Having a blog for SEO purposes has become a vital part of online marketing. Blogs have evolved over the years to be a key part of building a strong online brand presence. If your business hasn’t already, the time is now to enter the blogosphere. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become a major part of digital marketing as more and more people turn to Google and similar search engines for information.
Optimizing blog posts for both search engines and users is a unique skill for copywriters. SEO content writing takes practice but has countless benefits.But, contrary to popular belief, it’s not a complicated process. There are some simple steps to follow to ensure that everything you publish on your website is SEO-friendly.
Why use an SEO Blog on Your Website?
Most business websites are focused on providing information, much of which doesn’t change on a regular basis. Your website is therefore not constantly evolving. If there are no product or service updates, or news alerts, it’s unlikely that there is much dynamic content for Google to find. Besides making sure you have a good website, you also need to make sure your site is active.
In order to make sure your site is shown to relevant users, your website needs to be found by your prospects. Google often uses fresh content, like blogs to determine if a site is relevant to a user’s search.
If your website doesn’t appear on the first page on the SERP (search engine results page), your business is going to struggle to get traffic. This will then limit the growth of your site.
Using a blog can be the answer to providing that fresh, relevant content that your site needs to stay on top of the game.
4 Reasons to Invest in Blogging and SEO
Still not sure whether you should add a blog to your site? Check out the below 4x significant benefits to adding an SEO blog to your website.
1. Improving SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Your site serves as an informational outlet, giving visitors background on your company and details on your products or services. All of this is designed to get your customers to contact your business. Frequently updating your website’s content prompts Google and other search engines to check in and analyse the new content that’s available. This is why adding d new, relevant content to your site on a regular basis is important. An SEO-friendly blog post is also a user-friendly blog post. A lot of people believe that if a blog post is optimized for search engines, it is somehow less friendly/readable for users. This is wholly untrue. The true meaning of SEO is to bring out content that both search engines and users can understand. If both of these conditions are not met, then you have limited chances of achieving high rankings. And your readers are more likely to ‘ignore’ your post. If on the other hand, you manage to meet both criteria, then your SEO blog posts will rank higher and users will spend more time reading and engaging with your content.
2. Bringing in Leads
With every blog post you upload, indexed pages are added. Essentially this means that search engines have a reason to check in on your website and amend rankings accordingly. According to research, websites that increase their indexed pages by 50-100, saw significant growth in the number of leads captured. The more quality content containing relevant keywords you have on your site, the more leads you can attract, engage and convert into customers.
3. Improve Visibility on Social Media
Social Media is without a doubt one of the best online marketing tools. And blog posts are an ideal way to increase traffic from social media platforms. Sharing blog posts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn amongst others, offers your brand exposure to new audiences. By doing this, you’re finding other online methods to drive traffic back to your site, potentially introducing them to many more aspects of your brand.
4. Strategically Positioning your Brand
Consistency in blogging is paramount! Being helpful and offering expertise in a particular area will help position you as a thought leader in that area. This is a great way to keep your brand top of mind when your service is needed. So what’s the best way to make your blog stand out amongst the clutter available online? You need to pay particular attention to things such as the title of the blog post, the structure of your blog, text formatting, headings and paragraphs. Interestingly, a post that is SEO optimized does not necessarily have great content. Contradictory statement right? While the quality of the content is one of the most important factors when evaluating a blog post, it’s not the only one. A well-optimized blog post with great quality content has more chances of ranking higher. However, a well-optimized blog post with “poor” content has limited chances of achieving higher rankings. In other words, you shouldn’t expect a blog post to rank high, just because you followed the steps to make it SEO-friendly. It’s the combination of good content and good SEO that will increase a blogs rankings.
Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts
So, now that you have a better understanding of what is an optimized blog post and what is not, let’s see how to ensure (before you hit the publish button), that your blog will be SEO friendly.
- Think before you start writing: Invest time into doing research on the topic at hand
- Create the structure of the blog post: Defining the different parts that outline the article
- Craft the title and URL: Writing a good and interesting title is a very important step for SEO purposes as well as user-friendliness. An optimized title is important for SEO because it gives Search Engines insight into what the page is about.
- Use headings correctly: The heading needs to include your target keyword/s
- Keep your paragraphs short and make use of punctuation: Chances are that the majority of your readers are on mobile, so make it easy for them to read the content.
- Add links when it makes sense: Internal linking is a very effective and easy to follow SEO technique – It helps search engines discover new pages on your website.
- Do make use of keywords (but not keyword stuffing): Don’t add keywords in the text for the sake of doing so – instead do it only when it’s natural to read. Keywords should be in the title of the post, in the main headings, within the content and in the conclusion.
How to Optimise Blog Posts for SEO
- Optimize the length of your blog: Understand that when writing on a particular topic, you compete with hundreds of other articles that are already published about the same topic. Therefore, your goal is to make your blog better and more informative, so that it will attract the attention of users, and eventually outrank competitors’ blogs. Endorsing a detailed post that covers both sides of a story, with attractive images, references to studies. Be sure to include useful information is much more likely to gain more traction than a ‘lesser’ blog.
- Optimize your meta description: Your description tag is a summary of the post in less than 141 characters. Search engines will show your description in the search results, so it should be informative and interesting, to encourage users to click on your link to read blog.
- Optimize your images and other media elements: Images, graphs, infographics, videos, statistics and other media elements, makes a blog post more interesting to read and enhance the quality of the content.
