Seven ways blogging can be a great SEO solution

Blogging is a fantastic way to attract more visitors to your website. With high quality, consistent and optimised content published on a regular basis on your blog, your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO) will go through the roof. SEO can be a pretty overwhelming concept to wrap your head around, but investing time in your blog is a quick (and cheap) way to direct more traffic to your website.

You’ll need to be proactive. Blogging without optimisation is unlikely to help your rankings. If you have a wordpress website, Yoast SEO can be a fabulous plugin to help guide you through good SEO practices. Alternatively, you could use an inbound marketing platform such as HubSpot. Equally, SEO can be improved with a few simple tips.

Did you know that poorly crafted content can in fact negatively impact your SEO? I’ll say it again, quality is key. Read on to discover our top tips for maximising your content and advancing your SEO.

1. Try to reach a specific audience

Before you even begin writing, think of who you’re writing for and who you want to target with your words. Consider questions potential customers might have about your business or services and tailor your content so that it clearly answers any obvious queries. By adopting such techniques, your writing will not only remain relevant, but it will naturally include keywords of interest and quickly direct visitors to your site after an initial online search.

2. Optimise existing blogs

Whilst blogs need to be continually updated, this doesn’t mean you can’t recycle older, yet still valuable content. Of course, new content is essential but older blog posts can continue to help your SEO. Come up with a strategy that reuses good content and you’ll reap the benefits.

Google loves fresh content but changing the published date or adding a note e.g. (updated on 7th June 2018) will let google know that it is fresh. This needs to be done carefully if the page already has an existing ranking. Check out this guide to updating and republishing outdated blog content.

Remember, sharing something, is better than doing nothing.

3. Fill a content gap

Do your research and then use your blog to fill a content gap in the market. Identify a topic that isn’t properly covered in the first few web pages of a search and get to work. Google also recommends a minimum of 300 words per page and ideally 800-1200 to be deemed relevant to the users search term.

4. Add keywords

Find keywords from looking at competitors’ websites, your social media or utilising tools such as Google Trends. Using the right amount (not too many and not too little) of keywords can do wonders for your SEO.

Ensure you add keywords to the blog title, use them intuitively (rather than just throwing them out there left, right and centre), and add them to the URL slug and meta description. Google will index your site based on keywords and provide relevant content for those seeking it.

Why not check out our recent blog on nailing keyword research?

5. Add optimised images and videos 

Including a featured image on your blog posts will enable you to share it more easily across social media. Choose something eye catching which will compel others to share your article and drive traffic to your website.

Always remember to source licensed images and don't pinch from google. Also, resize and compress images before uploading so your blog down doesn’t slow down.

Not only will an image (or images) make your blog more visually appealing, but you can use them to ‘up’ your SEO. Add extra keywords to the alt tag which will then be found in image search results.

6. Create SEO friendly inbound links

Creating SEO friendly inbound links takes time, but it will happen eventually.

These inbound links are still a major ranking factor with google, as it shows you are an authority and trusted source for the search term.

Still, they have to appear naturally and be created by third parties. It’s rare that a third party will link to your service or product pages. More than likely, they will to link to a helpful and informative blog post which takes us back once again to the importance of quality content.

7. Share your blog

Share your blog wherever you can and watch the traffic roll in to your website. Organic SEO will be improved by our optimisation tips, but you do need to share it regularly.

Post to your business Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn as appropriate and your personal accounts too. Share multiple times with a different message each time. We recommend that you share something from your blog 2-3 times per day and ideally you should share 2-3 original blogs per week to direct traffic back to your website

Need more convincing? Buffer App reported 75% more traffic per retweet, each time they retweeted the same piece of content.

Final thoughts – go for it!

There is no time like the present to use blogging to optimise your SEO.

While it does take time and consistent effort to see any SEO benefit, the rewards are worth it.

Remember, blogs must possess high quality content. Producing low quality content can hurt your SEO, and nobody wants that.

We can support you with content ideas, creation and sharing to any level you require. Click here to request a free SEO website audit.