The start of a fresh new year is an exciting time, especially as a business owner or manager. This is the time of year when dreams, goals, and excitement are flowing freely at the thought of new opportunities and growth. As you sit down to map out what you want 2021 to look like for your business, SEO should be at the forefront of your mind.
Getting in front of your ideal target audience is crucial to businesses in the online world we live in. Being competitive when it comes to SEO is a key piece to achieving this. Today, we want to help you learn about a powerful tool for attacking your 2021 SEO goals. That is, we want to talk about how blogging can help boost your SEO and catapult your business.
First, let’s tackle the elephant in the room. Is blogging still relevant? With social media platforms and microblogging being the new trends, we can attest that blogging is often overlooked these days by most people. The good news is that the one entity that doesn’t overlook it is the giant, Google. To Google, fresh and relevant content is king. This means that blogging is still a great way to boost your SEO and keep it growing throughout the years.
Next, you may ask, does blogging really affect your SEO enough to worry about it? Simply put, yes, it does. Although, having a blog, in and of itself, isn’t a factor in how your website is ranked.
Blogging is good for SEO because it helps with a number of important ranking factors. When you have a blog that’s updated regularly with high-quality blog posts that are focused on topics relevant to your audience, it can make a huge difference in how your overall website performs with search engines.
5 ways blogging helps your SEO:
1. It Creates Fresh & Current Content
Often, we hear business people say, “please don’t look at my website, it’s so outdated” with embarrassment. What they don’t realize is that people and search engines are going to take notice. Outdated websites can signal to them that a business is no longer open or no longer relevant and can quickly turn them away.
Search engines like Google will always prioritize websites that are offering their users fresh content. It’s important to them that they put the best websites and content forward and you want yours to be one of the ones they highlight. It also gives the search engine algorithms more of a reason to index your website frequently, keeping it more on their radar over time.
You probably won’t have a reason to update your homepage frequently (and we don’t encourage you to unless it needs it). A blog is a more practical solution for adding new content to your website on a regular basis.
2. It Helps Keep Users on Your Site
Having helpful, engaging content on your blog will entice users to stay longer. While Google has never outright said that the duration of time people spend on a site will impact rankings, it is well known that it does have an impact.
Another great reason for blogging new content regularly is that it gives people a reason to continue engaging with your site. Someone who comes to your website from a blog post that showed up in their search results is going to have a reason to stay longer and continue to explore your site. This gives them a reason to search out other blog posts or purchase your product and/or services.
3. It Allows You to Link Internally
So much of SEO is about links. They’re not just important for building your website’s internal architecture, they actually build link equity and help show search engines what’s most important on your site. Internal links are the easiest ones for you to acquire since you can create them for yourself within your blog. Failing to include internal links on your website is one of the simplest SEO mistakes you can make.
While you can probably find some good internal linking possibilities on the main pages of your website, it’s not enough. When you start creating blog posts, the opportunities for internal linking will really bloom. As you add more blog posts that are related topics, you can add more natural opportunities to link those posts to one other.
The best part is each time you link internally, you can intentionally use the anchor text to better inform Google what the page or post that you’re linking to is about. This strengthens the connection of that page to your target keywords in how the search engine algorithm views it.
4. It Gives Others a Reason to Link Back to You
Backlinks are the bread-and-butter of building your SEO. Creating content that is helpful and engaging will make your information more valuable to other websites. This will give them a strong reason to back-link to your website. These backlinks show Google just how valuable your information is and gives them insight into your business.
There is also a special emphasis here on creating truly valuable content. The sheer quantity of backlinks is no longer the most important factor. Google’s algorithm is always getting better and it now also takes into consideration the quality of the link.
As you write blogs for your website, make sure that you are intentionally creating useful posts. This is important so that when another website decides to point their readers to a helpful article, they are more likely to point them to your site for that information. The more great content you have, the more likely you are to gain backlinks on other sites.
5. It Helps You Connect with Your Audience
Blog posts can give your readers a reason to keep coming back. While this isn’t a ranking factor itself, the benefits it provides help in a multitude of ways.
Blogging gives you an easy and practical way to build a connection with your target audience. It also can give them a strong motivation to share your content and create a way to drive more traffic to your website. Through this it also provides a way for new readers to find your site, sign up for your email list, and can even give them a chance to purchase your product and/or services.
While all of this is helpful in building your SEO, it’s ultimately far better for your business itself than for your rankings. Having people within your target audience visit your website, connect with it, and come back regularly is more valuable than any #1 spot on Google. Really, that’s the whole reason you want the spot in Google to begin with. By being able to achieve this regardless of your ranking, you will continue to grow your business and SEO at the same time.
Was this article helpful to you? If you need help with blogging, SEO, or any other digital marketing service, contact us directly at https://fusiononemarketing.com/contact-us.