With all the Google search changes, it very important to have a blog on your website. This is now a big part of SEO and search rank.
Why? Content Depth & Content/Link Relevance
It is near impossible to accomplish solid search rank for organic or local search with just website content. The days of keyword jamming are dead, which is why a quality blog has become such an important part of any SEO strategy.
Content Depth: This is the amount of coverage that surrounds a focus topic. Example: Mortgage companies have mortgage loans, but there are purchase, va, refinance, fha, 30yr, 15yr, fixed versus arm, etc. So while the topics are individual, the focus is mortgage loans. Each of these topics also has multiple parts to it, so you could also talk about specific features around each one of these topics.
Content/Link Relevance: A little easier to grasp is the content being related to what you do as a company and where you do it. So if you are a plumber, you do not need to worry about your blog talking about roofing. You can, but it is less relevant, unless you like to give reference or general home information. Just make sure the bulk of your focus is about your company topics. This includes internal links from your posts or pages to other posts or pages. Instead of have a link that says “click here,” you can have the link say “plumbing 24 hour emergency services.”
Now to talk about QUALITY!
From the above information, some may think they can just put up any content and use the “old-school” keyword and link jamming methods to build out a blog. You can try, but Google is wise to these attempts and is good at ignoring or penalizing these methods.
This is where quality comes in. The blog needs to be something people want to read and needs to be natural. If a topic is short, then a topic is short, but try to make blog posts 500 words or more. Also, try to use images both relevant and interesting to your blog post. This can really improve the feel of the post and delivers better engagement from visitors.
Websites with quality blogs have:
- 97% more pages indexed, this adds more entry points to your site and helps with search ranking.
- 67% more leads, which all of us would be happy about.
- 55% more visitors, also something no one would complain about.
- 97% more inbound links or backlinks, which is another important component of SEO and search engine ranking.
Hopefully at this point, you are thinking about your existing blog or thinking about starting one. If this task sounds overwhelming, we have great Blog Writing and Management Services that can help do this for you. If you have the time and want to tackle this yourself, here are a few things to think about.
1) Write out blog topics
Writing out a plan will help your success of overall content. This is a good place to also think about how you may reference the other articles or pages in your site. Although do remember to only link content that has been published so you can avoid sending someone to a 404 error page.
2) Plan your Post Titles
Titles are important for both telling a search engine what the page is about, but also to draw the attention of a possible visitor.
3) Choose 1 or 2 keywords to use in each post
Similar but diverse keywords are good to plan in advance. You will generally try to work your keywords into the title, body headers, body wording, links and meta description. It is a good idea to do long tail keywords (3 words or more) and try to have them be natural. You don’t have to focus on “exact match” keyword phrases. Algorithms these days are good at understanding context, so if you have a quality blog and depth of content, Google usually figures it out.
4) Write first draft link-less
The best way to have the keywords be natural is to write your first draft all the way through without worrying about your keywords and then go back and edit to include the body headers and wording to include the necessary keywords. When you go back to edit, try to resist overusing keywords, this may harm your goals, if it ends up looking spammy.
5) Consistency
This is one of the hardest parts of a quality blog, being consistent. Trust us, we know this to be true. A blog with one post every couple months is not going to produce much for results. We recommend at least 1 per month and more if possible, 4-8 is a good range to shoot for.
6) Don’t Plagiarize!
We all get ideas from the news, our newsfeeds, etc, but don’t copy or steal content. Get inspired from others, but don’t duplicate their work, this only hurts you and the site you steal from.