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What is Blog SEO?

Blog SEO is part of an SEO strategy focused on creating a blog page and posting high value content to improve search rankings. It works by capitalising on customer engagement, establishing E-A-T, and leveraging each article as a linkable asset (to attract backlinks).

Writing a blog as your online diary is different from blog SEO. Blog SEO begins with keyword research, content development, content optimisation, followed by link building.

Now that sounds much more daunting than writing in your diary, right?

Does Blogging Help With SEO?

Yes, blogging for SEO can be hugely beneficial in many ways.

Blogging on your business website can dramatically boost your SEO and position your business as an online authority, aka an industry leader.

That means you can position your business as an authority that provides helpful answers to many of your customers’ burning questions.

In short, blog posts open more opportunities to rank for highly relevant keywords and allow your business to capture more customers as they are in the research phase.

But while it sounds too good to be true, does theory really translate well into practice?

Top Reasons and Benefits of a Blog

Blogs began as a way for individuals to write about their passions, day-to-day life, and things they found interesting. They were like online journals or diaries.

However, blogging soon became an important part of the marketing strategy for businesses due to its benefits.

Currently, there are 1.9 billion websites in the world, and over 600 million are blogs. That means that the blogging industry makes up a third of the web.

For more information, see our guide on what a blog is and how it is different from a website.

Out of these, WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites, which makes it the best website builder and the best platform for bloggers.

It is used by both individuals and businesses to promote their ideas, brands, stories, products, and more.

Let’s dig deeper and take a look at some of the most important benefits of blogging and why you should consider starting a blog. Here is a summary of the topics we will cover in our guide:

  1. Blog Brings Traffic to Your Website
  2. Helps You Generate More Leads and Conversions
  3. Helps You Repurpose Content for Other Marketing Channels
  4. Helps You Build Authority in Your Industry
  5. Helps You Strengthen Brand Recognition
  6. Helps You Build an Engaging Audience
  7. Share Business News, Announcements, Sales, and More
  8. Helps You Improve Long Term SEO
  9. Beat Competition in Organic Search Traffic
  10. Allows You to Educate Customers
  11. Build Additional Revenue Streams for Your Business
  12. Helps You Learn Online Marketing
  13. Unlocks Partnerships and Opportunities for Growth
  14. Helps You Find Your Dream Job
  15. How to Get Started with Blogging Right Away

20 Benefits of Blogging to Improve SEO

1. Leveraging Blog Posts to Answer Frequently Asked Questions

You can’t build an audience if you don’t know your audience. It often pays to listen to the chatter between your audience, their concerns, and the questions they hold.

However, thinking about relevant topics isn’t enough. You can seek valuable topics by asking your customers about their concerns and queries. Maybe it’s about how to use your product or how they can avail of your discounts.

Maybe there’s hype on insulated flasks, and you, as a product brand, want people to know about your water bottle’s safety and health features.

With more people leaning towards conservation, sharing that you’re using environment-friendly materials could mean countless leads and sales.

In short, ask around and take note of their concerns, then build a topic out of those queries.

2. Blogging Builds Traffic; Traffic Builds Leads

All websites feed on traffic to thrive and survive. With blog SEO, each blog you post opens another opportunity for users to engage with your brand and decide whether to buy now or later.

Moreover, the more blog posts you publish, the more you attract organic traffic that you can convert into a sale.

Say you have a 6% monthly conversion rate of about 6 purchases per 100 visitors. If your blog page can drive 500 more visitors a month, you can get up to 30 conversions monthly!

But you must first publish consumer-centric blog content that tickles your readers’ interest and not search engine manipulation.

If implemented correctly, blog SEO can return your investment tenfold and produce lasting results.

Here is a simple chart from Hubspot showing how by compounding your blog posting efforts through a 12 month period, you can dramatically improve the leads/contacts generated.

3. Google Loves Fresh (and Refreshed) Content

While fresh content may not rank well on its own, it significantly contributes to overall site activity and can strengthen your ranking power holistically. Google isn’t particular about how frequently you should update your blog as long as it’s steady and predictable.

If your blog page goes dark and radio silent for a long time, your link structure may deteriorate, and user experience may crumble faster than you think.

From a crawler perspective, active blogs are clear indicators of site activity. It tells Google that your business is thriving and has the resources to update your site.

On the other hand, an abandoned blog implies that a website is closing its doors to new content and isn’t something that Google wants to recommend in its search results.

That’s because it easily translates to store activity and performance. If nobody takes care of your blog, how can Google guarantee the same isn’t the case for your product pages and order shipments?

Here is a chart from Orbit Media showcasing how frequently most bloggers publish articles. Depending on your growth goals, we would advise posting more frequently than not.

4. Evergreen Content: Yes, Please!

In a nutshell, evergreen content is a piece of content that remains valuable years after a website publishes it. Most of the time, it only requires minimal maintenance to keep evergreen content from decaying.

Google loves evergreen content, particularly those that answer informational queries. A single evergreen content is powerful enough to drive massive organic traffic and retain a strong position for a long time.

5. Better Quality = Better Dwell Time

Popping and punchy ads don’t work as well as well-written blogs in 2023. Besides, a content-driven blog engages with users personally, keeping them interested and curious about the entire post.

If you can make your audience comb through the whole post or read through relevant pages on your site, this leads to a longer dwell time—which in turn reinforces your ranking strength.

So a few points: Great blog, better engagement, longer dwell time, better metrics!

6. Blogging Lets You Target Keywords Naturally

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and content spinning. If you want to target a keyword in 2023, blogging is the way to go!

Every blog post you publish opens a golden window of opportunity to target new keywords and ride the latest trends. If you’ve managed to target a low-competition keyword, then Google may rank that post in highly sought-after positions—including position zero!

Powering blog SEO with keyword research fills topical gaps within your site, reinforcing your E-A-T entirely.

What matters is addressing a specific search query for each post and building a seamless network across your blog so that any user can find related posts within your site.

If you’re unsure which keywords to target, we suggest looking at pain-point topics and those surrounding customer intent.

Ask your customers whether they have pain points that led them to your website and publish a useful consumers’ guide addressing that subject.

7. Earn Quality Backlinks Through Blogging

We’re becoming redundant with the idea that every blog post is an opportunity. Because it really is! That includes earning backlinks and publishing link baits!

Hold your SEO horses! Link baits sound black hat, but they’re high-quality informational blog posts that attract backlinks. Nothing to worry about!

Links are the backbone of search engine results pages. Thus, earning more backlinks with evergreen content and link-bait blog posts is an excellent idea.

Think about publishing list articles, infographics, statistics, and valuable link-worthy types of content. The more research and effort you put into a single article can produce 10 times better results than several thin-content articles at once.

8. Blogging Demonstrates E-A-T

Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are baked into Google’s algorithm and are important factors dominating rankings. Even Google itself claims that E-A-T is vital for search ranking.

Eventually, your users will know you’re an industry expert by publishing relevant authoritative, and trustworthy content. While that’s true as a blogger, it is equally proven and tested for business.

9. Ranking in SERPs Builds Recognition and Familiarity

Do you know that feeling of watching a movie and recognising a familiar actor/actress without knowing their name?

We’ve all been there. Even for brands and websites!

You can give the same reputation to your site by ranking multiple pages consistently. Eventually, enough people looking for content will find you in SERPs and slowly start recognising your brand.

Give it enough time; slow yet steady exposure will build trustworthiness and authority. Once it peaks and starts moving, your traffic will grow steadily and consistently.

10. Blogs Can Go Viral on Social Too!

Viral social media content isn’t limited to short videos and controversial posts. It can include compelling blog posts and revolutionary informative articles that people love to check out.

Since only some people visit and scroll through your social media profile, having users share and engage with your content can benefit your social media presence in the long run.

You can embed sharing buttons below every blog post so users can share, tweet, or send it to their peers, family, and colleagues. You may even land several influencers and capture the public’s attention.via word-of-mouth advertising for free!

However, going viral doesn’t last forever. A massive influx of traffic can only last a few weeks at best. The challenge, therefore, is leveraging that traffic boost for long-term benefit.

We recommend building a positive feedback loop by posting user-centric blog posts and listening to what your customers say.

11. Blog Posts can be Anything and Everything, All at Once!

Blogs don’t have to be product features all the time. They can be in-depth statistics about local SEO and industry trends, lifehacks, and workarounds on a known product-related issue.

You can also combine multiple types of content in a single blog post and provide an engaging reader experience. A blog post can kick off with a punch lead, then take a reader through videos, podcast interviews, and an infographic summary.

That way, your readers have all senses locked in, absorbing your content and engaging with your website. Who knows, that may lead to a sale or word-of-mouth recommendation.

12. Blogging SEO Benefits Your Image Search Ranking

With Google Lens taking the image search by storm, it’s wise to have a blog post that can reach multimedia search channels aside from conventional search engines.

Optimising every image in your blog by adding meta elements (alt text, captions, SEO-optimised file names, and meta descriptions) will help Google crawlers index your images on Google Image Search. Talk about hitting many birds with one stone!

13. Diversified Blog Content Helps Safeguard Valuable SEO Traffic

More content and optimisation means stable rankings and metrics. Everyone wants maximum efficiency when investing in SEO. But putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t the best idea.

Once you drop the SEO basket, you’re left with no eggs. The same is true for blogs. Posting diverse, high-quality content is king. Your content can come in the form of the following types of content:

We recommend updating your blog page frequently—and maintaining a high standard for your content, rotating through the types of content highlighted above.

Quality always beats quantity. But let’s be honest; you can’t beat a brand frequently posting high-quality blogs if you’re not blogging at all!

14. Content Syndication Improves Lead Generation

Aside from blogging on your website, you can power up your SEO by republishing your content on many websites. We call this content syndication—and many big and small websites love to syndicate content as it keeps fresh information flowing for readers.

Note that content syndication is different from guest posting or guest blogging. In guest blogging, you publish completely new content written solely for that website.

But for content syndication, you’re literally taking the same blog post on your website and republishing it on other platforms.

How about duplicate content? Will I get a penalty for syndicating content?

Syndicated content is not duplicated content as long as you do it carefully and responsibly. Google approves content syndication as long as you make it clear to your readers that they’re checking out a syndicated piece of information.

Moreover, you must include a link pointing back to the original post with the proper canonical tags.

Syndicating your best pieces of content can draw in more people by expanding your reach and getting more exposure. Think about posting on Yahoo News, and Medium, among other websites.

15. Every Post Can Boost One Another

By creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience, you’re encouraging them to explore other posts in your blog and ultimately contribute positively to your site’s overall performance.

Talk about a positive feedback loop where a new post reinforces your overall website value, making it more attractive to visitors and web crawlers!

Add a related posts section below each article that points to relevant content. That way, you’re helping readers discover more content on your page while you get an overall site performance boost. A win-win!

16. You Can Never Have Too Many Links with Blogging

Link building is important for SEO. It adds tangible value to your website and can improve your overall site structure, coherence, and integrity.

Indeed, you can always have a few more backlinks on your website. Besides, the more links you have, the stronger your internal link-building campaign will become.

But not all websites share the same interest in internal links. Most bloggers focus on publishing individually amazing content that lacks coherence with other pages, leaving users digesting one article and then bouncing out.

From a technical standpoint, linking between blog posts improves SEO and UX, particularly with the following:

  • Relational awareness
  • Improved indexation
  • Dwell time, impressions, and other tertiary benefits.

In short, every blog post allows you to plug in internal links to distribute traffic and value to and through your website.

17. Blogging Establishes Trust, Even if Users Don’t Read It

Say you’re a customer interested in buying a product with only a few choices.

Which brand should you trust?

Naturally, it’s the one with the strongest presence and activity.

Even if you haven’t read a single blog post from that brand, knowing that the blog exists and is updated frequently gives away the fact that they’re invested in their presence and authority.

In short, having an updated blog page means a brand is active.

A brand that posts great content is more trustworthy for consumers than a competitor without a blog page.

At this point, you should know how E-A-T plays a role in driving leads and sales. Trust can make or break your SEO campaign, so make sure to nail it with blog SEO designed to engage with readers and not just to manipulate rankings.

18. The Resilience Boost: Blogging Adapts to Algorithm Updates

As discussed, it’s bad practice to put all your efforts into a money keyword and have it drive the most traffic to your website.

Once a Google algorithm update hits the money page, you’ll suffer a steep downfall and lose half of your presence overnight.

Instead, implement a blog SEO campaign that targets a resilience boost. With enough blog posts attracting users and crawlers, your site value becomes diversified and resilient against core updates.

Remember that Google favours long-form content, and in almost every search results page, the ones sitting on the top spots are blog posts.

19. Blogging Lets You Beat the Competition

When it comes to search visibility and authority, the one who writes better content takes the win. If you’re running a small blog section, having a competitor come along and publish more compelling content is a real threat to your SEO.

But blogging is a two-way avenue. You can do the same to the competition and reach new heights by executing a clever and consistent blogging strategy.

20. Blogging Signals Activity to Search Engines and Users

Anybody home?

Check their blog page. If they haven’t posted anything in a few years, there’s a good chance the business has kicked the bucket.

Otherwise, the business may have stopped doing SEO long ago after ranking on the first page.

Search engines will come by less often when a site goes radio silent. Remember that the internet has billions of websites, so Google bots must work efficiently and conserve resources whenever possible.

One way to do so is by assessing your activity. Google looks into activity trends, and if yours display a flat line, search crawlers will adjust and decrease their crawl frequency.

Moreover, blog posts are a heartbeat that keeps your website alive and active. If a visitor checks your blog and sees fresh content published at least a month ago, it tells that the business still maintains the website.