Do Blogs Really Help With SEO?

Blogs are a standard part of SEO strategies, and have been for more than a decade. But do they really work? Yes! Even today blogs are a critical part of SEO. Here’s how they improve your SEO.

There are many important reasons to keep your site content fresh. First, Google values websites that are kept up-to-date. It doesn’t always choose the newest pages on a topic, but newness is definitely favored in the search results. Even more important, not freshening your website can cause the pages that used to succeed to gradually lose ranking.

Secondly, your blog gives you the chance to do a “hot take” on current issues that are being searched. Because it’s a blog, it doesn’t have to be definitive or your last word on the subject, but it puts your site out there where it can earn search traffic on terms that have many new searches, but don’t have a lot of results yet.

Blogs Can Target Longtail Keywords

One of the big challenges in SEO is that we don’t know what people are going to search about any given topic. It used to be that most searches were completely new, which is why Google started suggesting searches–it found it could steer people to searches it had already done and knew gave quality results.
Even so, these days most searches are what we call: “longtail” searches: they include four or more words in the search box. Optimizing your main pages for all the possible longtail searches is essentially impossible. It’s likewise difficult to predict these and build a PPC campaign around them. However, you can have blogs that are focused on the longtail searches and include them either in the title or their headings. This helps your site rank for these searches.
Here’s another benefit: people making longtail searches are often further in the buying cycle (closer to making a purchase), so if you can win their search traffic, you are more likely to convert them into customers.

Blogs Link to Internal Pages

One important part of SEO is directing Google to which are the most important pages on your website. You do this in part through your link structure: the pages that have the most links going toward them are the most important.
Blogs help with this by linking mostly to the key pages on your website, such as your homepage, main product pages, and profile pages. As they reiterate this pattern over time, Google gets the message. It knows which pages are most important on your site. That helps those most important pages show up in relevant searches.

Blogs Can Earn External Links

Even more important than internal links are external links: when someone links to your site from another site. These links increase your site’s importance in Google’s eyes.

Blogs win external links, including social media links, by being original, different, or fresh takes on a topic. This is where putting out your “hot take” can really make a difference. If you can get out an early, authoritative take on a subject, you can see enhanced traffic from it for a long time.

Let’s Design Your SEO Strategy

If you are unhappy with the organic search traffic on your site, SEO can help you bring more traffic by making your website more search-friendly. Most SEO strategies include a blog, but we will work hard to evaluate your website and your goals to determine if a blog is recommended in your case. See, for example, how previous SEO success stories have used blogs.

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How Ads Help Your SEO Campaign

Organic SEO can yield tremendous results. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also have a paid ad campaign. In fact, paid ads are a critical support to your SEO efforts.

Many clients come to us dead-set on an organic search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. We completely support this approach. Organic SEO can yield tremendous results. It can bring extensive business to your website at a very low cost, making it the best return on investment (ROI) for your advertising dollars in today’s market.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also have a paid ad campaign. In fact, paid ads are a critical support to your SEO efforts. Here’s how paid ads help SEO.

Immediately Build Traffic

SEO is effective, but it’s rarely fast. Depending on the market saturation for the keywords you’re targeting, it can take weeks, even months for your campaign to start bringing significant numbers of visitors to your website.
This isn’t just frustrating–it can be hard to weather. Your business needs paying clients to keep the lights on–and to keep funding your SEO efforts. With a paid ad campaign, we can essentially flip a switch and bring people in the virtual door. The ROI might not be as good as SEO over the long term, but at least there will be a return, which we can’t always say for the beginning of an SEO campaign.

Traffic Gets Google’s Attention

Google became the top search engine by reliably delivering quality results to searches. It doesn’t want to deliver your site as a result until it’s reasonably sure searchers will be happy with the result. Traffic is one indicator it uses to distinguish quality sites from dubious ones.
When your ads drive traffic to your website, it helps Google decide that your site is worthy of bumping up in the list of results.

Increased Brand Recognition and Branded Searches

Another factor that Google uses to decide whether your site should be ranked is whether there are any branded searches for your business. A branded search is when people search for your business by name. People won’t do that if they don’t know the name of your business.

Ads help put your business in front of people, improving brand recognition. Along with that, people will start searching for your business by name. And when they do, Google will notice.

More Quality Traffic

But perhaps the most important way that ads support your SEO is that it brings more qualified traffic to your website. What do we mean by this? Ads bring people who are specifically looking for the goods and services you offer.

How does this support your SEO? Well, another way Google ranks your site is based on how people act when they get to your site. If people immediately bounce from your site and go to a different site, Google starts to think your site is low quality and demotes it. If, on the other hand, people come to your site, read an article, click on several of your products, even skim your “About” page, then Google thinks your site satisfied that user. They’re more likely to send more users to the site in the future.

With organic SEO, you’re going to get a fair number of bounces, especially in the early days of a campaign. But ads bring in qualified traffic that is almost guaranteed to spend time on your site and show Google that you have a quality site it should deliver in search results. Over the long run, this helps your site’s ranking improve so that SEO efforts may make paid advertising unnecessary.

Let Us Design Your Best SEO Strategy

At VEA Technologies, we understand how to combine organic SEO and paid ad strategies, including social media advertising, to achieve success for clients in many different industries. We can help you understand how to start with a strong ad campaign that will taper off as your organic strategy becomes more successful.

To learn more about the best SEO strategy for your business, please contact us today for a consultation with VEA Technologies.