If you speak to a lot of people about SEO one of the first things that many of them say is that you need to add a blog to your website because they are great for SEO, but this is often heavily misunderstood. In some cases a blog is an ideal way to add more content but in others it is the wrong approach.
Are blogs great for SEO?
The truth is that it is the content that is great for SEO; the blog has little to do with it. The only benefit to blogs is that most common blog platforms and themes lend themselves well to allowing search engines to crawl the content. This is just as achievable in the rest of your website though! So what does this mean? Should you add a blog to your business website? This all depends on what you are going to put on it.
Everyone starts a blog with good intentions, but unless you are going to post engaging content regularly a blog isn’t really worth it. Why, you may ask? A blog that has not been updated, sitting abandoned with only a couple of posts makes the site look unfocused and un-maintained. This can counteract the rest of a website that is proclaiming enthusiasm, focus and delivery of any product.
Why are you considering adding a blog to your website?
If you are thinking about adding a blog to your business website to develop a community and engage with your customers a blog is a fantastic tool. It can be a great way to show how personable and transparent your business is, which can help to positively influence people’s buying decisions. It is important to have genuine content on your blog as users are savvy and will spot fake content that is only there to force feed a product right away. This way of blogging can be really effective and also have some SEO and social benefits. Here is how:
- SEO value – Lots of relevant blog posts can often be a great way to rank in search engines for long tail terms. If you post a lot of guides or useful information it can also be a great way for people to discover your brand.
- Social media – Assuming you are active on social media, your blog posts will be a great resource to share with your followers. If people share your content and link back to your content it can make your website look more popular and have some SEO benefit too! This could be enough to make someone choose your brand over another.
- More traffic – If done well, your blog should help you to generate more traffic for your website, and that’s the goal right!?
What not to do on your blog
It is important to not be too spammy with your blog. Force feeding products to visitors without any engaging content is just a turn off. Some companies take advice from shady SEO companies to add blogs purely for SEO ranking purposes. These splogs (spammy blogs) are often hidden away so that only search engines can find them. The posts on these blogs are often very poor content that is really spammy and full of links to pages on the website with a view to manipulating search rankings. This is a terrible approach and if the post is successful at helping search it could be a way people find your site. You don’t want someone’s first encounter of your brand to be some really spammy blog post that has no engagement potential at all do you?
Blogs can be a really good addition to your website
Blogs can be a really good addition to your website and a great way of generating extra traffic and exposure to your brand. It is important to have the right intentions for your blog to maximise the potential gains, which are huge.
Should you add one?
If you think that you can dedicate the time to regularly publish great content you should definitely consider adding a blog. You could also get your staff to help! If you feel that you only have the potential to add a couple of articles all together to your site why not consider adding them to a help or information on your website that looks less time based. Wherever you place your content, good content is always useful as long as it is relevant.
Happy writing and good luck!