HERE ARE FIVE REASONS COMPANY BLOGS ARE GOOD FOR SEO
If you own a business of any size, you have probably heard the term ‘SEO’ in conversations about growing your online presence. You have probably heard many people also mentioning ‘My website is not working‘.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) essentially dictates how high your website appears in search results. The better adapted your online content is to SEO, the more likely Google is to show it to search engine users, increasing website traffic and introducing your business to more customers.
What does blogging have to do with SEO? Blogs are much more than a place to post the annual Christmas message from your CEO and announce your latest product launch. Blogs optimised for SEO will generate traffic on your website and increase customer reach. Here are five ways a company blog can help improve your SEO.
Blogs are a good way to implement keywords
Updating the mainframe of your website is time-consuming and complicated. However, frequently posting to your company’s blog provides a quick and easy way to update your website with fresh content, including keywords your customer is likely to search for.
Overloading your webpage with keywords makes for a worse reader experience and can actually lead in your SEO falling, as search engines want to discourage people from keyword ‘stuffing’. Using one or two keywords combined with a small handful of long-tail keywords (explained below) per post is enough to boost SEO.
Your chosen keywords should feature in the header, title tag (headline), body, URL and meta description, as these are the areas search engines look for information on a webpage.
More blog posts, more opportunities to include long-tail keywords
Not all keywords were made equal. Long-tail keywords, which are short phrases or a number of keywords grouped together, are the most valuable to SEO because they are often part of a question. Research from Ko Marketing showed 50% of search queries are four words or longer, which gives you an idea of why long-tail keywords are so important.
Company blogs are unlikely to get much traffic for the keywords you’re fighting dozens of other companies for. However, blog posts are a great opportunity to use long-tail keywords your rivals might not have thought of.
For example, a long-tail keyword search might be, ‘London hotels near Soho’. A smart hotel group with a branch near Soho might then write a blog post with the title ’10 of the best tourist attractions near Soho’ and tie it back to the hotel branch in London using the long-tail keyword.
Backlinking shows search engines that your company matters
The more you link to other relevant companies, the more likely they are to link back to you. The more websites your link appears on, the more people will click through to your website. It pays to build solid relationships with organisations and websites in your industry. Search engines notice when your link is being frequently shared and clicked on, and will boost you in the rankings if they see your content is doing well.
However, choose your allies wisely, as search engines penalise websites that link to too many irrelevant pages.
Image metadata can be optimised
Thought the purpose of website images was just to brighten up the page? Think again. Every image comes with metadata and alt-text, which provides another way for search engines to find you. Make sure you name all images with relevant titles, including those all-important chosen keywords.
Search engines can’t see images, so they need descriptions of images to tell them what they’re looking at. Alt text is also essential for better user experience, as it tells the user what the image is if they are unable to see it – for example, people who use screen readers.
Alt text is easily edited in blogging platforms like WordPress, Wix and Squarespace. Simply double click the image and look for the alt text field.
Interesting posts are shared, shared and shared again
The goal of running a successful company blog is to get people clicking on your content and hopefully getting to know your company in the process.
Well-written, quality content will be shared on social media far more often than your company’s service page. Blog posts are ideal for sharing on your company’s social media pages too. The more an article is shared, the more likely it Google will boost its ranking position in search results.
SEO can make or break your company’s website. Whatever field you work in, a well-written blog covering thoughtful and shareable subjects your customer finds interesting is likely to provide a welcome boost to your SEO ranking.
