The Importance of Blogging for SEO

One thing we can never stress enough to our partners is the importance of blogging. Blogging can often seem like a waste of time, and often does not show immediate effects or ROI, making it difficult to justify. Hopefully this article can persuade you to up your blogging game!

We don’t just stress the importance of blogging, we stress the importance of blogging with intent. Rather than writing very company specific blog posts, its important to write posts targeted around a certain keyword or topic. For example, if you a local painter, a bad blog post would be;

We Re-Arranged our Storefront!

And a good blog post would look like;

How to choose a Portland Exterior Painting Company

The first title does not target any useful keywords, and provides no beneficial content for searchers. Why would Google ever show users an article titled “We Re-Arranged our Store-Front!”? Who would be searching for information about your specific business re-arranging its store? Answer: No one!

Looking at the second title example, you can see that the article will target a specific keyword: “Portland exterior painting company”, or even just “exterior painting company”. Unlike the previous title, people WILL be searching for Portland exterior painters, and because you have a laser targeted blog post about just that, Google will be more likely to show your site in the search results for this term.

Both blog post examples will take relatively the same amount of time and effort to create, so why not make sure you are blogging with intent to capitalize on the time and effort you put into blogging?

The goal is to find many long-tail keywords with low competition for you to target.  Long tail keywords are often easier to rank for, and are easier to write blog posts on. For example, the keyword “Exterior house painting Portland Oregon” has around 70 monthly searches and relatively low completion. If you are able to rank a blog post targeted around that keyword, it can drive 10-50 visits a month alone. Now, multiple that post by the 10’s if not hundreds of posts you plan on adding in the future! The more content, the more visitors! As I mentioned earlier, blogging does not often show an immediate return on investment, rather, the effects of blogging are cumulative.

So how else does blogging benefit a website? Here are some more ways:

1. Blogging on a consistent basis keeps your website constantly updated – Google favors sites that are constantly updated more than those that remain dormant and just sitting there.
2. It bulks up the page count of your site – Google favors larger sites in the search ranks. A site with 1000 pages is more likely to outrank a site with 100 pages.
3. It can target long-tail keywords to bring more visitors to your sites
4. It can help keep your visitors engaged and on your site longer

If this still hasn’t convinced you, think of your blog posts as an asset. Yes, they can take initial time commitments, or cash expenditure, but they will continue benefiting you and your site for years to come.

One VERY important tip!!!! When writing your blogs, or having them written, please, please be careful about the number of times you use the targeted keyword. Keyword stuffing (overuse of keywords in the content, and placing where not necessary) can actually reduce the effectiveness of the article. This is because keyword stuffing was used in the past to help increase the ranks for those keywords, since Google had discovered this long ago, it is now being hyper-sensitive to the overuse of keywords. If you are planning on blogging please read our post on the SEO for bloggers, we really want to make sure you are writing a blog post in the correct way to get the maximum benefit!