How a Blog Can Improve Your SEO Results

In this modern age, everyone uses Google to search for just about everything. Regardless of the industry or sector you work in, this highly-popular search engine will be able to ensure that your website appears in the search results. This will enable the user to find your service or product if they’re making an effort to look for it online.

There are a number of different strategies that will help to rank your website or particular web pages higher in the search results, but one of the most effective ways for this to be done is through the use of a consistent, relevant, continually updated blog. A blog can be easily added to your existing website, so it’s an effortless way to bring in more traffic if you’re currently looking to improve your leads.

How can a blog improve your SEO results?

Having a blog and regularly uploading articles to it that contain high-quality, relevant content will help to improve SEO in general, making it important when it comes to ranking factors. The more informative and useful the content you produce, the more you’ll entice a loyal, engaged audience. With a wide number of visitors coming to your site, you can soon expect your website to perform much better when it comes to Google searches.

What are the benefits of implementing a blog?

There are many different benefits that are associated with having a blog linked to your website, no matter what industry you work in. From the material handling industry and waste management services to the sale of electrical products and pest control, there isn’t anything you can’t write about, especially if you’re a specialist in the sector. So what are the other benefits of having a blog and why should you think about adding one to your existing site?

A blog will keep your site looking fresh, modern and up to date

There are some blogs that visitors come across that haven’t been updated in quite some time. Subsequently, this will lead to immediate distrust in a website and that visitor will most likely click off the page and go back to the search results rather than click through to other pages on your site.

If the blog hasn’t been updated in some time, then it could lead to the visitor asking other questions about your content and also your business as a whole, such as:

• Is the information they’re displaying out of date?
• Has the information they’re displaying been debunked since it was written?
• Is this business still operating?
• Are their staff as knowledgeable as they can be?

The issue with an out of date blog is that Google doesn’t want to be delivering its searchers old content which therefore means that your articles will not appear in the search results; if it does, the blog post will be ranking extremely low. 

If you keep your website updated, with regular, fresh content on a continuous basis, then it’ll immediately signal to Google that the website is being used and that new content is constantly being produced. In turn, this will give Google a good reason to bump your articles further up in the rankings so that searchers will see your website or blog post before your competitors.

It’ll help to retain visitors to your website for even longer

The number one priority Google has is providing its searchers with the information they are looking for, depending on the words or phrases that were inputted initially. If someone does a quick search and clicks on the first link to find that’s actually useless information, that person will close that web page down almost immediately. Once this is done, Google will realise that the information it provided as a first response isn’t as helpful as it first thought, thus pushing it further down in the search results.

However, if the opposite happens and the visitor stays on the site for a considerable amount of time, Google will also recognise this and it’ll then rank it higher as a result. This is because the longer a visitor spends on the site, the more Google will think that it’s actually quite informative and useful content; this is why it’s important to keep visitors on your site for as long as possible and a blog will help you to do this.

For example, let’s say that you run a skip hire business and you don’t have a blog, a visitor who searched for “skip hire” would have come across a homepage or a service page that’s displayed on your website. Often, web pages have a limited amount of copy on them and so it won’t take long for a visitor to read it and then click off. 

If you do have a blog and they land on your site via one of your articles, possibly entitled “The Benefits of Skip Hire”, then they’ll stay on that page for a significant amount of time just reading that blog post. With a clear ‘Call to Action’ at the bottom, you’ll be encouraging them to click through to other pages on your site and not just stay on your blog or, in another instance, click off the article entirely.

By keeping your site visitors on your website for as long as possible, you’ll be signalling to Google that your content is helpful and trustworthy, thus pushing up in the search results. The further up your site appears, the more likely it is that you’ll receive a major increase in traffic.

Publishing blog posts will ensure that long-tail keywords are targeted

The benefit of long-tail keywords is that it’ll help to broaden the search terms people might use in order to come across your company online. For example, if you own a pest control business and the only keywords you want to use are “pest control”, then the likelihood of your small company popping up in the search results is slim as the competition for that phrase will be high. Instead of optimising your content for “pest control”, you should try to narrow it down slightly, perhaps with a location, such as “pest control Derby”. 

The best thing to do is to try and rank for longer, more specific keywords, as half of all searches done through Google are made up of either four words or longer. Understandably, these can be harder to incorporate into web page copy, but they’ll be much easier to get into an article that contains relevant information about your industry, services or products.

When it comes to finding a title for an appropriate article that contains the most specific long-tail keywords, then you could look to entitle the blog post “What Are the Benefits of Pest Control?”. Although this won’t produce as much traffic as “pest control”, the long-tailed alternative will be searched for by a specific group of people, making it more likely that your article will be the one they find and subsequently click on. 

Opportunities for internal linking will be provided

Much of SEO involves links and incorporating internal links throughout relevant copy. These links will help to keep people on your website for longer, simply by adding links to other pages on your website. 

For example, you could have written a blog post about the importance of forklift maintenance because you offer a forklift maintenance service and you have a dedicated web page for that specific service and you’d like to advertise that. As such, you’ll link to that page using the term “forklift maintenance services” and this can be added at any point throughout your content – internal linking.

As you add more pages and further articles, the more these opportunities will present themselves to you. Eventually, you’ll be able to naturally add further internal links that’ll ensure your visitors land on the intended service and product pages. Google will then look at your content as being relevant and trustworthy, therefore ranking it higher than other articles that don’t contain internal links.

Blog posts will give other relevant websites a reason to link back to your site

Where internal links have a significant weighting on how well your content performs in the search engine, external links have been proven to be more valuable when it comes to ensuring that Google knows your articles are relevant, informative and trustworthy. 

This can only be done if other, appropriate websites are linking back to your website and a digital marketing agency, such as Kumo, will be able to ensure this happens using something called ‘outreach’ campaigns. 

Although, you can only take advantage of external linking if you have a blog, mainly because it’ll contain numerous different pages with valuable, authoritative content. Whenever another website owner thinks that this information will be useful enough to bring traffic to their own site, then they’ll opt to take your articles on board and therefore link back to your products and services.

Blogging will ensure that you connect with your audience more

If you produce a blog post that’s engaging, informative and packed with useful, meaningful content, then your readers will be more likely to share it with others, whether through word of mouth or online, which will then help to drive even more traffic to it. 

One great, well-written article could ensure that people keep coming back to your website on a regular basis to see what else you’ve done, which is another important reason to keep your blog updated. The more traffic and repeat visitors you get, the more Google will raise your authority level in its algorithm. 

All in all, a blog is a great way to make connections and build a rapport with your visitors; something which will be extremely difficult to achieve if you don’t have a blog or news page available on your site. 

Service and product pages should display factual, short, sharp and easy-to-read pieces of information to advertise and sell what it is you offer – that’s the purpose of a service or product page. A blog can be much more personal, informal and extensive in comparison, letting your readers know that your brand has a unique personality and tone of voice.

We hope you found this article useful! If you’re wanting to set a blog up for your website, get in touch with a member of our team today – we’ll be able to quickly and easily set up a news or articles page, dedicated to displaying blog posts containing specialist, engaging information about your industry; we can even write the articles for you, if you wish.