Digital marketing for your business is a vital component to online success. But, we know it can also be a long and complicated process if you’re time and resource-poor. So, it’s important to ensure you’re directing your efforts to the areas that will get you the best results.
Whether your business is new to the digital world, or you’ve spent some time in the online space, you know enough to be aware that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a key player in your business’s digital presence. So, how do you regularly engage with consumers and remain relevant and appealing in the highly competitive game of search engine rankings?
Blogging has consistently proved to be one of the most valuable and effective digital marketing tools to engage with consumers and enhance your business relationship with search engines for some time now. It can be outsourced to writing professionals and used to routinely update your website content with relevant and useful information.
A great blog can be harnessed as an opportunity to showcase your business’s unique voice, so to demonstrate its value, we’ve put together 4 major ways great quality blogging can directly boost your business’s SEO.
Fresh, optimised and relevant content
Search engines love a fresh and steady stream of good quality content, and you can be sure they’ll notice the difference between quality and quantity. Routine blogs that are well-thought out, uncomplicated, and easily digestible will always be favoured by search engines over the ‘more is more’ approach of flooding consumers with daily content that isn’t relevant, engaging, or useful.
Search engines keep an eye on when your website and social media was last updated, and a good blog can act as the perfect wellspring of activity. Static pages that have displayed the same content since Google can remember are quickly deprioritised by search engines as they make their way to the wastelands of ‘page 57’ in search results.
Blogging can also be a great way to produce SEO-optimised content by utilising keywords and phrases related to your business and SEO strategy. But be careful not to overuse these; search engines can tell when businesses are abusing the system.
They know the difference between “health shakes can improve your vitality,” and “health shakes can improve your vitality with healthy ingredients in the shake to make a great health shake.”
Quality is key!
Increased website traffic and sessions
Search engines use many means to measure how credible and trustworthy your website is, and your website traffic and session times are big factors in their judgement. Good blogging can inspire consumers to click through to your website, but great blogging will encourage them to stay and read your content.
Search engines monitor the average length of time consumers spend on your website, and can gauge how to rank you accordingly. Consumers clicking on your blog and immediately closing it or hitting the ‘back’ button faster than the page loads tells search engines a few things. Namely, that your site’s content isn’t worth reading.
Producing well-composed and relevant content that engages with consumers will be directly reflected in their average session time on your website, and tells search engines that your site is worth ranking.
Backlinks and internal links
Simply put, a backlink is another site linking to your blog. Backlinks can be the golden geese of blogging, and can greatly impact your site’s SEO rankings. When other reputable sites are linking to your blog, it’s sending a message to search engines that your content is high quality and worthy of sharing across different sites and platforms.
On the other side of this coin, some businesses use ‘link schemes’ to purchase backlinks to their sites with the purpose of manipulating and influencing their search rankings. Link schemes are not recommended and are in-fact highly frowned upon by Google and other search engines. Businesses who engage in link schemes are often penalised by search engines for the practice.
Another great way to utilise links on your site is to refer to your own content on your blog. You can create internal links to relevant topics within your site to keep consumers engaged and interested. You can also share your blog links via your social media platforms for search engines to pick up and rank. Internal linking can take the form of anything from referring to a previous blog entry for relevant information, or linking the services and products you offer that are related to your blog topic.
Images, infographics, and vlogging (video blogging)
In a blogosphere full of dynamic and endless information, it’s important to produce content that is not only unique, but also visually appealing. The use of videos and images in your blog serves two distinct purposes; 1) images, infographics, and videos are easily digestible and cater to the time-poor and visual stimulus-driven consumers; and 2) they can be optimised for search engines to improve rankings.
Vlogs are great vehicles to condense information and present it in a way that is concise and easily viewed by consumers. Visually appealing content will often get more clicks than bulk paragraphs of text. Integrating videos on your blog will boost your rankings through communicating to search engines that your site’s content has substance and a good mix of media.
On the same note, the use of images on your blog is worth much more behind the SEO scenes than given credit for. Optimising your image-SEO begins with simply using a descriptive and relevant filename, and includes other factors such as reducing the file size and scaling the image to be smaller or larger, optimising its viewing and load time on a search engine.
Infographics are also one of the most shareable and popular content structures for businesses online. They’re vivid, concise, informative, and often a fun visual communication device to digest. Infographics are capable of condensing large amounts of information and data while using visual cues to tell a story, making them highly clickable and inviting to consumers and search engines alike. A great tool to get your content on the map.
If you’re still not convinced of the benefits of having a blog, check out our post on why you should be blogging!
