The question of how blogging impacts (and hopefully increases) your SEO is one marketers ask often. Whether your goal is to reduce your advertising budget, or to build a library of resources for your clients, blogging plays a major role in smart SEO and branding today.
According to Statista’s Key Market Indicators (KMI), “As of January 2021 there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide – 59.5 percent of the global population. Of this total, 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices.” Specifically in the US, the number of internet users in 2021 were estimated to be 302 million users with projected growth to 321 million by 2025.
With more than 4 billion people online, the opportunity to attract and market to your ideal target audience has never been better. What makes this a smart strategy is the ease of blogging. Almost anyone can be taught to write content that aligns with the needs of your target audience. In this way, blogging for SEO has a direct impact on your bottom line.
By writing content that aligns with the pain points your clients have, you can leverage prospective client’s time online and build your brand at the same time.
Not to mention, it will save you money.
When you compare the difference between advertising costs and the cost of blogging, there are huge savings for most brands when their content strategy works. It does require a plan. But, the plan onboard, businesses from plumbers to coaches to advocacy groups can reduce their dependency on advertising and drive targeted interest to their business.
Here are the 5 critical ways blogging can increase your SEO plus help make the cost and work of running your business easier.
SEO + Traffic To Your Website
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is incredibly helpful and even vital for marketers. When searching for services, products, and/or information, people often use search engines like Google. Optimizing is required not only for your web pages but also blog posts — this is the work that will make your website more visible. In simple terms, when people search for services related to your business through search engines, SEO will help them find you.
If you are blogging regularly and your content is effectively optimized, there’s no need to buy traffic in the form of ads or email lists. The more blogs you publish, the more indexed pages you will have on your website, which means a higher probability of driving traffic to your website through organic search.
Repurposing Blog Content For Social Media
If reducing your marketing costs is important, this tip is a m-do. As mentioned in HubSpot’s guide for creating a blog for your business, one secondary benefit of writing blog posts is found when you repurpose blog content on social media. There are a ton of ways to do this, but one easy way is found after writing a great article and then taking single line quotes and making them into memes. This strategy means you don’t need to create separate content for social media, saving you money and time.
Continual Results From SEO Optimized Content
Unlike most social media posts, a blog has a significantly longer lifespan online than almost anything other than websites. According to IT company Mamsys, blogs can drive traffic to your website for up to 2 years. Social media posts do a fraction of this work, lasting somewhere between 18 minutes and 5 hours.
The work to become popular on social media requires much more effort and requires posting regularly, sometimes even a couple of times per day. Quality, informative blog posts get traffic for days, weeks, months, or sometimes even years in the future.
In our work, we have seen articles generate traffic from Google for years (not just 2 years as reported by Mamsys). If you do a search yourself, it’s not uncommon to see articles published in 2018/2019 still holding top spots on Google. The power in this kind of long-standing authority is one of the core goals in most SEO projects and really only happens if your content is of top value and authoritative.
When you reach this top spot, you elevate your business to a new level in Google’s eyes and start commanding more of this kind of trust which helps future blogs to rank highly as well.
Branding & Your Company’s Personality
Defining and constantly evolving your company’s brand is one of the most valuable byproducts of a smart blogging strategy. Blogging creates an opportunity to not only design, but also boost your brand, by making it more interesting, relatable and timely. Your blog shows your personality and gives insight into your ethics, values and character.
Whether you’re a small business, or a large team, blogs showcase your insight into your client’s challenges and express why you are the ideal solution to their problems. Blogging in this way strengthens your personal connection with consumers. Strong connections mean more loyal customers, which results in stable business and better earnings!
Organic Publicity For You & Your Expertise
Finally, well-optimized blog content is a traffic driver. Your articles direct traffic to your main website, which provides an opportunity for people to share your website and recommend your content to their colleagues, friends, and family. If you create engaging text consistently, there is a good chance that some of your content will go viral either in its long form (the article itself) or the shortened versions on social media.
As you can imagine, going viral is a great way to grab the media’s attention. For example, this could lead to your inclusion in industry news articles, requests for quote(s) from other bloggers or industry experts or even requests for work. All of which means more interest, customers, trustworthiness, and eventually earnings.
Overall, blogging has a huge advantage for small businesses, especially if a company is trying to save money on advertising and marketing. Starting on a smart blogging strategy will help elevate your SEO. The overall answer to the question does blogging increase your SEO is an absolutely yes, when it’s done right. And the great thing is that it’s a lot simpler than it may seem. And NOW is the perfect time to start.
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If you’re either blogging now and not getting the SEO results you desire, or you want to start blogging intelligently, we can help. Request a free SEO consultation with our team. We’ll audit your current blogs + make recommendations for the future so you create content that’s aligned with your customers and why they need your help! Reach out today!
