Blogging is one of the best ways to improve your search rankings. Search engines love fresh, valuable content, and blogging is a way of providing both. Blogs improve your search rankings for many reasons:
Fresh Content
A website shouldn’t be something you create and then leave alone. Your website should be alive. It should be constantly growing and changing. A blog is the perfect way of providing fresh content.
The Googlebot “crawls” websites and discovers new and updated webpages to be added to Google’s index. It favors fresh content over static websites that don’t get updated often. All other things being equal, Google’s algorithm pushes fresh content to the top of search results pages.
If you are providing valuable information about your field or expertise, customers are more likely to find your content when they are looking for a product or service like yours. A good blog allows you to establish yourself as an authoritative voice in your industry.
Link Building
When search engines crawl the web, they also look for external and internal links. External links help to prove that your content is relevant. A great blog will encourage others to reference your content. Internal links tell the search engine that your blogs are coherently tied together. Blogs can reference your products, services, or other company pages to help create an internal linking structure. Linking to outside websites tells search engines that you are referencing outside material that can make your content more valid. When you add blog posts, you increase opportunities for both internal and external linking.
Keyword Expansion
Keywords are the foundation of SEO. One of the main ways search engines rank webpages is based on the keywords contained on that page. Websites that have more relevant keywords will rank higher than other sites with similar content. The search engine assumes the site with more keywords has more relevant content. When you add blog posts to your site, you’re also adding more keywords, which builds SEO value post by post.
Valuable Content
Although keywords are important, stuffing them into blog posts just to have more keywords will backfire. Always write blogs intending to provide value and information first. Think about questions your target audience would ask search engines. Write content that answers those questions in a helpful and relevant way. Search engines rate the quality of your content. If people spend time reading your blogs, search engines will take the cue that your content is relevant. If people click on your blog and bounce right off, search engines will assume that your content is not relevant.
Most web users now expect companies to provide helpful content in the form of a blog. Use one to establish yourself as a thought leader and increase customer engagement.
Would you like help writing and maintaining a blog for your business? Contact The Light Digital for more information.
