These days, Google and other search engines are putting more emphasis than ever before on the value of quality content. While backlinks and using the right keywords are important ranking factors in Google’s algorithms, so is providing your site’s visitors with material that is informative, entertaining or otherwise useful — and this is where your blog can make all the difference.
Quite simply, producing quality content for your blog is an essential part of your SEO strategy that you can’t afford to ignore. Here’s why.
It makes your blog useful
As Blog Tyrant explains, “The most important thing you can do for your SEO is create massively useful content that solves people’s problems.”
This is because Google’s search algorithms have been programmed to essentially read your site content to determine whether or not it is valuable and relevant to a particular set of search terms.
And while incorporating select SEO keywords into your blog content is certainly beneficial, it is far more important to produce materials that will actually inform or entertain your target audience while being written in a manner that is easy to read and understand.
Say, for example, that you run a company that sells lawn mowers and other lawn care supplies. Most likely, your customers would hope to find a range of lawn care tips on your blog, such as how to properly maintain lawn care equipment or even something as simple as an explanation of the best times to water the lawn.
This helpful information won’t just be useful for your customers — it will also indicate to Google that you have produced a useful site that deserves to be ranked, and your site will rank higher as a result.
Another key part of this process is to update your blog on a regular basis. Google’s search algorithms check to see how fresh your content is, and a site that updates its blog on a weekly basis will be considered much more useful than a site that hasn’t posted a new blog entry in over two months.
It helps drive traffic
Of course, for your blog to do any good, it needs to generate a consistent flow of traffic. Even when your website gets a SEO boost for posting original, quality content, that still usually isn’t enough to drive significant traffic to your blog — especially when you’re first starting your blogging efforts. More often than not, you need to do a lot of the work yourself.
Thankfully, the steps involved in promoting your blog aren’t really that difficult if you already have some experience in the world of digital marketing. And once you’ve established an initial group of loyal readers, the amount of traffic coming to your site will increase naturally as they share your content on their own.
Some of the digital marketing basics are among your best options for driving traffic to your blog, such as sharing your posts on social media and promoting them with your email list. If you have additional budget available, you can also invest in Facebook or Google advertising to help drive traffic.
The content of the blog itself also plays an essential role in driving continued traffic to your site. After all, if your blog is engaging and well-written, readers will want to come back for more — especially if you give them the option to subscribe to your blog.
As visitors return time and time again for the useful information provided on your blog, they become increasingly likely to visit other parts of your site and tell others about your brand. They also become more likely to generate sales, and as Google notices the steady, increased traffic going to your site, your search rankings will continue to climb.
It generates backlinks
It stands to reason that when you produce high-quality content, it’s going to get shared. Those who read your blog and find it interesting or useful will quite often share it on their own social media profiles, but you can also use your blog posts to generate valuable backlinks that further demonstrate your site’s authority to Google.
As Search Engine Watch explains:
Google still sees backlinks as a wonderful demonstration of the authority of a website, believing that a website with numerous backlinks is highly regarded within its field…Blogs make it easy for companies to regularly produce high-value content…This will help you establish your authority in your industry, enticing people to link to your content.
The generation of backlinks is an essential part of SEO, and when your blog posts demonstrate your authority on a particular topic, other bloggers and websites become significantly more likely to link to your content.
While you can reach out to resource pages and other reputable bloggers and ask them to link to your post, consistently producing high-quality blog entries can help ensure that these valuable backlinks will be generated naturally as other bloggers recognize the value of the information you provide and link to your page on their own.
Conclusion
It’s clear that when done correctly, a high-quality blog can have a massive impact on your website’s overall SEO success.
When you consistently provide valuable, original content to your audience, your site’s search rankings will improve thanks to the increased website quality, higher levels of traffic and the generation of new backlinks.
By crafting useful content and promoting it effectively, blogging can dramatically improve both the overall quality of your site and the results of your SEO efforts.
So if you’re not already incorporating blogging into your inbound marketing strategy, I strongly encourage you to get started.
If there is anything holding you back, let me know about it in the comments section below!
