A Website Blog Is An SEO’s Secret Weapon | Rebel Ape Marketing
A blog is often written off by many people as just something for hobbyists to do or for travelers to keep a journal, but have you ever heard of the “mommy bloggers” making millions or wondered why some of the largest companies keep a blog active?
A blog is one of the greatest tools available to you to become an industry authority, send recent news to followers, update them on the latest tips in your industry, and overall, reinforce your brand and what it stands for, but how does that help with SEO?
But first, to cover what SEO is and how it can help your site. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a series of techniques to help your website rank higher when people do a search and your website can provide them with accurate information they are looking for. In addition, SEO has some technical factors to help them navigate your website, download content faster, and various other things, but for this, we will focus on keywords.
How an SEO driven blog can help your business.
It’s important to know a few things about SEO when it comes to blogging. Not only by utilizing these great techniques can help your blog outrank your competitors but it will also help your site rank higher in the Google Search Engine Results Page, SERPS.
By maintaining your blog, you are essentially becoming a content creator and Google loves content creators! The more you create original content that is different than all the duplicate and spun content on the web but still supplies the user with the results they need the better. The blog is a great place to voice opinions, answer questions, supply information, and a variety of other things.
When you begin to write, you are going to want to incorporate keywords into the blog. Now a word of warning, it is easy to “keyword stuff” which are old SEO practices that are now frowned upon. Keyword stuffing is using the same keyword over and over on the website, often in an unnatural way, simply to rank for it. However, Google is on to this. You can now rank for content without even having the keyword searched for in the content, as long as the context matches the users query. Often, you can also get by with just mentioning the keyword naturally a handful of times. Plugins such as Yoast or RankMath have an algorithm which mentions a good usage amount of your keyword before it’s considered keyword stuffing. You can use these suggestions as guidelines to help you follow.
Instead of using the same word over and over, try some synonyms and even just matching topics that relate. Often, a bone relates to a dog; or a hook relates to a fish; etc.
How often should you blog?
To this, there is no specific rule, but there are general guidelines most bloggers follow. At a minimum, it’s suggested to blog at least twice a month and you will find this to be the base most SEO companies recommend. However, following that, if your time or budget allows for it, you will find that it’s suggested the more, the better.
In fact, blogging 2–4 times a week can drastically increase your rankings, and even the King of Marketing, Seth Godin, blogs every day, but there is a catch to this. Going back to SEO, the only way this will work blogging that often is if the content is high quality. It’s not necessarily the length of the content, but the substance. Though, general practice is at least 350 words.
Have a goal in mind.
Every blog post should be written with intent. Well, a few points of intent for that matter. The first and foremost is to supply the user with relevant and useful content that fulfills the intent they searched.
The second part is going to be to fulfill your marketing goals in some form or another. Perhaps a newsletter signup or to direct them to a purchase on the website. The Mommy Bloggers mentioned above usually write for the intent of affiliate marketing. Each blog post is different and should satisfy a marketing goal, that way it becomes a win-win situation and the users will usually revisit for more information, and you get a customer in the meantime. Just don’t lose sight of the customer comes first.
Who does all the writing?
There are a variety of ways to get content written for a website. If you have decent writing skills, it’s always great to contribute to your own blog. However, you will often find that the task can become overwhelming very quickly and you may choose to hire a content writer (<-see, that’s my call to action!) so they can take the burden off of you and you can focus on your business.
Whether you choose to hire us to write for you or you prefer to find someone yourself, just make sure they know enough about the subject and know enough about basic SEO practices that you can ensure traffic will come to your site, you will be fine hiring out the writing.
If you have any questions about getting your blog up and running, please feel free to start or join the discussion below. If you would like to discuss how Rebel Ape can help you with your content marketing, please feel free to send us a message.
Originally published at https://www.therebelape.com on January 4, 2020.