No one should be surprised to hear blogging is good for SEO.
I had an unexpected email interchange with a client a few minutes ago.
I’d been recommending blogging to him for months. He keeps making excuses why he can’t; lack of time, what would be write about – the usual string of things. But I kept pushing because as we all know unique, topical, regular content is great for SEO.
It’s important to point out that while I call it blogging really it can be news, updates – whatever – just as long as you get well written topical content on your site regularly.
Here’s what you want from a blog post:
- Unique
- It needs to be original content to avoid any possibility of a duplicate content issue.
- Topical
- The copy needs to be related to your business. You can’t just write about your recent holiday if you’re trying to sell greeting cards. Having said that if you went exploring a variety of greeting card shops while abroad – that might be enough to make it on topic. (It wouldn’t be easy to do well though.)
- Included in this is it needs to be interesting information, authoritative and useful.
- Regular
- Posting something every week, or even better twice a week, is ideal. Search engines learn to come back and rescan your site for new content often, and it’s great if there’s something new for them to index every time. What’s no good is if you post just a few times a year at fairly random intervals; it’s better than nothing, but not by much.
This client thought he really had me on the issue today when we said he’d checked with his developer (not another SEO expert, just the person that pieced together his site) and he said not to bother. Because if you search for anything online you’ll very rarely see a blog post on page one.
He’s half right. You do rarely see blog posts on page one. But everything else there is wrong.
Just because a blog page might not rank highly on its own merit doesn’t mean it’s not adding to your overall domain authority. In fact it’s definitely adding to it. There’s a reason sites with lots of well written content tend to have homepage’s that rank more highly than other sites.
If everything in SEO was purely on a page-by-page basis it would be enough to have a single page website that ticked all the boxes and expect it to rank in the top spot. But we all know in industries with any competition that’s simply not going to happen.
Good content on your site all adds up towards the overall SEO authority of the domain. Those weekly blogs might not be found a lot, but they’re a large part of the reason your homepage is.
