I’ll bet the answer you’re all expecting is an unequivical YES, they absoldutely do always! But the truth is it depends. It depends on how you’re blogging. So let’s take a look at some related questions about blogging and talk about how they can either help or hurt your SEO.
How Often Do You Blog?
Search engines like Google love a website that gets frequent updates. So do your readers. As far as Google is concerned, the more articles you post, the better. However, your readers are more demanding. They want good quality, relevant articles posted on a regular schedule, so they know when to expect your next article and know what types of topics you’ll be covering. They like consistency in other words.
So what’s the ideal frequency or schedule to blog on? That depends on your market to some extent. If you’re running a consumer products business, you may want to blog about things of interest to your customers that also support your business more frequently, your audience likely just wants that next cool bit of content or to know what cool product they should buy next. If you’re writing a more technical blog, you may be able to get away with a less frequent schedule, your audience knows it takes time to properly research your content and make sure you’re giving them the right facts.
It’s also important to take stock of your resources, both time and money, as you can use any combination of them to publish your articles. You can invest the time into writing them in house, or you can hire a freelancer or agency to produce them for you, or even mix the 2 strategies to supplement one with the other, writing as many as you (or your staff) has the time to write in a month, and hire a freelance writer to provide the rest.
Whatever approach you take, the key is keeping to a consistent schedule, be it daily, weekly or even monthly articles.
Image by Enokson – https://www.flickr.com/photos/vblibrary/4480092264
What Should I Blog About?
When writing a business blog, you need a strategy. Do your homework and find out what search keywords are hot, and what keywords are not too competative (meaning many others, including industry leaders you can’t compete with are not also targeting them). Pick topics relevant to your business and product/service mix.
If you’re struggling to find topics, you may want to hire an SEO expert to help do the keyword research for you. While that will require an investment of money to get that info, it’s well worth it as it can save you months of time and thousands of dollars in wasted efforts, foing after keywords nobody uses, or that all the big names in your industry already have locked up. They can direct you to the keywords that are hot, relevant and attainable.
Image by Bruce Clay, Inc – https://www.flickr.com/photos/bruceclay/16137908231
Of course, topics are about more then just stuffing good keywords into them. Google and other major search engines frown on that practice and will either not move you up the results or will even penalize you until you clean up the bad content. Your readers will also not like boring, keyword stuffed articles and will not stay with you.
So you need to use the keywords naturally, as part of a related topic. You need to build up your key message or talking points around these keywords so they appear naturally as part of a consistent message that hits consistently on specific key points that lead to sales. The topics also need to be interesting or informative, so people will want to spend the time reading your articles.
Search engines do take into account how many people who come to your website, stay on your website as they’re in the business of delivering their search users to websites they want to find, containing the info or products they were looking for. So make sure your topics are what they’re looking for, and that those that find your articles are ones you are looking for what you’re offering.
So coming back to the original question, do blogs help SEO? That depends on if you’re doing the blogs right. If you’re being consistent, updating them regularly, posting quality content, and have a strategy on what topics to cover, then you’re blog will help. It will likely take time, so be patient with the process. Whether those visitors eventually go on to buy products depends on whether the rest of your website is well designed and directs people to take an action you want them to take, but that’s a topic for a future discussion.
I hope you found this valuable, and if you did, feel free to share it with your networks, and if you have any feedback or questions, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.
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