The Importance of Blogging for SEO – Blog On!

using your blog to market your website

When people seek a product or service, the first stop for most people these days is the internet. Blogging for SEO is a technique of keeping certain things in mind when writing your blog article. Blogging is a great way to answer the questions that internet users have about what they are looking for while showing the personal connection consumers crave. You can pose yourself as an expert in your industry by addressing what your company can provide including solutions to specific problems and showcasing real life experience only you can offer.

Social blogging is used to share personalized experiences, not just business ideas and concepts. In our social media driven world, customers respond to companies they feel they can connect and relate to. Keeping an updated blog tells the world your site, and in turn your business, is active and trustworthy. Developing these relationships may lead to more potential clients and stronger customer retention.  Of course you need to announce upcoming events and company news, but style it into conversational text to help your blog develop a personality.

Catchy titles and creative content are paramount, and blog posts may vary in length and overall message can range from straight-up serious to down-right silly. The most important criteria of blogging is to keep it interesting. When writing, consistently ask yourself “Is this something I would share to friends or colleagues?” If the answer is no, you might want to rethink your message.

A huge advantage to blogging is to engage readers to share content, ultimately bringing more traffic to your site. If your posts are falling flat, you’ll miss out on some of the best benefits.

Consistency is the magic ingredient in all this. Once you have begun blogging, you need to keep to a schedule. Although it may take some time to build a following, it will happen more readily by establishing a routine. Consider it like a TV show, one that viewers turn to every Tuesday night at 10 pm. If for some reason that show does not air in its regularly scheduled time slot, fans have a tendency to flip through channels and discover a new program to follow.

If you begin by blogging on a weekly basis, you must continue to do so in order for your followers to “tune in” to your new “episodes” or risk losing their attention. It is better to start out gradually and increase the frequency as popularity increases, rather than begin blogging daily and allow it to slack off.

To bring all this together into a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) standpoint, it’s no secret search engines favor updated and evolving content. Every blog post you make is an invitation to index your site again, improving your organic visibility. You also have an opportunity to include different and specific keywords in your posts that may not be in your page content.

Even if you’re blogging on a service you already have a page for, your new original post is just one more place on your site you can reiterate those keywords. Blogging is also fantastic for a social media/SEO one-two punch. Sharing your blog on Facebook, Twitter, etc is a quick way to get your daily posts in while giving users a new reason to visit your website. Once you’ve got them there, hopefully that phone number or contact form will catch their eye and gain you a lead!