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That means that no matter the type of website you have, if you want people to find it, you need it to show up in the search engine. And that’s not so easy.
One of the best things you can do to improve your chances of ranking high in the search engines is to start a blog, and then to make it a habit to post new blogs on a regular basis.
Blogging is simply about adding fresh, up-to-date content to your site. The more up-to-date content you have, the more traffic you’ll get, the more links you’ll attract, the more “domain authority” you’ll build and the more potential clients you will bring in (if the content is relevant and high quality).
You’re probably not going to have reason to update your homepage frequently (and it wouldn’t necessarily be a good business move to do so), so a blog is a more practical tool for adding new content to your website on a regular basis.
Blogging is absolutely a game-changer for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because it helps with a number of things that are important ranking factors. When you have a blog that’s updated regularly with blog posts that are high quality and on topics relevant to your audience, it can make a huge difference to your overall website performance in the search engines. Here are six reasons why:
If you ever happen to visit a website that you realize hasn’t been updated in years, you will probably immediately get the impression that this content is outdated, and as a result, you’ll lose some interest and trust in the information you’re seeing.
Blogs are known to dramatically promote sites chances for better ranking, and Google doesn’t want to deliver its searchers outdated information. Websites that are regularly updated signal to Google that the website is alive and offering fresh content. It also gives the search engine algorithms more reason to index your website more often, keeping it more on their radar over time.
The top priority for Google is to provide the people performing searches with the information they’re looking for so that they keep coming back to us Google over and over again.
If someone searches google and clicks on the first link, then finds it unhelpful and leaves or goes back immediately to the search engine, this tells Google that this particular result wasn’t as helpful as they thought, which in turn, translates into a higher bounce rate that would gradually lower the ranking of that website.
On the other hand, when someone clicks on a result and stays on the website for a while, that signals to Google that this website is actually very helpful, which translates into lower bounce rate and gradually increases the website ranking.
Generally, someone who comes to your website from a blog post that shows up in the search results is going to have more reason to stick around for a while and read the whole thing than someone who lands on a page with less text or information.
And that becomes even more the case with longer, more comprehensive posts. SEO researchers have found that longform blog posts tend to perform better than shorter ones.
A lot of people start out doing SEO wanting to aim for the most relevant keywords for their business. For example, if you offer IT services or sell SaaS Products, you want to show up on page one for the term “IT services provider.”
While that’s a nice goal, but if you’re not the most famous IT services provider in the country, you’re probably going to have a hard time landing a top spot for that search. SEO is really competitive. The best bet for most companies / organizations is to look for longer, more specific keywords people are searching for that are relevant to the business and try to rank for those organizations.
These are called long-tail keywords and they’re extremely important for any SEO strategy – half of all searches are for terms that are four words or longer. For example, a store that sells SaaS products can use their blog posts to provide information on terms like “the best SaaS products store in KSA” or “SaaS store in Saudi Arabia”
These searches often come from people clearly in your target audience of SaaS products and, if you can make it onto page one, you’ll get way more traffic from these topics than you would on page five or ten for broader more popular terms.
So much of SEO is about links, and internal links are the easiest ones for you to get since you can create them for yourself. Including internal links on your website that point users from one page on the site to another is one of the simplest, yet most successful SEO strategies you can adopt.
While you can probably find some good internal linking possibilities on the main pages of your website, once you start publishing blog posts, the opportunities will really blossom. As you add more pages on various but related topics, you add more opportunities to naturally link those pages to each other.
Every time you do so, you can strategically use the anchor text to better tell Google what the page you’re linking to is about – strengthening its connection to your target keywords in how the algorithm sees it.
Those internal links matter, but the hardest part of SEO is earning external links. For Google to see your website as trustworthy and authoritative, other sites (and respected ones) have to link back to yours. It’s not impossible to get external links without a blog, but it’s much, much harder.
When you write a blog you fill your website with page after page of valuable information. Any time another website decides it’s valuable to their readers to point them to useful information on a different site, there’s a far higher likelihood that your website will provide that information that’s worth linking to if you’ve got a bunch of great blog posts.
When your audience read a blog they love, they’re more likely to comment on it, share it, drive more traffic to it, come back to your website again to see more of your content and maybe even sign up for your email list. When you get lots of traffic and repeat visitors, that shows Google that people like your website, which raises your authority level in their algorithm.
And while that’s pretty great from an SEO perspective, it’s ultimately more important to the success of your website than where you are in the rankings. People in your target audience visiting your website, connecting with it, and becoming regular followers is more valuable than any #1 spot on Google (that’s the whole reason you want the spot in Google to begin with).
A blog is a good way to make those connections and start a continued relationship with the people you want to reach.
In conclusion, blogging not only helps you establish thought leadership, build trust, and increase credibility, but it also enables you to stand out from the crowd, build relationships and engage with your audience.
This, of course, has a lot to do with SEO, because the better you optimize your blog posts for SEO, the higher your webpages will be listed on search engine result pages, so more people can find your website and get to know your business. In fact, companies that blog typically gain at least twice as much web traffic as those that don’t blog.