How Do Blogs Help SEO: Making the Most Out of Your Website Content

You’ve worked hard on your website. Your homepage and service pages are search engine optimized and provide high-quality content. So why isn’t it bringing in enough visitors? It could be because you don’t have a blog. Do blogs help SEO? The answer is a resounding “yes.” Not only that, but research shows that 77% of people read blogs online, and 61% of online users in the United States have purchased something after reading a blog. All of this means knowing how to incorporate SEO into your blog posts is essential.

How Do Blogs Help SEO?

Understanding how blogging helps SEO is a big step toward creating the right SEO strategy for you.

SEO Blogs Build Trust

The more people click on your website in search engine results pages, the more relevant Google will consider your page about a topic. This is especially true if you create informative and interesting long-form blog posts that keep people on your website for longer. Successful bloggers often have posts of more than 1,000 words.

Focus on Google’s E-A-T concept, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Ensure you are an expert on what you’re writing, double-check your facts and statistics to keep your page authoritative, and never make claims you can’t back up.

SEO Blogs Generate New Leads

Ending your blog posts with strong calls to action can help you generate new leads for your business. Focus on providing relevant SEO content, then add a call to action that instructs your readers to contact you or make an online purchase for products or services that are relevant to your post. Blogs that provide exclusive content or offer perks or rewards for your readers are the most successful at generating leads.

SEO Blogs Create Brand Awareness

Posting new and original content on an ongoing basis sets you apart from your competitors. When people more regularly visit your website for the information they need, it builds brand awareness. It helps to do more than provide information about your products and services. If you want people to feel like they know and trust your brand, provide behind-the-scenes looks, such as how you come up with a certain product, what your employees do, and other unique content.

SEO Blogs Drive Engagement

When you have an interesting SEO blog, it drives engagement. People are more willing to comment, share your post on their social media, and engage on your website and social media pages. The more your content is shared on social media, the more likely you are to bring in new people who may become customers.

SEO Blogs Increase Visibility

How does blogging help SEO when you don’t currently get a lot of traffic? When your blog employs effective SEO techniques, it increases your visibility by raising your ranking in Google’s search engine results pages. Of course, this all depends on ensuring you’re using the right SEO techniques.

What Are Google’s Ranking Factors for Blogs?

It is useful to understand what Google uses as its ranking factors when you’re creating your blog SEO plan. Blogs only help SEO when they’re designed with ranking in mind.

Indexing

Page indexing is a requirement for Google. It is how the search engine finds online content and adds it to its index. This allows your page to be retrieved when people search for keywords related to your content.

Relevant, link-worthy pages are essential for ensuring search engines crawl your website. Improve how often bots crawl your website and index it by adding fresh content to your pages on a regular basis. Creating a blog is an excellent way to add more content.

Internal Links

Linking your pages makes it easier for people viewing your website to find the information they’re looking for. Adding a blog provides a space that allows you to link to other pages on your website, such as other blogs you’ve written on the topic or products or services pages. Internal linking also makes it easier for website crawlers to have a clear path to your entire site and determine how organized it is.

Organic Click-Throughs

If you try to add too many keywords to your homepage or products and services pages, Google docks you for stuffing keywords. Creating blog posts on a regular basis creates a space where you can include relevant keywords and increase organic click-through rates. This improves your SEO and is likely to raise your ranking on search engine results pages.

Backlinks

Good SEO means you have other high-ranking pages linking to your website. A good way to create pages that people want to link to is to add a blog and provide relevant content on it. Well-written blog posts that provide education about specific topics are more likely to be linked to than your homepage or products and services pages.

What Is an SEO Strategy For a Blog?

Creating an SEO strategy for your blog is essential for improving organic search results. Useful components of the right SEO strategy include making lists of useful keywords, optimizing your blog content, and performing research on your competitors. Search engines update their algorithms frequently, so it is important to receive ongoing education on current best SEO practices.

How Do You Create a Blog SEO Strategy?

Finding SEO practices that work best for you is vital for creating a blog that brings in new customers via search engine results pages. Follow these steps as you add a blog to your website.

Identify Your Target Audience

Blogs only help SEO if they are matched to the proper audience. Determine your target audience to ensure you’re speaking directly to the right people with your blog. To do this, consider buyer personas. A buyer persona focuses on customers’ psychographics, demographics, and buying behaviors. Generally, you can create a persona by determining trends in your contacts database, using forms to capture important information, or interviewing or surveying customers to find out what they like and what they would change about your products and services.

Perform Keyword Research

Using the right keywords in high-quality content is the only way your blog can help with SEO. Conduct research to ensure you’re using words and phrases that your customers are searching for. Remember to focus on both short-tail and long-tail keywords. If your business depends on local customers, ensure your words and phrases include local SEO that uses city names.

Use Catchy Titles

The right title not only draws the reader in but also employs the keywords that search engine web crawlers use to categorize your website and determine where it should fall on the search engine results pages. The right title will provide an important piece of data, pique curiosity, or ask a question that your readers want the answer to. The title should include both uncommon and common words, provide something powerful, and evoke an emotion.

Ensure Mobile Responsiveness

How do blogs help SEO on mobile devices? More than half of search traffic from the U.S. comes in the form of mobile searches. This means your blog needs to be optimized for mobile responsiveness. Use standard font sizes, include plenty of headings, and write in short paragraphs of roughly two to four sentences to keep things simple for easy mobile reading.

Add a Powerful Call to Action

While your blog should typically be more informational than a sales pitch, it’s still a good idea to add a powerful call to action at the end of each blog post that provides the reader with a next step to take. The right CTA should be relevant to the topic in the blog post and flow well with the rest of the content you write. A CTA should be clear and to the point, and provide a hyperlink to a page on your site or phone number to contact you. Some website owners use buttons or widgets, but these can be overwhelming for some readers, so consider whether they’ll truly add value to your blog.

Include Visual Elements

Readers and search engine crawlers alike prefer blogs that use visual content to help convey their messages. Images and videos are the most common elements used. When people search keywords, they’ll first see images and videos. If you want to be one of the top results, you must create image packs or video snippets that are informative, creative, and original. When writing your blog post, remember to add descriptive text about the visual components. This is important not only for keyword placement but to ensure screen readers for visually impaired people can create a positive experience.

Focus on the Experience of Your Readers

Your reader’s experience is the most important part of your blogging SEO tactics. Ensure your page loads quickly, is easy to read, and has proper formatting. Your content should be clear and comprehensive, and provide information that points your readers to a solution to a problem. The organization should include headings and subheadings that allow your readers scan the page quickly and find the information that is most important to them.

Do Blogs Help SEO? We Can Prove They Do!

Do blogs help SEO? Now that you understand how they do, let us do the dirty work. BKA Content provides a wide range of SEO services, including managed writing services, white hat link-building services, and much more. Learn more about our affordable SEO services by getting in touch with us today.