers that your blog is worth showing at the top of the results as it directly answers the search query.
Sub headers can be H2, H3, H4… They. help structure other queries/ keywords and general information further down the page and will also help give crawlers the right information they need quickly.
Making sure there are no broken links
A technical SEO professional will be able to conduct regular crawls of your site to make sure there are no broken links but if you’re short on time, simply click through your website once or twice a month to make sure there are no broken links.
Broken links have a negative impact on the overall performance of your website which in turn affects SEO as the user experience is impacted and crawlers can’t access the broken content.
404 errors are broken links that happen when the URL path gets interrupted or broken. If you find one, make sure to get your web developer or someone technical to help re-direct it to the right page.
Making sure your website is mobile-friendly
As Google values user experience, having an accessible website that is responsive on screens of all sizes is another factor that helps improve SEO. Make sure the CMS you’ve chosen automatically applies a responsive view when people visit on tablets or phones. One quick way to check this is by looking at your website on other devices such as your mobile phone.
Having a responsive website will mean your bounce rate reduces as people will stay on your site for longer, which is another positive factor for SEO. Make sure your blog is responsive too and that includes any images and video you embed so nothing gets left behind.
Need help getting started with your blog?
With all these great qualities and more, there’s no time like the present to start blogging! Worried you don’t have the time to blog? Want to work with expert writers who can help bring your ideas to life? Get in touch with us here at Wordsmiths Unlimited today. Your website and audience will thank you for it.
This blog was written by Emily Wood, Super SEO content writer and Wordsmiths associate.
