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Posted: Wed 20th Mar 2024
Having a well-maintained blog on your website increases your traffic and can increase your sales. You’ve likely heard that blogs do this by helping your SEO (search engine optimisation).
If you’re vaguely aware that SEO is something you ‘should work on’ but haven’t because you don’t get on with tech, read on.
I’ll explain what it is and how it helps your blog (and thus your website) in non-techy language.
Most of your customers need to get to know you and your business before they buy from you.
A website is a great place for them to do that, but they’ll need a reason to visit your website. This is where your blog comes in.
Sharing your blog posts on social media, in your newsletter, or networking meetings is a low-commitment way to get people to your website.
After all, you’re just asking for a couple of minutes of their time, during which you’ll inform and maybe even entertain them.
People like to learn new things and will become regular visitors to your website if your blog regularly provides them with the kind of information they’re looking for.
Even better, people like to share what they learn. When they do this with your blog posts, they’re helping you with your marketing for free!
Don’t you hate it when you click on something in search results only to find that it’s way out of date? Yeah, Google hates that, too!
Since Google doesn’t want to irritate users by giving them outdated information, it’s always crawling the internet looking for the latest information.
Adding new blog posts (which Google sees as new pages on your site), keeps it coming back for up-to-date info on your topic.
A note about Google: Google isn’t the only search engine but it is behind the vast majority of UK website traffic, so I focus on it. If your clients are in other countries, find out which search engines they use.
People grumble a lot about algorithms and SEO in the online business space but we need to remember that search engines like Google actually want to be helpful to their users.
Google knows people use search engines to find information. If they didn’t, the verb 'to google' wouldn’t now be part of the English language.
Since people turn to search engines for answers to questions, they prioritise pages, like blog posts, that give those answers.
This is also why Google loves well-written, well-structured long-form content (over 1,000 words).
Google knows some questions need short answers (“Would you like tea or coffee?”), while others require more detail (“Which is healthier, tea or coffee?”).
When you write blog posts that answer those bigger questions in the detail people are looking for, they’ll stay on your site longer.
Keeping people on your site helps you by showing Google that searchers value what you post (increasing your site’s credibility) and by giving them time to get to know you and your business.
Blog posts take longer to write than most social media posts but they last longer, too.
We all know that what we post on some social media platforms in the morning is mostly irrelevant by the afternoon. That’s not the case with your blog posts.
As I said above, Google does like new pages but that doesn’t mean it ignores older ones.
So long as you maintain your blog by doing things like making sure you don’t have broken links (links that go to inactive pages) and updating your posts as necessary, it will keep sending people to your posts.
For example, a post I wrote in April 2020 is consistently bringing in traffic even now! Why?
Because people are still concerned about the quality of information on the internet – I suspect interest in finding out who (or what) wrote the things you read will only increase with the rise of AI-created content.
Keywords are the topics you write your blog posts about. So for the post you’re reading right now, the keywords include blogging and blog posts.
Keywords are also the words and phrases people put into search engines to find out about the topics you blog about.
One of the key ways to build your SEO is to use your keywords in natural language when you write well-structured blog posts.
You see, we’ve moved on from the bad old days of keyword stuffing (when people just repeated their keywords over and over again in ways that didn’t make sense to human readers).
Now, instead of looking for the page that mentions the keyword the most times, Google looks for pages that write both intelligently and intelligibly about it. Why? Because as I said before, Google wants to be helpful by sending people to useful sites.
