Seven reasons why blogging boosts your SEO

HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing Report found that website SEO is the top marketing channel for ROI.

Getting your website's SEO on point can help with more traffic and leads. But it takes time and effort.

Starting with a few small SEO tasks will benefit your website, traffic and business in the long run.

In this webinar, Laura Shimili Mears looks at what SEO is, how to find and incorporate keywords in your pages and how to keep it simple and give it no more than one or two hours of your time each week.

Topics covered in this session

• What SEO means

• How to add content to your website that benefits you, your clients and Google

• How to simplify your SEO practices

About the speaker

Laura is an experienced digital marketer and photographer with more than 10 years' experience in marketing, branding, running a business and building communities.

She's now focused on content marketing support and mentoring for founders and organisations that want to communicate clearly and effectively.

Laura is also founder of the Small Business Network, a community of small businesses in South West London.

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Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Beth: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today.

Welcome to this Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today.

For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.

I'm pleased to introduce Laura Shimili Mears, who is a strategic content marketing and business mentor.

In this session, Laura will look at what SEO is and how to find and incorporate keywords into your pages.

If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please pop them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.

Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with further resources later today. So, thank you very much, and over to you, Laura.

Laura Shimili Mears: Thank you so much, Beth, and thank you for the introduction.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this Lunch and Learn session. We'll be focusing on SEO today, and I'll be talking you through some slides I've prepared.

As Beth said, if you have any questions throughout the presentation, put them in the chat and we'll look at them at the end. It would also be really useful to know how much you already know about SEO, how much you currently practise blogging and SEO, and whether there are any specific areas within the topic that you want to know more about.

I'll make a start, and then at the end I'll come back to your questions and feedback.

Today I'll be talking about why blogging can boost your SEO, and I'll be sharing seven reasons why blogging helps.

First, though, let's look at what you'll take away from this session. You'll come away with a clearer understanding of what SEO means, how to add content to your website that benefits you, your clients and Google, and how to simplify your SEO practice.

I'd also like to invite you to think about blogging not as a diary, but as a strategic business blog. Think of it as your content engine, one that identifies and answers people's queries. That helps your business, your clients and search engines. So rather than seeing blogging as just writing posts, think of it as a strategic tool for your business.

Let's start with the first element: what is SEO?

SEO can feel overwhelming. It can seem complicated and technical, and lots of small businesses think it takes a lot of time and effort. But if we break it down, there are different elements to SEO.

There's technical SEO, content SEO and context SEO.

Technical SEO is about the speed, security and structure of your website. With most websites, these things are usually handled either by the platform you use, such as Wix, Shopify or Squarespace, or by your developer. The person who built your website will usually have included these things as part of the package.

Content SEO is the part that you can control and change. This is about the words on your website, and this is what search engines work with. When Google crawls a website, it crawls the words.

Then there's context SEO, which is about how your website relates to people visiting it, how long they spend on the website, and how other sites interact with it. That includes whether other websites link to yours and how your business is referenced elsewhere online.

Now let's dive into the seven reasons why blogging can boost your SEO.

The first reason is that blogging gives search engines new words to work with.

When Google crawls websites, it matches the content of the site with the search queries that people type into search engines. So new blog posts give Google more words to work with and more ways to match your content to what people are searching for.

The second reason is that every blog post you add is a new page that can be added to Google's index.

Google indexes pages based on their content, words and keywords. So every new blog post you publish is an opportunity to be indexed and appear in searches. You create more opportunities to show up for different keywords and different types of content.

The third reason is that blog posts can directly answer what your ideal clients are Googling.

People do not always search using the exact name of the service they need. More often, they search using their problem. If they are looking for a plumber, they may not just type "plumber near me". They might type "I have a problem with my tap" or "my shower is leaking".

This is becoming even more common with voice search and longer search queries. People are typing or saying more specific problems, not just service names. By blogging, you are more likely to match those very specific searches.

Reason four is that blogging allows you to go deeper on specialist topics.

At the moment there is a lot of noise online and a lot of content being generated around all kinds of topics and keywords. Generic topics are crowded, so going more specific is better for search engines and better for your audience.

It also gives you an opportunity to show your expertise.

When you write detailed, expert content on a focused subject, you naturally use the language your clients will use when they search. That means you are more likely to come up in searches, and you face less competition because you are being more specific.

Reason five is that blogging supports your local SEO.

Local SEO is what helps you appear on things like Google Maps or Apple Maps. It is also helped by using words that are specific to locations.

For example, if I am in southwest London, and I use terms like Tooting, Balham or southwest London in my blog posts, then I am more likely to appear in local searches. This also links well with your Google Business Profile.

Google works hard to connect local searches with local businesses. If someone is searching in their area for your type of service, Google is more likely to show your business if it is clear where you are located. So you need to use those location words.

Reason six is that blogging increases the time people spend on your website.

If your blogs are useful, relevant and match what people are searching for, people will spend more time reading them. That is good for your website because time spent on the site is a strong signal to Google that your content is valuable.

This is often called dwell time. If you have good dwell time, Google is more likely to rank your content more highly because it shows that people are finding it useful.

If people spend several minutes reading a blog post, that is a strong result. We know that attention spans are short and you often have only seconds to catch someone's attention, so if someone stays for minutes, that is a very positive signal.

The better the blogs, the more interesting, valuable and detailed they are, the more likely it is that dwell time will increase.

Reason seven is that blogging attracts backlinks.

Backlinks relate to the third element I mentioned earlier, context SEO, which is about how your website relates to other websites on the web.

Backlinks from other sites give authority to your website. The more high-authority backlinks you have, the more likely your website is to come up in searches.

If you have blogs that link to other people, to other websites, to other businesses or publications, especially websites with more authority than yours, that can be beneficial.

Without backlinks, it can be difficult to make meaningful progress with SEO. Blogging gives you an opportunity to build those connections.

So those are the seven reasons.

One of the key takeaways from today is that I wanted to make SEO feel easier and more manageable.

It should not feel like you need to spend a whole week on SEO. You could spend one to two hours each week on it and break it down into an action plan, focusing on something different each week.

If you have more time, or if you have a team, then of course more can be done. Fresh content is always good for websites. It keeps them current and gives Google and other search engines more material to work with.

The more you do it, the better, but you also need to be strategic. It is not only about quantity. It is about relevance, specificity, and understanding intent.

Intent is something I have not mentioned yet, but it is about understanding how people are searching for what they need. That is what search intent means.

So in terms of making your SEO practice simpler, this is a suggested action plan.

Start by understanding your current rankings. What do you rank for at the moment? Do you know that? Do you know what your website and pages are currently ranking for?

One way to do that is to use some of the tools I'll mention shortly. That gives you a baseline of where you stand, what keywords you rank for now, and where you want to be.

If you are not ranking for some keywords that are important, then those become priorities. If you are ranking for some keywords and you are on page two or three, then with some effort you may be able to move those onto page one.

The third action is to find keyword opportunities.

Focus on page two or three keywords, but also on those that have high search volume and low competition. When you use keyword research tools, they will often give you a keyword difficulty score, which shows how hard it is to rank for that keyword.

If a keyword has high volume and low difficulty, then that is often a good one to focus on, or at least a good cluster of keywords to work around.

You also need to understand search intent.

That is very important because, as I said earlier, people do not always search using the names of services. They search using their problems. Understanding how people search for the problem you solve is really valuable.

If you are a plumber and you are doing SEO for plumbing services in SW17, that is one keyword you can focus on. But you may be missing out on searches such as "leaky tap", "broken shower" or other specific problems that reflect real search intent.

The words people use are very important, so being mindful of those is key.

Another part of the action plan is to think about the most common questions people ask you. What do your clients ask all the time? Those are great opportunities for content.

Write blog posts around those questions. Write a series of blog posts, or create FAQ pages or sections on your site to answer them.

Another effective way to create useful content is to educate people about what you do. That often means demystifying or debunking myths in your industry.

That means breaking things down and making them simpler for people to understand. Then, once you have started, do it again and keep monitoring the results.

There are a huge range of SEO tools that can help with this. Some of the main ones are Semrush, Ahrefs and Ubersuggest.

Semrush is a really good tool. You can open a free account, and there are also paid plans, though they can be quite expensive. Depending on the size of the business, it might be worth using a paid plan for a month and seeing how far you can get.

Ahrefs is another very useful tool.

For plugins, most website platforms such as Wix, Squarespace and Shopify will have their own built-in SEO tools or plugins. Make use of those and understand how they work, because they often guide you through the process of writing content, structuring headlines and formatting posts.

If you do not have those, I have found that Yoast SEO and Rank Math are particularly useful, especially for WordPress websites. They guide you through the process and I use them regularly.

Another really useful tool, which is completely free, is Google Search Console.

That is great because it shows your website's performance over time. You do need to have your Google Analytics set up as well, because that tracks your data, where traffic is coming from, your dwell time, and which pages people are landing on.

When linked with Google Search Console, you can monitor which keywords people are using to find your business.

Then there is Ubersuggest from Neil Patel, which is also very useful. It is good for tracking your baseline, your keywords, keyword opportunities and backlinks.

All of these tools now also have AI functions built in, which can help with content generation.

For example, Ubersuggest has its own area where you can create content on the platform itself based on the keywords you want to focus on.

That brings me to the end of the slides. Thank you very much for listening.

Maybe I was going a little fast, but I wanted to make sure we covered everything. I'm happy to go back to any of the slides and answer questions.

Beth: That's brilliant. Thank you, Laura.

It's good that we do have some time because we've had a lot of questions come through, so thank you for that. That was really interesting.

Sandra would like to know how SEO has changed in the age of AI. I'm sure you could talk a lot about this, but are there any standout points that come to mind?

Laura: Yes, of course. SEO has changed a lot in the age of AI.

As I said, all of these SEO platforms now have AI functions built into them. But I think what Sandra may really mean is how you come up in searches through AI, for example in ChatGPT or in Google's AI summaries.

That is definitely a new development. People can now appear in ChatGPT, in Google AI summaries, and that is a great place to be.

Usually, if you already have good SEO in place, these systems will often pick up the people who rank highly and reference them because they are seen as relevant or authoritative on a topic.

It can be a bit random at times, but it can also be highly relevant.

For example, my photography business has come up on ChatGPT. Clients have said, "We found you on ChatGPT," which is great.

So in terms of your SEO practice, I would say that the principles remain the same.

Neil Patel's Ubersuggest has some very good material on how SEO is changing with AI, including concepts like GEO and AEO, generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation.

If you want to know more about that, I would definitely recommend Neil Patel's newsletter. He writes daily, sometimes twice a day, on these topics and goes into a lot of detail.

One of the main things he says is that businesses should focus less on service names and more on how people are actually searching for their problems.

Keywords are also becoming longer, more like long-tail searches. So if you build your content around the real problems people face, and if you write about those problems in a detailed and useful way, then that really helps with SEO in the age of AI.

Beth: That's great. Thank you, Laura.

We've got a few questions specifically about Substack as well, and whether that can feed into SEO. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. Substack is another platform for creating content, and a lot of people are using it.

A lot of people are generating content there and also linking it to their websites. As long as you do that in a connected and strategic way, it can be useful.

Substack has its own platform visibility, so there is value in ranking within Substack itself. But it can also help support visibility elsewhere if it links back to your website.

What you want to avoid is building two completely separate presences, one on Google and your website, and another on Substack, with no real connection between them.

If they are linked, then that is much better because you are putting your effort in once and multiplying the effect.

Beth: Great, thank you.

We've got a question from Michelle here. She says, how can blogging boost GEO? Do the same principles apply as SEO, and do you have any specific tips?

Laura: The same principles do apply.

If Michelle knows her clients very well, their language, their concerns and their questions, then she should focus on those.

That applies to any kind of SEO or GEO because you are identifying what people need and responding to it. That is really the foundation of both.

Beth: Great, thank you.

We've got one in from Buffy as well. Buffy says, can blogs with a short dwell time impact your SEO negatively?

Laura: Yes, they can. If people are not spending long on a blog, that could be a negative signal. But the answer is then to improve the blog.

That might mean making it longer, making it more detailed, refreshing it, updating it, or making it more relevant.

So the thing to do is look at why the dwell time is short and then improve that post.

In some cases, you might even replace it with a better version, but make sure you link it properly so that you don't create broken links.

So yes, it can affect SEO, but it is also something you can fix.

Beth: Great. Thank you.

We've had another one from Mark. He says people talk about blog platforms. Do you need that, or can pages on your website linked from an internal blog page work just as well?

Laura: Yes, absolutely. What we're really talking about here is the blog section of your business website.

People used to think much more in terms of separate blogging platforms, and of course that still exists. But if you have a business and a business website, then usually you have a blog section there.

That is the kind of blogging we are talking about. Publishing articles in that section and linking them to your services, your testimonials, your social proof and what you do.

So yes, pages on your own website linked from an internal blog page work very well.

Beth: Brilliant. We've got another question from Stacy.

She says, I've got two different audiences, parents and entrepreneurs. How do I structure my website and content so it's clear and still ranks well on Google and doesn't confuse things?

Laura: Yes, when you have two different audiences, that can be tricky. The key is to be very clear about which pages are specific to parents and which are specific to entrepreneurs.

Then on your homepage, you can introduce the overall business and explain that you work with both, but use the homepage more like a signpost.

These days, homepages tend to be shorter. You do not need to put everything there. Use it to say who you are, who you help, and then direct people to the relevant pages.

Practically, I would recommend having separate audience personas for each group, so one set for parents and one for entrepreneurs.

Then do your keyword research separately for each audience.

I also find that searching for these things directly on Google gives useful clues. Look at how people are actually searching for your services, and then classify those searches under each audience.

So it is very much a case of structuring and classifying clearly.

Beth: That's brilliant. Thank you, Laura.

We've had lots of questions in and a lot of positive feedback too, so I think everyone found that really useful.

So yes, thank you so much for your time today.

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