Yes, having a blog on your website will improve your rankings on search engines. Although a blog is not a direct ranking factor for SEO, the use of one gives you opportunities to implement SEO techniques that will affect your overall rankings.
Knowing this, let’s clear this up a little bit and understand how they help us with our SEO and lead to an increase in our rankings.
What we’ll cover in this post:
- Do blogs help search engine rankings?
- Do blogs help SEO?
- How important are blogs for SEO?
- Are blog comments good for SEO?
- Conclusion
Do blogs help search engine rankings?
Overall, yes having a blog on your website will help your search engines rankings. However, as we mentioned, a blog itself is not a direct ranking factor taken into account by search engines such as Google and Bing, when displaying our websites on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
It’s what a blog indirectly does that can rank us higher in search results.
Two common questions people ask on this subject are, “Does having a blog improve your rankings” and “Do blogs help SEO?”. Ultimately, these questions are asking the same thing, just phrased in a different way.
Blogs improve our website rankings in search engines because they allow us to publish content that is optimised for keyword phrases people are searching for.
And to put it another way…
Blogs help SEO because they allow us to publish content that is optimised for keyword phrases people are searching for.
However, there is a bit more to it than this, so let’s look at how they can help Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Do blogs help SEO?
Blogs are a great addition to any website and having one as part of your site structure, can help your SEO and improve its ranking in the SERP.
Websites in their basic form are usually made up of a homepage, one or more sales pages and a contact page. This allows us to funnel the customers from the home page, or the sales page they land on, to a call-to-action (CTA) such as the contact page.
The sales pages usually contain information about the service or product a business offers and hopes to give reasons why the customer should choose them.
This is a great page to include a primary keyword and build your content around it. Our SEO Services page explains the benefits of investing in SEO and what it can do for your business.
Now, although we created this page to give information about our service, that keyword term may not be the most common phrase people use to find our services. So what can we do about that?
Yes, you’ve guessed it… a blog!
By using a blog, we can use the results from our Keyword Research and Search Analysis to create content (blog posts) based on these search queries. This allows us to rank in the search engines for these keywords, giving us access to so much more web traffic.
These blog post can then link back to our Service pages in order to ‘close the sale’. Can you see how valuable this can potentially be to website owners?
How important are blogs for SEO?
Blogs are a great addition to your website and are really important when trying to improve your SEO.
We’ve already mentioned how they give us access to so much more potential web traffic, by allowing us to target relevant keywords people are searching for and create engaging content to match the user’s intent.
But there are a few more benefits of having a blog on your site.
Targeted search terms
In connection to the above point, blogs also allow is to target long-tail keywords.
In a previous example, I referred to our sales page for SEO Services and how “SEO Services” might not be the most popular search term people use to find information on that topic.
A more popular term would be “Does my small business need SEO”.
Because our sales page needs to talk about the benefits of our services, what we do and how to contact us, to optimise the page for this longer phrase, just isn’t realistic as it would be too specific to cover on a page of this type.
This is a great opportunity to create a blog post based on this and we did just that. We create a post providing 10 Reasons why SEO is important for small business. Go check it out.
Fresh Content
Another great reason for using a blog is fresh content.
How often do you visit a website and notice that the content is out of date or not been updated for years? Whether it’s still relevant or not, it doesn’t fill you with confidence that you can trust it – is the company still in business?
Visiting a website that you can see is consistently and regularly updated provides customers with confidence and lets search engines know that your website is running and offering fresh content.
It also gives the search engine more reasons to index your website more often, keeping it on their radar over time. Google doesn’t want to return outdated content to its customers so creating new content gives them a reason to rank your site.
However, you can’t keep updating your home page or sales pages as that content is likely to stay the same unless you change your offer or product. This is why a blog is much more practical for adding new content to your site on a regular basis.
Reduces Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors to a webpage that leave without taking an action, such as clicking a link or submitting a form for example.
It’s another entity that isn’t a definitive ranking factor, however, if someone clicks on your site from Google and then leaves quickly and without action, it tells Google that it didn’t answer their question, or it didn’t meet their search intent.
Having a blog allows you to create content that answers a question people are asking, the more detailed and relevant the content, the more it fulfills the user’s search intent.
The effect of this is the increased time a user will stay on your site, thus reducing the Bounce Rate and telling Google that this is good valuable content that answers a question and should be shown to other people.
Are blog comments good for SEO?
No, blog comments do not directly influence your search engine rankings and are not a good SEO link-building practice. However, if your comment provides value to the reader, you could see an increase in traffic to your website naturally.
Gone are the days when you could simply find a blog, comment on it and blatantly just add a link to your website. Google’s a lot smarter these days and that type of link building doesn’t work anymore, in fact, it can get you into a lot of trouble.
Perhaps it would help first if we explain why this type of action was popular a few years ago. The reason for this is Link Building.
Link building is the process of generating links from other websites, back to yours. It’s understood that Google uses Backlinks as a ranking factor for websites in the search results.
So, the more links you have to your website the higher you will rank – well no, not really.
As mentioned, Google is Smart!
This type of link building, called blackhat link building, was (and still is really) not as effective as it used to be. Google only takes into account relevant links to your site and more value comes from a trusted website such as .gov.
So an Architect website isn’t going to benefit from a link from a dog bed website. In fact, Google will see that as spam and a blatant attempt to get a link and probably issue a penalty.
However, this doesn’t mean blog commenting is dead.
If used correctly and genuinely, commenting on a blog – that is relevant to your sector and offering genuine value to anyone reading it, may possibly generate some traffic to your website.
If your comment is that good and really helps someone, they will want to visit your website anyway, which is great!
Conclusion
A blog is a great add-on to any website and we believe is an essential tool that should be included in your SEO strategy to help improve your search rankings.
Writing and maintaining a blog can be time-consuming and a successful blog depends on a number of factors:
- Comprehensive Keyword Research and Search Analysis
- Good quality content
- Optimised content
- Regularly updated
If you’re thinking about a new website for your business, first contact our web designers in Cumbria and talk to them about including a blog.
If you are serious about ranking higher in the search engines and have the ability to run a blog, we advise you do.
As part of our SEO Services, we not only provide a comprehensive audit of your website, but we can advise on what to write and how to write it. What’s more, we can also write the content and manage your blog for you!
I am an SEO Consultant from Cumbria and work with businesses of all sizes to improve their online visibility. Contact me today for a friendly chat or email me for more information. Why not take advantage of my FREE Website Audit to see how your website is currently functioning?
