Does Blogging Help SEO?
Sure, blogging is a modern marketing trend, but – should you expect it to boost your search rankings?
People still love reading the latest news, opinions, and information – they just don’t read about those things in the same ways that they used to. Let’s take stock: glossy magazines are all but out of print nowadays, and newspapers are best used for lining birdcages – and taking their place is a massive lineup of online blogs about every topic imaginable. In recent years, businesses have started blogging (either directly or by hiring an agency) to take advantage of the popularity of digital publishing. The hope is to win new customers and to boost their website’s all-important SEO.
So, does blogging help SEO? Yes, but ONLY if you do it in a very precise way. Blogging successfully for your business requires you to find the precise topics, write like a professional, and add the necessary SEO optimizations.
When you do it all correctly, blogging can be a standalone lead generation source – and the secret weapon towards dominating the search engines. At WebTek, we’re a digital marketing agency that has a successful track record of using content marketing and blogs to create online marketing success for a wide variety of businesses, including both B2B and B2C. Read on to learn more about blogging for a business – or start the conversation with us to put WebTek’s marketing experts to work for you.
Blogging for Your Business Successfully
A good blog can answer relevant questions that turn searchers into potential customers. In addition, the valuable traffic your blog earns can catapult your website on the most competitive local searches. Bottom line: blogging for your business can be a fantastic strategy to grow your SEO and – by extension – your business.
So, you know it can work, but now you might be wondering if it helps the vast majority of businesses that do it. Unfortunately, not all. For the majority of business blogs, whether they are managed by a freelance writer, no one will read them because they are buried deep on a search engine. That’s why we recommend never working with a blogger, writer, or an agency that can’t show you their portfolio of high-ranking blog content.
While managing a successful business blog is extremely challenging, we’re giving you our primer of what to look for and what to try. These are the 4 components a blog needs in order to be successful in driving traffic and boosting SEO:
- A Highly-Searched Topic – What you write about determines so much about the success you’ll see. Before you (or a blogger) ever starts writing a blog for your business, you NEED to be sure people actually want to read about the topics you’ve chosen. The way to do this is by seeing how many people search for a topic or a keyword on various search engines in a given month. There are numerous tools (paid and free) that can provide you estimates on blog topic keywords that relate to your business. For example, the main question keyword for this blog is, “Does blogging help SEO?” – and it is searched approximately 550 times per month. Without those searches, we wouldn’t have written this blog! The bottom line, though, is that there is no point to waste time or money writing a blog about a topic no one wants to read.
- Valuable Information – Providing valuable information related to your industry is essential to blogging for your business successfully. Both the Google search algorithm and any potential readers want to see valuable content. That means you shouldn’t just fill your business blog article with filler or SEO keywords you want to show up for – instead, you should provide valuable, expert-only information. If you’re a business owner or marketing director, you can leverage the subject matter experts in your organization to provide specific information that few others have. This expertise becomes the basis for your blog topic. At WebTek, we make interviews with client experts a component of our integrated marketing packages.
- Well Written SEO Content – Once you have a topic and information for a blog locked-in, it’s time to put pen to paper (figuratively). The specific sentences and paragraphs need to be written very precisely to earn those prominent, top-of-page-1 placements. In order to write a blog that will rank, you need to utilize the correct primary and secondary keywords while balancing the perfect keyword density. Keyword density refers to the number of times specific words or phrases are used throughout the blog text, and getting it right is one of the most challenging aspects of blogging for your business. If you use the keywords too infrequently, your site won’t be found – but if you use them too often, you’ll be hit with a spam penalty from Google and, again, your blog will be buried. From our perspective, the margin for error for SEO writing is very slim – so trust an expert to get it right.
- Additional SEO Optimizations – This is the x-factor in successfully blogging for a business, especially if the field is full of similar blogs all competing for the same traffic. The search engine optimization tactics that can help your homepage rise to the top of a Google search also apply to each new blog published on your site. This includes everything from the title, to alt tags, to in-bound links, and countless other technical SEO optimizations – all of which are elements our SEO agency specializes in. Bottom line: the actual writing of the blog is only half of the equation for a business blog that generates substantial ROI.
Want to see some examples of our successful blogging and content marketing campaigns? Check out our case studies!
Partner with WebTek for All of Your Blogging and SEO Needs
There’s no question that blogging provides dramatic SEO value for businesses in countless industries. However, the companies that do it well and those that flop have one big difference between them: a dedicated marketing partner. That’s exactly what we are at WebTek: a full-service marketing agency that partners with our clients to deliver expert work that grows your business.
If you’re interested in learning more about how blogging for your business and a digital marketing package can grow your company, reach out to schedule a consultation today!
