Does blogging help SEO? The short answer is a resounding yes! SEO and blogging often go hand-in-hand. Blogs are the active onsite lifeblood of SEO – they are your driver of keywords and gives you the ability to diversify your website and rankings. After all, you can’t just rely on a few keywords on your homepage to do all of the heavy lifting, right? 

When you update your blog regularly with high-quality content and relevant topics, it can make a huge difference to how your overall website performs in the search engines.

Here’s why. 

Blogging Keeps Your Website Updated

Which are you more willing to trust: a website’s that blog hasn’t been updated for 5 years, or one that was updated last week? The answer is a no-brainer: you trust the website with updated and relevant content, not one that hasn’t been touched in years. After all, you know without a doubt that the one with an updated blog is still in business! 

Google thinks the same way – it doesn’t want to deliver outdated answers to its users, therefore it is more likely to rank an active website higher on its site! Blogs are the key to this, as you’re likely not going to update your homepage and services page every other week!

Blogs Allow You To Have a Robust Internal Link Structure

Internal link structure is a HUGE part of SEO, which means you want to have a lot of natural internal links. An internal link is a link that’s on your website or blog, that points back to your website (like this one, for example). 

You can’t litter your top-level web pages with links, but you can put links in blogs! And the more blogs you post, the more internal links you have! 

Every time you add internal links, you can strategically use the anchor text (the clickable text that has the link embedded in it) to better tell Google what the page you’re linking to is about – strengthening its connection to your target keywords in how the algorithm sees it.

A Quality Blog = More Backlinks Too!

Just as internal links raise your SEO, so do backlinks! A backlink is a link posted on another person’s website that points back to your website (like this one here). These types of links boost your offsite SEO, which essentially tells Google that other websites trust your’s. 

Therefore, in Google’s eyes, you are a credible site that is updated often, which means your website should perform better (and rank higher) than others!

How does this work? Well, when you write a blog with valuable and relevant content, you increase your chances of other people finding the blog valuable and relevant. This significantly increases your chances of them linking back to you as a resource! 

Blogging Can Target Long-Tail Keywords 

Long-tail keywords are huge traffic sources for a ton of websites. They are highly specific search queries that are designed to answer a question immediately. Blogs are perfect for targeting those, because you can provide quality information and a lot of it. 

The one downside about long-tail keywords is that they don’t attract as much traffic as more generic searches. For example, searching for “dog food” will bring up thousands more results than searching for “puppy food for a German Shepard.” This isn’t a bad thing – it allows you to target a more niche audience, thus increasing your chances of making a sale, getting a backlink, or increasing the time on page of your website. 

Speaking of time on page…

Blogs Improve Time on Page

Time on page is a simple SEO metric: it measures how long someone stays on a specific page. The longer the time on page, the better it is for your SEO. 

Google looks at it this way: if a person clicks off your website within 5 seconds of viewing it, then it must not have the information they were looking for. Therefore, Google is likely to drop your website’s ranking for specific keywords and search queries. Conversely, the higher your time on page, the higher your ranking will likely be! 

That really becomes even more the case with longer, more comprehensive posts. SEO researchers have found that longform blog posts tend to perform better than shorter ones – the average first-page result on Google is nearly 2,000 words long! 

The Takeaway? 

Blogging isn’t only good for SEO, it’s incredible for SEO. A single high-quality blog post can add 2-5 internal links (without looking like spam), countless backlinks, boost your website performance, and skyrocket the number of keywords you rank for. 

The takeaway? Don’t skimp on your blogging efforts! You’ll never know how high your SEO can fly if you put in the effort! 

Now that you know that, what about the question of marketing? If you want to know how blogs can increase your general marketing efforts, check out our blog here!