How blogging helps your business

What is blog SEO?

Put simply, blog SEO centres on using blog posts to get a boost in the search engine rankings. It involves using technical and on-page SEO techniques in order to make your blog more visible in organic search. Through blog SEO, you can help search engines find and understand your posts and create content that serves your audience’s needs. Tasks commonly associated with this practice include keyword research, internal linking, image optimisation – and of course, content writing.

At Click Consult, we call this style of copy user focused content, and it’s all about delivering information that’s useful to readers while at the same time improving search engine visibility.

What is the purpose of a blog?

As touched on above, blogs serve two primary purposes. The first is to make your blog, and through this your website as a whole, more visible to your target audience online. The second is to drive engagement with your brand by providing your audience with information that they find interesting and valuable.

Why are blogs important for SEO?

So, from a technical perspective, how exactly do blogs give you an SEO boost?

Increase organic search traffic

If a person has never heard of your business before, you can’t expect them to just land on your website. They need to find out about you first. There are various ways to make this happen, including running paid ads and encouraging social media shares. But organic search is an important part of the mix too, and blogging can give you a significant boost here. It allows you to target a greater range of keywords connected to your products or services than other pages do, which in turn increases your organic clicks. Blog posts can be created to satisfy a range of different types of search intent, including:

• Informational – when someone wants to know more about a particular subject area in general, for example they may be searching for an answer to a question or wish to learn how to do something
• Transactional – when someone want to complete a transaction, such as make a purchase
• Navigational – when someone wants to find a particular website
• Commercial investigation – when someone wants to compare different products or services, for example to find out which is best for them

Creating blog content that serves these types of search queries can naturally drive traffic to your site.

Boost your visibility

In order to perform well in the SERPs, you need search engines to rank your pages. To do this, they have to crawl and index them. You can encourage search engines to index your pages more frequently by updating your website content on a regular basis – and a blog gives you a convenient way to do this.

Build authority and trustworthiness

In August 2018, Google rolled out an algorithmic change which eventually became known as the E-A-T (expertise, authority, trustworthiness) update.

Expertise looks at whether the content creator has the knowledge and credentials to give reliable information on the subject.

Authority refers to the creator’s reputation in the industry.

Trustworthiness is the most important aspect of the update and it looks at the extent to which a page’s content is honest, accurate, safe and reliable.

In December 2022, Google further refined its update to E-E-A-T, adding ‘experience’ to the list of prioritised characteristics. This is designed to take account of the fact that high quality content often demonstrates the creator’s personal, first-hand experience with the subject area.

A blog provides you with the ideal opportunity to demonstrate these qualities. You can showcase your business’ knowledge, experience and expertise within your industry, providing people with useful, accurate information. Although it’s widely agreed that E-E-A-T is currently a concept rather than a ranking factor, the framework represents very real signals that Google evaluates when ranking pages.

Encourage backlinking

Backlinking is when other websites link to pages on your site. When this happens, it indicates to search engines that your content is authoritative and useful to readers. In effect, these links are treated as a kind of peer review system. And the more respected the sites that link to you, the better the impact can be on your search ranking.

Because blogs are designed to inform and educate readers, they’re more likely than many other types of pages to result in backlinks, and to get higher quality backlinks too.

Allow you to link internally

When you create blogs on subjects closely connected to your products or services, this gives you lots of opportunities to link internally to relevant areas of your site. This makes it easier for visitors to your site to navigate their way around and it also helps search engine crawlers to understand the structure of your site.

As well as having SEO value, this gives you a clear opportunity to convert visits into sales. Say someone enters an informational search term and lands on your blog page. While on your blog, they decide they are interested in your products or services, and through internal links, they are intuitively guided to pages where they can make a purchase.