Blogging? Why bother?
For some businesses, writing blogs may seem like a waste of time, however, when done properly, regularly posting can benefit your company in many ways.
For starters, blogging can help to improve your SEO— with the long-game goals of building brand awareness or increasing your sales.
We’ve got five reasons why maintaining an active blog can benefit your ranking strategy:
1. Blogging Gives Your Website “Freshness”
A “fresh” webpage is one that’s been recently published, or recently updated— and publishing new or editing old blogs can add freshness to help improve your SEO. That’s because your content’s present-day relevance counts as an important ranking factor, according to the world’s largest search engine.
Data, technology and our understanding of matters changes regularly, and it’s vital to make alterations to provide searchers with the most factual, timely information.
That’s why Google’s algorithm accounts for freshness, with the search engine going as far as to say it frequently interprets fresh posts as more relevant, or “as a signal that up-to-date information might be (more) useful than older pages.”
Unfortunately, many webpages can be written and left untouched for months or years. In certain industries, this information can remain accurate. However, competitors might get an edge over you by adding additional information your content now lacks. Stay relevant in your industry by posting frequent articles, or by updating old posts.
2. Blog Posts Are a Great Place to Share Internal Links
Internal links are hyperlinks that send you to the same domain as the source page. To put it simply, interlinking is the practice of linking to your own webpages within the content of individual pages of your site. For instance, us linking to our article blog post length here is us practicing interlinking.
Interlinking on your site helps to give your domain a thing called “link equity,” or link “juice,” as SEOs call it. This gives your website depth and helps users to navigate through your site architecture or to other relevant sources on your site, which Google likes! (Spoiler alert: Google likes anything that helps improve the user-experience).
you don’t want to anger the users
You leading site visitors to other relevant links helps searchers get their answers. It also helps Google to categorize related items and to better understand the hierarchy of your website, so it can properly rank your pages. And your blog posts are the perfect place to spread and share relevant link love!
Fun fact: Did you know that linking to new posts on your homepage gives those articles more “link value?” Learn more from Yoast.
3. Blogging Helps with Link Building
When another company embeds a link to your site on theirs, it’s their way of saying, “Don’t believe me? This other reputable site agrees!” or, “I don’t have all the answers, but you can dig deeper here.”
Link building, or the practice of acquiring links from other domains, shows Google that other people think your content is great and worthy of mention. The cool thing about external linking is that it goes both ways: you can link to other domains and other domains can link to you. Blogs are a terrific linkable asset for both.
Blog posts are an enticing source to link to because they often contain valuable data or a unique theory/point-of-view— and are so easy to share (just copy the link and add some anchor text). So if you write bomb-ass content, and other sites link to it, they are helping to boost your SEO!
Google even affirms it, saying on the Search Console Help Center that, “links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results.” They compare someone linking to you as that source “voting” for you. The search engine continues to say, “votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”
What does that mean? When “important” sites, i.e. sites with high domain/page authorities and low spam score) link to you, you’ll get some of that link juice lovin’ too!
Plus, you can help your SEO by linking to other relevant sources in your own content. Google loves it when you reference other sites that it already ranks. It affirms the search engine’s notion that their results are credible— and that you, in turn, are also credible, since you reference their already algorithmically-relevant sources.
Increasing Your Domain & Page Authority
Ever heard of Moz? These SEO wizards developed two powerful SEO metrics called domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA). These search engine ranking scores range from 1 through 100— just like a test grade— and can help to predict how well a website may rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
While Google itself doesn’t use domain/page authority directly in their ranking algorithms, DA and PA scores can still give you a rough estimate of a site’s “ranking strength.” Each score is determined mainly by the number of quality links you have, and can be used in tandem with other SEOs tools to check how your blog is ranking.
Generally speaking, building more powerful inbound links on other domains can help to increase these ratings, which helps build your SEO cred’. Plus, authority goes beyond a set score and extends to establishing you as a strong contender in your industry. Learn more about creating a sense of authority here.
4. Blogging Helps You Utilize More Keywords
SEO is all about optimizing your website for search, which requires an understanding of how Google uses keywords to help categorize and serve content on its search engine results pages.
If you’ve done your keyword research properly, you’ll know which terms you can target to get more organic traffic to your website. Simply put, your blog is just another place to weave in those keywords— and each post is another page that can rank.
Want a few examples? One article that we published on our Impulse Creative blog is organically ranking for 651 keywords, as of the date of publishing this post. This article— 8 Reasons Your Business Doesn’t Appear on the First Page of Google Search— ranks on page one of Google’s SERPs for queries like “why doesn’t my business show up on Google search?” and “how to make my business appear on Google search first,” according to data pulled by SEMRush.
Your business can start attracting visitors to your domain too, with the right keywords in your blog posts. Invest in doing keyword research to create posts that gain steady traffic over time, on their own. According to HubSpot, 75% of their blog views and 90% of blog leads come from old posts.
Check out our article on Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool to discover what people are searching in your industry, and to generate content to answer searchers questions.
5. Blogs Help to Increase Traffic/Site Views & Your Source Diversity
Not only can your blog posts bring in more organic traffic if they rank on Google’s SERPs, articles can also generate traffic from other methods, including:
- Direct traffic. This is typically when someone types your exact URL into the search. They are sent “directly” to your site, without needing to find you on the SERPs. Or, sometimes people bookmark your URL for quick access and can click the shortcut to ping your web address.
- Social media traffic. When you post a link to your blog post on social media, users can click through from your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn to your site.
- Referral traffic. If another user is linking out to your blog post, a searcher can click the link on their site to hop over to your domain. AKA the searcher is being “referred” to you from this original reference.
- Email marketing traffic. If you send out email correspondence, you can share a link to your blog post with your customers or clients. If they are sent to your site from this email, you’ll receive a view count, often labeled “email marketing.”
Simply put, your blog posts are getting more eyeballs to your domain, giving users an easy way to click through to other pages on you navigation bar.
If you host your blog on a different domain than your main site’s URL— let’s say “blog.samplesite.com” instead of “samplesite.com/blog,”— it’s not going to be as easy for someone to click through to other pages as it would be reading your content on your main site. Because of this, if you have your blog hosted on a separate domain, you’ll want to make sure you’re embedding links to your main site inside of your post.
Google likes to see diversity in the traffic sources you gain, because it demonstrates authenticity. Think about it. If all your traffic came from just one source, wouldn’t that seem odd?
Getting hits from one source is a huge tip-off to Google that you’re getting fake traffic, or paying for a traffic exchange program. In terms of your AdWords account, Google says this type of channeled traffic can “result in your account being disabled,” (hint hint: because they want you to pay for their ads).
Why do you think Google Analytics shows you where your traffic is coming from? The world’s largest search engine cares about where your views are coming from, and you should too.
Improve Your Blog Ranking with Help from Impulse Creative
Do you see the value of blogging now? Not only is it an incredible way to improve your SEO, but maintaining a powerful blogging strategy can help you gain more leads and customers.
Creating a blog for the first time? We have the perfect guide for you. Download our Beginner’s Guide to Blogging for Business for insights on which topics to blog about, how to optimize your posts and more.