When browsing through websites that offer services and products, you may notice that many have blogs that provide information on topics related to their industry. These can sometimes take the focus away from the actual products and services being sold but can still be informative pieces for the user.

From an SEO perspective, creating regular blog posts for your website is essentially a no-brainer. Not only does creating blog posts keep your content up-to-date and keep users on your site for longer, but it can also help you to target additional long-tail keywords and phrases that you wouldn’t necessarily target for the core products or services for your website.

For example, if you sold mountain bikes you may target terms such as ‘mountain bikes’, ‘off-road’ bikes for your main product page. Terms such as ‘best tyres for mountain bikes’ could be targeted for a blog, however. As a result, you’re targeting a key term that’s still relatable to your website and it can drive additional traffic to your website.

Blogging for your website is important and there are additional SEO efforts that you can do to give your blog a little extra push in the rankings and bring in even more traffic. Below, we outline the reasons why you should put in this extra effort to optimise your blogs for your website.

Can blogging actually help your SEO strategy?

Any digital agency manchester based will tell you that it can. Although it’s worth noting that having a blog isn’t itself a ranking factor to help your website rank high. Instead, it’s a feature that can contribute to helping your website rank higher as it supports the efforts of the ranking factors you need to position high in search engines. When you create a blog that includes informative and well-researched content, it can be a great addition to your SEO strategy. Here’s how:

1. Blogging keeps your website up-to-date and fresh

If you ever came across a website and realised that the content that you were reading was out-of-date, it’s unlikely that you’ll continue to trust it as a resource for information. It’s likely the website has been neglected or it has gone out of business, which shows there’s no dedication to keeping the website running or informative. 

This is a big no-no from a Google point of view. They don’t want to provide their users with out of date information so they’ll simply rank websites higher who are updating their content and keeping their website informative for users searching around the topic. Applying fresh content to your site is one of the search algorithms that Google considers as a ranking factor. Blogging is a perfect way to do this considering there won’t be many reasons to update your homepage, for example.

2. Users will stay on your website for longer

The main aim for Google is to provide their users with websites that answers their query the best through search results. This means, if a user clicks the first website to a query and then immediately goes back to the search results, this indicates to Google that the website wasn’t useful for the search query. Alternatively, if the user stays on the website for a long time then it suggests that it’s really useful. 

Whilst it’s not indicated by Google that dwell time is a definite ranking factor, they have suggested that it’s something they keep an eye on. This is why blogs are useful as it’s likely to have plenty of content that the user will read through keeping them on the page for longer. Particularly when blog posts are open to having more comprehensive and longer information as it’s been researched that pages with longer content are likely to rank better when they have around 2000 words.

3. You can target longer-tail keywords

Whilst it’ll be great to rank for the service that your company specialises in, you need to be realistic considering there are probably 1000’s of other companies also specialising in a similar service. This makes targeting the keywords that you want to far more competitive and harder to rank. This is why the option to target long-tail keywords is a good addition to your SEO strategy as the keywords will be more niche and easier to target. 

It’s also an extremely important aspect of your SEO strategy to target longer-tail keywords as many search terms now include an average of 4 or more keywords. The reason why blogs are so beneficial to target long tail keywords with is because they’re easy to embed within your content compared to your service/product pages. So “best tyres for mountain bikes” will be perfect to fit into the title “what are the best types for mountain bikes when travelling off-road?”.

Whilst this won’t attract as many searches as “mountain bikes”, they will still be attractive for audiences that are suitable to your industry. As they’re easier to target, there’s a better chance of claiming position 1 and attracting more traffic compared to positioning 20 for a higher search volume term.

4. There’s the opportunity for internal linking

Another important aspect of SEO is gaining links and internal links. Internal links are easy to get considering you can generate them yourself. Internal linking on your website helps to creating a website structure and an easier user experience.

Whilst you’ll find opportunities to internal link through your main pages, blogging provides endless opportunities to internal link elsewhere. As more pages increase from blog topics, the easier it is to link other pages with each other.

As you do so, providing anchor links in the text helps Google to understand what the page links to – increasing the strength of your target keywords.

Make sure you optimise your blog posts

Having a blog on your website can be one of the most powerful tools in your SEO kit. Publishing blog posts regularly will help to strengthen the authority of your website and influence your overall ranking. So, next time you’re writing a blog post think about the optimisation opportunities that you have and enhance your website’s potential.