How Does Blogging Help SEO?

Does blogging really help Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Your digital marketing team keeps encouraging you to write blog posts, but how does blogging help SEO, anyway?

Publishing blog posts helps SEO because it is one of the best ways to continuously add fresh, helpful, and keyword-rich content to your website.

While your main navigation pages are unlikely to change much over time, a blog provides an opportunity to consistently push out new, unique content without changing the core messaging about your products or services on your website. You can use your blog posts to comment on current events in your industry, share helpful insights, or answer commonly asked questions. Google favors fresh, up-to-date content in search engine results, so a new blog post that addresses a user’s search query is likely to rank better than an older, out-of-date post.

Google also favors quality content that is interesting and helpful for users. Blogging allows you to go into detail and provide the answers that users are searching for. By analyzing keyword research, you can identify commonly searched topics that you can write about in your blog, which will build organic traffic to your website. If you follow SEO best practices, Google will identify your blog post as a strong match for the targeted search query, and your rankings will increase. Your click-through-rates and page engagement metrics will reflect that users are finding what they are looking for on your page. Not only will your organic traffic grow, but your helpful blogging can position your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

Beyond adding fresh, helpful, and keyword-rich content to your website, a blog also helps SEO by encouraging both external and internal linking. If you create great content, others will want to share it and are likely to link to your post on their own website. If you share your own insights or findings via primary research, others will have to link to your post to give you credit. Links from other websites back to your own are helpful for SEO, serving as a sign to Google that your page has strong content that others are referring to. Your blog will also give you an opportunity to link to the other pages within your own website, which will keep users on your site by leading them to other content and will allow bots to easily crawl and index these pages. Both internal and external linking are helpful for search engine optimization, and blogging can help with both.

So, how does blogging help SEO? It provides an opportunity generate new content on your website that is helpful to people searching for the keywords that you want to target. With an effective blog, you can bring more visitors to your website, keep them on your website longer, and lead them to other pages about your products or services.

Learn more about blogging for SEO in our upcoming live webinar, taking place on August 1, 2018.