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.

To learn more about your best