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Why a Blog is Important for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Why a blog is important for SEO - The quick answer
Google handles 8.5 billion searches per day on a huge variety of subjects. However, everyone who uses the search engine is searching for one of two things: To find content or make a transaction. Blogs are a place where businesses can give those searchers the former in the hopes that they might one day come back for the latter. This is the short answer to the question of why a blog is important for SEO. For more information, let’s take a look at the main ways blogging can improve your SEO and why, as well as what can be done to maximise the effect.
For this blog, as with most others on search engine optimisation, we’re going to be focussing on Google because it has a market share of more than 83%. That said, many other search engines have similar rules and practices, so what is said can mostly be applied across the search engine market.
How blogging can improve your SEO
A blog provides a place to add regular new batches of content on any topic needed or desired. That means you can focus on particular keywords, groups of keywords or areas of interest that prospects may be searching for.
1. Regular updates
Indeed, just adding new material to your site regularly will give it an SEO boost. Google favours sites that are updated regularly, so it ranks these higher than sites that are only added to occasionally. As such, a blog provides an SEO boost even before we begin to consider what’s in it.
2. Pulling in browsers and keeping them
Additionally, that regular batch of new material will give the search engines more places to link to and send searchers, expanding the breadth and depth of search engine results your site has available. Meanwhile, people will have new content and new pages to engage with when they first enter your site and when they’re on it, bringing more new browsers to your site and keeping them on it for longer. Both the number of people accessing your site and the length of time they stay on it affect your search rankings, so this is good news.
3. The ability to focus on SEO keywords and topics
As mentioned above, individual blog posts can be tailored to focus on particular keywords, keyword groups and search topics that standard pages might not be able to. We’ve done deep-dives into everything from the largest tyre in the world (24.4 metres) to performing-arts productivity techniques (Pomodoro, anyone?) for clients. This can help you carefully steer your SEO strategy from month to month or week to week. Not getting much traffic to a particular sales page or area? Focus on it in your blog and you can boost the flagging section. The ability to include highly focused and niched blogs also allows success to be achieved at all levels of the highly competitive world of search engine optimisation by focussing on less competitive keywords and topics. Just find a keyword or keyword group with a level of competition you can compete with and write about that.
Handily, Google’s Keyword Planner gives a competition value to any term you search for. SMEs without an SEO expert are advised to aim for a value below 40.
4. A place to be original
There’s only so much you can do with home pages, product pages and ‘about us’ sections. Blogs can be a great place to let loose, be creative and produce something new and valuable, even for serious businesses. Today (in 2023) Google values originality and real creativity more than ever before. What’s more, the numerous cutting-edge AIs now linked into the search engine allow it to spot true creativity and originality better than it did before, so get the gears turning in those heads.
5. A demonstration of expertise and more - EEAT
Blogs are a perfect place to demonstrate expertise and experience in the form of high-quality writing. These are huge boons in themselves, because you’re building trusting provider relationships with your prospects, and they’re good for SEO, too. In fact, Google states that it favours pages with content that shows “expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”[1] in relevant areas. This makes blogs excellent and necessary places to show off an organisation’s knowledge and reliability. For more information about displaying expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, check Google’s Search Rater Guidelines.
6. A link-building tool
Links are what set Google apart when it began, allowing it to trounce the competition and dominate the search market. Do any of my readers remember the internet in the 90s? Aside from low-quality images and beeping, clicking 56k modems, it was characterised by keyword-stuffed websites that repeated the same sentences and terms over and over again. This was because early search engines simply counted the number of times a keyword occurred on a website. A great idea in theory that was easily foiled by search engine optimisers stuffing sites with keywords.
Google changed this by analysing the other pages which linked or connected to the focus page and ranking it on this basis, as well as on keywords. Pages with many links, mentions and other connections from other relevant and reliable pages were ranked above those without. It is even argued that links may be more important than keywords for climbing Google’s rankings.
Blogs are a great tool for satisfying this particular requirement of Google because they are great for building connections. First of all, blogs give their owners the ability to link to pages that wouldn’t make sense being linked to from their main sites. At least not with relevance and accuracy, which are SEO requirements. I have already linked to Google’s Keyword Planner and their Developer Blog from this post. Further down. I’ll link to Forbes, too. These are three links which wouldn’t really fit in anywhere else in the main site. It’s worth noting here that outgoing links have some SEO value while links to your site from others have much more.
Secondly, blogs create a foundation on which to build deeper relationships with all kinds of company contacts, which can result in links and other web connections. This is true in the same way that one is more likely to feel closer to someone who tells them a good story than to someone who delivers them a good sales pitch. Blogs are the stories to your site’s pitch.
Blogs can also include customer / user generated content (UGC) and references to the sources of statements, images and points that are made. On a deeper level, they provide the opportunity for guest blogs, blog swaps and guest illustrations. These are all great link-building strategies which feed in strongly to your SEO, but the best way to build links for SEO is to be creative and original.
Conclusion – Why a blog is really important for SEO
Almost everyone logs on to the internet to learn, be entertained or do business, and around 93% of those people start with a search engine. Search engines help their users do these three things by reading all the content on the internet and ranking it all in terms of what each individual will find most valuable. Blogs give businesses a way to put out large quantities of high-quality content in order to vastly improve their chance of getting found. It’s like fishing, where the blog is the rod, and the search engine users are the fish. If you don’t have a rod, your chances of catching a fish are vastly reduced.
Putting the metaphors aside, blogs are so important to search engine optimisation that if you are seriously trying to achieve success with SEO, I would say you need one. You might take this with a pinch of salt, as I am a blogger myself and I am about to promote my blogging services to you (spoiler alert). However, I also make this claim as a researcher who has investigated all of the 200+ Google Ranking factors that have been uniquely distinguished by the company and other SEO experts, as well as the numerous AIs that now undertake the job.
Speaking of undertaking jobs, you can make your way up the SEO rankings with the help of the experienced expert bloggers, marketers and SEO experts at Wireframe. We’ve written blogs that topped the search rankings for our clients’ target terms, we’ve undertaken exhaustive research on SEO, and we’ve turned passive blogs into active value generators for their owners. Just get in touch with us on mail@wireframe.uk.com to see what we can do for you.
[1] Google (2023)
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-search-and-ai-content
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