Your website is one of your most valuable marketing tools— IF people are finding it. When a company or organization comes to RSPR for advice on improving their website traffic and search engine presence, blogging is always among our TOP recommendations.
Blogging has been around for 30 years, beginning as a type of online journal that would regularly publish content in a conversational style, presented in reverse chronological order. Today, it’s a common practice for a company or organization to incorporate a blog into its existing website. Each post made to the blog is indexed by search engines as a new page for the site.
Here are five reasons why blogging is more important than ever for your marketing and SEO.
Blogging Increases Traffic from Search Engines
When people use Google to search for products and services that are relevant to their business, does your website appear in the search results? How far down on the page?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on search engines like Google. The main pages of your website should each focus on the most important and general product and service keywords that you hope to rank for. After that, blogging is incredibly useful for creating additional ranking URLs—website pages that will be listed for more specific keyword search queries that you care about.
The more content you have on your website, the more often you’ll appear in search engine results, which will increase your website traffic.
Blogging Tells Google You’re Credible
Blogs are ideal for adding content because they are meant to publish new posts regularly; your schedule for posting could be daily, weekly, bimonthly, or monthly. When Google sees you are regularly posting fresh content for it to index, your website will gain favor over your competitors’ sites.
The more indexed pages of quality content that your website has, the more search engines will see your site as trustworthy and credible, again improving your search presence.
Blogging Gives Your Audience a Reason to Return
A collection of well-written blog posts helps establish you as an expert in your field. Each blog post you publish will answer a different question that a potential customer may have.
The more helpful your website is, the more likely you are to turn new visitors into returning visitors and customers.
Blogging Incorporates Backlinking and Internal Linking
Backlinking (when another website links to yours within its articles or blog posts) is one of the more difficult aspects of SEO. Your blog posts should provide any relevant backlinks to supporting articles, and you can encourage them to return the favor. The more useful content you have, the more likely another website will want to link to you.
Internal linking (when anchor text within your blog post links to different posts or pages on your website) is another important aspect of SEO. Internal links help Google understand and rank your pages and posts better. It also encourages readers to continue browsing your site.
Blogging Enhances Your Social Media Efforts
Social media helps you attract customers, build loyalty, and gather feedback. Blogging supports these efforts. Every new blog post you publish can be shared on social media to create awareness, encourage a conversation, and increase website traffic.
Blogs can cover a wide variety of topics, including…
- Industry Commentary
- New products
- Awards received
- Employee recognition
A Note on “Content”
“Your website needs more content.” At RSPR, we’ve lost count of how many times we’ve made this statement. Website content encompasses everything your visitors see or experience on your site—text, images, videos, and more. Good website content is:
- accurate, concise, and easy to navigate
- relevant to your company or organization
- targeted to engage and persuade your audience
- organized so that each page or post focuses on a specific keyword phrase for ranking in search engine results
Like all aspects of SEO, blogging is an ongoing journey, not a destination. Give RSPR a call to get started. We will evaluate your website and work with you to develop a keyword strategy and blogging schedule that will meet your business goals.