So you’ve got a website and you’ve heard that adding a blog to it might be able to help you achieve your SEO goals.
To help you understand how and why a blog will help your SEO efforts, we are going to provide you with some examples, scenarios, and advice that will encourage you to make the leap and integrate a blog into your existing site.
Video Transcript
Today’s question is: If I add a Blog to my Company’s Website, Will It Help With My SEO?
Build Relevancy & Crawlability
In the eyes of search engines, the main difference between a site that has a blog and one that doesn’t is that the one with the blog provides new content for search engine spiders to crawl on a more frequent basis than a static website, which is rarely updated.
If a local garage has a website that promotes their services or any products that they might sell, it is likely to remain static for a while unless they have frequent price changes or special offers that are updated on a regular basis.
By adding a blog, that garage could regularly create unique content that is related to their services e.g. how to identify if your brake pads need changing, whether or not particular car manufacturer models have been recalled, or even basic DIY tutorials for their customers to try at home.
As each new page of content is published on this blog, search engines (like Google) are presented with more opportunities to re-visit the website and determine its relevancy based on the type of content that is produced.
You wouldn’t benefit from treating your blog like your personal Facebook page wall because this could create relevance confusion as the content may not match what the rest of your website is about – very important if your website only has a few core pages and the number of pages created by the blog outweigh them in volume.
Websites that don’t make frequent changes and remain static run the risk of being lost in the search engine results pages (SERPs) if no other SEO practices have been applied compared to those with a blog that produces fresh content on a regular basis.
Growth in Organic Search Impressions
The second SEO benefit that an integrated blog can provide your website is increased organic search visibility, which can be measured by the number of impressions your website achieves in Webmaster Tools.
By writing about topics that are related to your products and services, you can appear for different types of search queries.
A furniture retailer in the UK, named Frances Hunt, appears around position 11 in organic search results on Google for the term “divan bed” with an article that they have published on their blog to answer the question: what is a divan bed?
For broad terms such as “divan bed” search engines (like Google) can’t identify what the exact intent of that user is so they will present a variety of pages, such as an informational page about divan beds, image results of divan beds, and places where you can buy a divan bed, because they are trying to appeal to each type of intention the searcher may have.
If you search for the exact term “what is a divan bed” the article ranks in a higher position in Google because it is exactly related to that term, the overall website is focused on furniture, and it has been referenced by another website which helps that web page gain authority – another ranking factor.
If the furniture retailer hadn’t published the article about divan beds then they might not have appeared in the search results for the term divan beds at all so although the page being ranked isn’t transactional it does help raise brand awareness for that term. If a visitor arrived at this article to find out about divan beds it is possible that at a later date when they want to buy a divan bed there is a chance that they could re-visit the website where they first found out about the beds (if it is made clear that the site sells them, which in this case it does).
Natural Link Bait
The final SEO benefit of adding a blog is related to link building i.e. external links to the website can help with raising its authority. By adding a blog you create more frequent, unique content that either helps or entertains people and it can perform as natural link bait.
A blog owner might want to inform their owner readers about something that you have written about, which means that they might reference you in an article of their own if your original article was an informational resource – providing a natural link back to your site.
If your content is entertaining or informative enough to be shared by a social site (Facebook, Twitter, G+, Pinterest, etc) it can help add some social links back to your domain – one of Google’s 200-odd page ranking factors.
Takeaways
To summarise the information we’ve supplied in this video, the three main SEO benefits of adding a blog to your website are:
1. Search engine spiders will crawl your website on a more regular basis and help determine its relevancy based on the types of articles you create.
2. The more related articles you publish on your blog, the more organic search visibility your website can gain for long tailed terms such as “what is a divan bed?”
3. Blog articles can act as good link bait as social media users and bloggers could reference or share your article online.
