Blogging, as we have mentioned in previous posts, can be an important in a host of ways:
- Want to build up your brand by burnishing your image as an expert in your field? Publishing regular articles explaining your field, and offering your take on what is happening in it, can do that.
- Or what about establishing a connection with your customers to deepen brand loyalty? Speaking to them directly via a blog and the comments on that blog can help to do just that.
- What about SEO? The answer to that is, resoundingly, that blogging for SEO can offer a great way to improve your search engine page rank along with all the other positive benefits it offers.
Blogging for SEO
Writing a blog works on multiple levels to improve your business. Many of the signals a blog sends out to customers and other members of your industry—paying attention to feedback, an interest in the industry, and a long term and sustained investment in developing your business—are also projected by your blog to search engines crawling your website. Blogging for SEO makes sense because one of the things Google and other search engines prize most highly is evidence of a sustained, well developed pattern of updating a site with new, good quality content.
What Will Work
I have written before on several topics related to blogging for SEO—content creation, topic generation, etc. All of those thoughts are helpful, but they only come into play after you have decided to implement a blogging strategy. What does an overall plan of successful blogging for SEO look like?:
- Regular updates—all the benefits of blogging for SEO will only occur if you can keep it up regularly over time, showign your readers, and Google, that you have a long term commitment.
- Create useful content—while discussed more in our post about content creation, it bears repeating: the content you put on your blog should answer a question, offer some useful advice, or otherwise showcase your expertise.
- Connect with your customers—whether you are a legal specialist seeking to show your expertise, a store looking to gain more customers, or a contractor looking to gain referrals, you need to ensure you interact with your customers or clients via your blog. It offers an easy way to answer questions and create relationships that could otherwise take a great deal of individual attention.
What Will Not Work
Short of repeating the negative versions of the statements made above, what are some pitfalls you might like to avoid, you might ask?
- Do not get frustrated—not getting the results you want right away? The answer is not to give up. Blog content provides compounding returns over the long run. More positive signals result from having a site with more content for more time.
- Do not engage in “spammy” practices—this means no keyword stuffing, no repetition of content found elsewhere on your site or those of others.
Final Thoughts
If all this sounds reasonable to you, than you should consider what applying a blogging strategy to your business’s website might look like. Like everything when it comes to SEO, there is no silver bullet, but the closest thing to a one step solution might well be a quality blogging strategy.