Content marketing can attract more prospects and generate more leads for your business, which is why many company websites will have a blog attached to them.
However, many businesses aren’t tapping into the full potential of a blog for generating traffic, attracting new leads, and building their brand.
If you’ve been wondering “how do blogs help SEO” and how you can take advantage of their ability to grow your business, this article will explain everything you need to know.
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1. Target Different Demographics
Blogs can be a powerful marketing medium when you create each post to target a specific demographic. Writers can optimize content around specific needs, wants, and desires.
For example, say you run a video production service. You could create a series of blog posts targeting the different services you provide, such as Facebook marketing videos, video production, or script writing.
Each blog post links back to your home page or service page using your best keywords.
2. More Opportunities for Backlinks
Well-written informative blogs attract natural links, which are still a powerful vote for your website from the internet community that benefits your SEO efforts.
Blogging opens new ways to form relationships with other blogs in related industries. There is no harm in creating a helpful post, linking out to others, and telling other website owners in related fields about your content in the hopes of a link.
Keep your backlinking strategy above board because you don’t want to lose the favor of Google.
Only work with quality sites that are related to your niche. Backlinks from unrelated blog content will provide little to no benefit, and if you collect too many links from unrelated sites, your site may attract a spam penalty.
3. More Opportunities to Get Found in the Search Engines
The more content you put on your website, the more likely you are to rank for keywords people may be using to find your business.
The good thing is that you no longer must string weird, grammatically incorrect phrases together to get an exact match keyword into your otherwise perfect prose. Googlebot is now much smarter and will know what you mean when you use plain language.
Focus on long-tail keywords that you can’t use on your optimized landing pages. A long-tail keyword typically has low search volume but fewer websites competing for a ranking, which means it’s easier to build traffic through SEO and blogging.
One long-tail won’t do much for your bottom line. However, rank a hundred or so, and you will quickly build up traffic to your blog through your SEO efforts. As your blog gets more established and builds authority, you can start ranking for more competitive keywords.
Answer questions and solve problems by using as many long-tail phrases as you can get your hands on. A long-tail phrase may have a lower search volume, but by creating more blog posts, the more you will be able to target and attract highly qualified leads to your site.
4. Blogs Create More Sharing Opportunities
Blogs can help SEO through your social media platforms. Not having a blog makes it challenging to generate engagement on your social media platforms.
If you don’t have fresh new content to share, then you will have long gaps between social media posts, which will be terrible for your engagement levels.
A new blog post gives you fresh content to promote on social media and generate extra traffic to your site.
Quality SEO content is more likely to attract likes, follows, comments, and shares. Getting people talking about your business online is where social media shines, but you’ll need a steady stream of blog content to keep the buzz going.
5. The Power of Optimized Blog Content
Internal linking, which is linking one of your blog posts to another related post inside your blog, is often neglected, but it’s one of the most powerful strategies where a blog can help with SEO.
Other methods you can use to optimize your content include adding optimized images with keywords included in the alt tag. Pay attention to your title tags and meta descriptions.
Keywords are often left out of alt tags when publishing a blog post, but they are an excellent resource for letting the search engines know what your post is about. They also show up as snippets in the search results, so make them compelling enough to attract a click.
6. Blogs Keep People on Your Website for Longer
A visitor’s behavior is tracked after arriving on your site. If they arrive and then leave almost immediately, it’s called a bounce. A high bounce rate could lead to lost rankings because it usually indicates your content is not answering the search query well enough to keep visitors browsing your site.
The more content, and the more informative it is, the more likely it is people will stay on your site to learn more. As a side note, long-form content almost always performs better in the search results than shorter articles.
7. Demonstrate Your Expertise
Google looks for sites that demonstrate expertise, authority, and trust (EAT).
An active blog shows your visitors and Google that your business is an expert at the services it provides.
Internal links and external links to authority sites all help to build your authority, and as visitors spend more time on your blog, it shows your business is trustworthy.
Establishing high points in EAT factors means your blog is helping a lot with SEO and your site will continue to rank and generate more leads and customers.
Summing Up
I hope I have given you something to think about when it comes to wondering how blogs help SEO, at least enough to consider adding one to your business website.
Make sure you are maximizing the SEO potential of your blog by ensuring you update it regularly with engaging, high-quality, and sharable content. Populate each post with long-tail keywords and optimized imagery, and it will reward you with more leads and improved search results.