The simple answer to this question is yes, blog posts do help SEO (search engine optimisation). In fact, blogging is one of the most efficient ways to improve the quality of your customers and boost the ranking of your website over time.
For just about any question or query you have, Google is there to answer it. For many people, the wildly popular search engine is their first stop when trying to look for just about anything, whether it be how to get wine stains out of the carpet or where to go on holiday during the school break.
No matter what type of business you have, if you want people to find it, you need it to show up on the search engine results page. And with most businesses already competing in a saturated online marketplace, that can be hard.
One of the best things you can do to improve your chances of ranking highly in search engine results is to start a blog. But before we look at the reasons why, it’s important to understand exactly what they are and what they look like.
What Is a Blog Page on a Website?
A blog page is a specific area of a website which is dedicated to displaying blog posts/articles. It is basically a hub where website visitors can access and read the latest articles, updates, or content published by the website owner or authors.
Blogs can cover a wide range of topics and can serve a variety of different purposes, whether it be to provide valuable industry or business-related information, opinions sharing, showcasing expertise or promoting products or services.
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What Does a Blog Page Look Like?
The blog page typically presents blog posts in a chronological order, with the most recent posts appearing first.
When it comes to the actual blog, you’re looking at one right now! A blog contains written content, and is typically accompanied by multimedia elements such as images, infographics or videos. A blog which has been SEO optimised will be well written, have fantastic user experience, and will provide great value to the reader (i.e. answer the blog title clearly).
Discover how to write an SEO-friendly blog post here.
How Do Blog Posts Help SEO?
Here are 5 ways blog posts can help SEO:
1. They Increase Domain Authority
The first reason why blog posts help with SEO is because they increase your domain score, otherwise known as domain authority. Domain authority is scored on a scale of 1-100 and helps Google understand the presence of your website online.
Publishing high-quality blog posts on a regular basis can naturally attract more visitors to your website. When visitors find your content valuable and educational, they are much more likely to engage with it by spending time on your site, sharing it on social media, and linking to it from their own websites. These user engagement signals can positively impact your website’s overall domain authority and relevance in search engine rankings.
This is great as the higher domain authority you have, the higher chance of Google ranking it well in search engines.
Having a good domain authority score will help Google see you as a genuine and trust-worthy site, and the quicker it’ll be taken into consideration for search ranking.
Additionally, regularly updating your website with new blog posts will signal to search engines that your site is active and relevant. Fresh new content can improve your site’s crawl rate, which can positively impact your search engine rankings and domain authority.
2. Featured Snippet Opportunities
A featured snippet is a short piece of text located at the very top of Google’s search results in order to quickly answer a user’s query.
Having your blog rank as a featured snippet is hugely beneficial for your site as it’ll offer you greater visibility, and in turn, greater organic traffic than the other pages in the results. According to Search Engine Land, a Featured Snippet gets approximately 8.6% of all clicks!
Are Featured Snippets Hard To Rank For?
A question many people ask and the simple answer is – no! Featured snippets are in fact relatively easy to rank for. You can either answer the question straight away in the first paragraph of your blog or alternatively, offer the answer in a list format.
That said, Google will also look at a number of other SEO factors when deciding whether or not to use part of your blog as a featured snippet, such as user experience, linking structure, multimedia, heading structure, optimised metadata etc. In order to get a featured snippet, you therefore must ensure your blog optimises all of these things, in addition to answering the question clearly.
The best part about featured snippets is that they always rank at number 1 and therefore allow you to dominate the search page. Here is an example of a chosen featured snippet from Ergo Desks, for the search query ‘do standing desks help with ADHD?
To learn more about how to get featured snippets on Google, check out this blog.
If you don’t feel confident creating high-quality blogs or you simply haven’t the time, not to worry. Our writing experts are here to help get your blogs to page 1 on Google. Get in touch for a friendly chat about our content writing services.
3. They Help You Build Long-Term Backlinks Links
Another reason why blog posts help with SEO is that they help generate backlinks to your website overtime.
The best way you can make this happen is to include things such as brand new findings, infographics or data in your blogs. Overtime, researchers and other blog authors will find your blog and use it as a resource in their own articles. This way, they link back to your website when they use your resources in their work.
When other reputable websites link to your blog posts, it signals to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative. And this is great as backlinks from authoritative websites are one of the most important factors in determining a website’s domain authority.
Learn more about how to show authority on your website here.
4. Internal Linking Opportunities
In addition to generating backlinks, blog posts provide ample opportunities for internal linking, which is where you link from one blog post to other relevant pages or posts on your website.
Internal linking is super important for SEO as it helps search engines understand the structure of your site and the relationships between different pages, which can improve the overall authority of your website.
What’s more, adding helpful internal links within your blog content can guide users to other relevant pages on your website and encourage further engagement. When users navigate through your site to additional pages, they are much more likely to click through and explore your website further, which helps to reduce the likelihood of an immediate bounce off the site and onto another. Search engines will take into consideration bounce rates when ranking a page, so the lower bounce rates, the better.
Find out more about the importance of links in SEO here.
5. They Improve User Experience
Last, but by all means not least, blog posts improve user experience and increase the likelihood that someone will buy a product on your website.
This is because, blog posts offer valuable information, insights, tips, and solutions to users’ questions or problems. And by addressing users’ needs and interests, blog posts enhance their experience and will allow them to see you as a trustworthy, authoritative and knowledgeable source in your field. This can give you a real competitive advantage if other websites in your niche are missing a blog.
Additionally, research has shown that customers who find your products via a blog often end up spending more and becoming a repeat customer overtime.
To encourage this, make sure you are including internal links to your products and services throughout your blog. This will help customers navigate through your website to the products or services they want to buy.
It’s also crucial that you include relevant call-to-actions, which are prompts that tell the visitor to take a specific action, i.e. what to do next. Without a clear CTA, the individual might not be as influenced to take to purchase a product or sign up for a newsletter, and is much more likely to leave the page or website without accomplishing the desired task.
For more information on how blog posts help SEO, check out our recent YouTube video:
Conclusion
And there we have it! We hope this article has helped your understanding of how important blogs are for SEO.
Right now, blogging is more important than ever for boosting SEO and helping your business. In fact, according to HubSpot, businesses that consistently write blogs on their website receive 67% more leads monthly than those that don’t – pretty impressive right?
If you’re interested in our transparent and affordable SEO services including blog writing, contact us here or drop us a message on Instagram or LinkedIn and we will get back to you the very same day. Other services we offer include keyword research, link building and technical SEO.
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Written by Kate Jones for Lumen SEO.
Published on 03/09/2021
Updated on 26/02/2024
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