Investing in your website’s SEO is one of the most important things you can do for your business these days. Even if you’re outsourcing help from digital marketing specialists, implementing an SEO strategy is still a massive project. If you’re tackling it by yourself, it can feel like you’ve taken on a second job.
After performing keyword research, revamping your web page copy, and making your site more mobile-friendly, you may find yourself wondering if the extra work of a building a blog is really worth it. How much could it actually affect your site’s rankings?
A lot, actually.
While you won’t see results overnight, commitment to a solid blogging strategy can produce huge improvements for your SEO overtime. Here’s how:
A Blog Keeps Your Website Updated
Search engines— not to mention humans— like websites that are updated frequently. It lets them know that the site isn’t abandoned and that the information is current and relevant. A website that hasn’t been updated in a year or even six months is going to have a much harder time ranking than a site that’s updated every two weeks.
The trouble is most business don’t actually need to update their web copy that often. Sure, you may want to revisit your About page and Services page every few months to make sure they’re still up-to-date. But for the most part, a lot of your web copy remains static for months at a time.
Blogs provide a way for you to organically update your site’s content on a regular basis. A healthy blogging calendar keeps your site fresh and active without making arbitrary, unnecessary changes to your web page copy every two weeks.
It Builds Links and Engagement
External links are one of the most important factors in search engine algorithms. When other reliable sites link back to yours, it tells search engine crawlers that your site provides credible, valuable content.
Both quality and quantity matter here. As long as you aren’t resorting to blackhat tactics like link farms, you can’t have too many external links. Still, make an effort create quality content in order to increase your chances of being linked to from high-authority sites. External links from respected website with large readerships will improve your SEO more than links from smaller sites.
While there’s no way to guarantee the caliber or number of sites that will link back to your posts, blogging is still absolutely one of the best strategies for generating organic external links.
“Most business will have a lot of trouble generating external links without a blog,” says SEO expert Dmitrii Kustov. “Good web page copy is essential, but it can only do so much in terms of external links. Very few people will ever have a reason to link back to your About page.”
But a library of informative, original blog posts on topics relevant to your business’s niche? That’s something worth sharing.
A Blog Ups Your Keyword Game
Even if you know next to nothing about SEO, you’ve almost certainly heard about the importance of keywords, and you probably even tried to include a few in your home page. The more keywords a site has, the easier it is for crawlers to “understand” what a site is about.
Without a blog, you only have so much room to include keywords. Search engine algorithms wised up to tactics like keyword stuffing quite some time ago, and these tricks come with a heavy penalty these days.
Over time, a blog will certainly improve your rankings for your most important search terms (the ones that bring the most visitors to your site). But perhaps even more importantly, it will give you the opportunity to rank for terms you never could have included in your web page copy alone.
“Essentially,” says Kustov, “a blog helps you cast a much wider net for all of the search terms you can rank for. The more opportunities you have to rank, the more people will find your website.”
Unfortunately, a lot of businesses focused on “quick-fixes” miss out on the benefits a blog can provide. But those willing to put in the work and wait for the results are often surprised by how much their blogs have payed off.