In order for your website to have a competitive edge in search engine results pages (SERPs), you need regular, fresh content.
You cannot rely on your pages for this because you normally don’t change your products by the week. So in order for you to have more content to use for your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts to rank, you can considerblogging.
Blogging enables you to have more opportunities to improve your brand’s performance on SERPs, as well as to naturally engage more users.
In this section of the KAMG SEO Content Hub, you’ll learn about how blogging can improve your business promotion SEO-wise and in other aspects. And we will provide you with tips you can use while blogging.
We will discuss:
- What Blogging Is
- The SEO Benefits of Blogs
- Other Non-SEO Benefits of Blogs
- Tips for Creating SEO-Friendly and Useful Blogs
Let’s dive in.
What is Blogging?
Blogging refers to producing media that’s self-published online. Blogs could be in writing, photography or any other form.
Blogging was traditionally used as an opportunity for internet users to write journal-style publishings. But it is now widely used by websites for companies, brands and businesses for its apparent benefits.
Even us at KAMG publish blogs regularly.
When you blog, you are helping your users learn more about the topics surrounding your business. At the same time you are also letting your target market know that you are an expert in your field and worthy of their trust and time.
If you think of it from a customer service perspective, blogging is a serious responsibility because as a business, your top priority should be to help your customers’ lives become better by using your products, services and expertise.
Furthermore, there are many business benefits to blogging which we will dive into next.
Why Blog?
Blogging can benefit your website both SEO-wise and conversion-wise.
The SEO Benefits of Blogging
Can blogging be effective for SEO? Yes.
However, having a blog is not a ranking factor in and of itself. Blogging is beneficial to SEO because it aids in a number of important ranking factors.
When you have a website that is regularly updated with high-quality blog posts on topics your audience is interested in, it can make a significant difference in how your overall website performs in search engines.
Blogs Keep Your Website Fresh and Updated.
The more frequently people use your website, the more likely Google and other search engines will assume that your content is reliable and helpful as a resource to related queries and searches.
If you look at an extreme situation where, let’s say, your users have exhaustedly read all of the content on your website, there won’t be much left for them to do on your website. And it’s also a practical observation that people usually won’t eagerly trust doing business with a website that isn’t consistently updated.
So if you keep attracting users to your website because you regulary release new blogs, you will stabilise or even improve your traffic over time.
Additionally, when you blog, you are actually giving additional reasons for Google and other search engines to continue to index your website, keeping it on the radars of users more often.
Blogs Increase the Time Users Spend on Your Website.
When a user clicks on your link on a SERP and then doesn’t spend much time on the page that they landed on, Google will interpret that behaviour that that the person didn’t find your page helpful. eCommerce business ownerswant users to stay on their pages and website for a reasonable duration which leads Google to believe that potential customers are getting the solutions that they need.
Blogs give your users more reasons to stick around onyour website. And if you link your blogs correctly and provide valuable, practical information, it can be simple for you to funnel your visitors down a rabbit hole of interesting knowledge – thus spending a lot of time on your website.
Blogs are an Opportunity to Optimise for Long Tail Keywords.
A long tail keyword is a phrase commonly composed of 3-5 words. These keywords are more specific than generic ones and thus allow you to target niche demographics.
Your long tail keywords are related to your seed keyword but are used by people looking for practical, specific information or solutions.
For instance if you are the owner of a pet store, your prospect could be someone with a cat who is looking to buy pet food online.
Your seed keyword may be buy petfood.
However, someone may be searching a more long tail keyword like where can I buy gluten-free pet food nearby when they are ready to buy.
Now the thing is that 70% all search queries are long-tail keywords, according to BrightEdge. These keywords are especially prevalent today because of voice search, allowing for a wider-spread use of natural language in searches.
When they search for the answer to that query, they may find what they wanted to learn and also discover that they need special cat food and vitamins that they can buy from a pet store.
That store could be your store if you blogged about something like Vitamins Your Cat Needs During Training.
So if your keyword strategy isn’t targeting them, you’re potentially missing out on about more than half of your audience and potential conversions.
Blogs Increase Awareness and Visibility
Blogging is one of those things that can, if done correctly, really give an individual or company more visibility than they’ve had before.
Think about how many people search Google for blogs versus websites every day – compared to just a few years ago.
A website is more static, blogs are updated frequently and SERPs are the results that come up for s search query.
More and more people are turning to blogs for information.
The best way of making sure your blog stays up-to-date with what people want is by having regular posts!
Other Non-SEO Benefits of Blogs
Blogs Increase Traffic
Driving more traffic to your site allows you to get people talking about you or your brand and spreading awareness.
This could potentially generate new customers, as well!
Blog posts can be evergreen and live on for years, whereas social media posts have a much shorter lifespan.
Which makes it easy enough that even beginners should be able to get started with blogging today.
The power behind popular blogs means they are great sources of visitors from Google search results or other online sources such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Blogs are Consumer-Centric
Blogging for consumers has become the new way to interact with brands.
Brands can now reach audiences directly through their favourite sources of information, which gives them access that was never before possible.
This is especially true if you’re looking at eCommerce sites where customers spend hours perusing products before making a purchase decision.
Here you are able to build a relationship with your prospects.
Blogs Increase Social Media
Blogs are a great way to get your message across and connect with potential customers.
They allow you an opportunity to continue the conversation and provide insights into what’s going on in people’s lives that can be invaluable when it comes time to make decisions about future products or services!
Engagement is key to building a solid customer relationship.
Tips for Creating SEO-Friendly and Useful Blogs
Identifying Who Your Ideal Client Is
You can’t create content that will resonate (at least intentionally) with your prospects if you don’t know who they are.
The better you are at figuring out who they are, the better you will be at attracting them and, therefore, the higher your chances of converting them.
If you don’t know who or what your ideal client is, your products or services probably don’t reflect that either. This ultimately eats at your sales.
Think of it as a conversation between a reader and a writer.
- Who are they?
- What questions are they looking to solve?
- How can you fill that gap?
Do Keyword Research
To identify what resonates with your readers is by doing some initial keyword research.
Semrush is a tool that can help you identify relevant keywords and areas to focus on.
For example, we typed in “keyword research” to see how relevant it is as a search term.
It shows that there is a global volume of 46 thousand with 3.1 billion results! So there are A LOT of people searching that term, however Semrush have scored it 100% keyword difficulty.
Keyword difficulty helps you determine how difficult it will be to rank for a specific keywork on Google.
Another example we used was “email marketing for shopify”. This term is a bit more niche as opposed to mass market email marketing.
It still shows that there is a keyword difficulty of 76% so it would help to look at some other keyword variations.
For example, the data provides some other keyword variations like “email marketing agencies for shopify dropshipping”.
This shows us at 27% that its the easiest keyword to rank for but it has a lower search volume.
An easy way to identify relevant keywords is by opening up exel and manually adding the data.
Length of The Blog
When you create a blog post, it’s important to consider writing one 1200 words minimum.
The longer the post, the greater your chances of obtaining backlinks, referrals links to other external websites, thus keeping your readers’ attention longer and providing VALUE overall.
However, it’s also important to note to limit your word count to 2500 to avoid losing your readersto information overload.
Visuals
Creating graphics and illustrations allows your blog post to be seen by Google.
Adding alt text, technical coding that is used to describe the images to Google, to all your images further enhances their chances of increasing in Google’s SERP and bringing inclusivity into your brand.
Link Building
Link building is the the main ranking factor in search engines like Google.
This is because they regard links as votes of confidence in a particular site.
Therefore the more quality backlinks you have, the more it signals to search engines that there is something of value here and that your content should rank higher.
So when you link to additional resources, blogs and thought leaders in your industry yougive them votes of confidence.
This is a great way to support other bloggers and their content and those you would like to be associated with.
Also by linking to relevant blogs that you have created, you create a link between different pieces of content in your blog for those wishing to explore a topic further and let Google know the connection.
The Content Itself
When you need to make your message compelling and relevant to the reader, consider using a tone that will hold their attention.
This means that you need to communicate why someone should care about what they’re reading and then keep them engaged with interesting information or thoughts on that subject matter.
When you browse the web, it feels like there are so many more words on each page than before.
Skim reading is what we do when these walls of text become too much for us to handle. By creating short paragraphs that can easily be skimmed by the reader, you not only create a greater chance of keeping the readers attention till the end but also an increased chance at conversion.
If you want your website to rank higher in SERPs, you need regular, fresh and optimised content.
This is where blogging can come in; it can enable you to have more opportunities for high-quality content that will help improve your SEO efforts.
Are you ready to start a blog and see the results for yourself?
Now that you know how blogging improves SEO, you can head over to the next section of the KAMG SEO Content Hub.
Need some help with blogging? Contact us today for a free consultation!
