Does Blogging Help SEO? 20 Powerful Reasons Why It Does

Content MarketingFeatured
Written By Marc Schenker

The Glorious Company Team

 
 

The short answer is yes, blogging helps your SEO. Blogging is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic to your website, which you need to grow your online brand awareness and business. Google and other search engines love fresh content, so each time you post on your blog, you are increasing opportunities for your website to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This is the epitome of search engine optimization or SEO. On your blog, you create content designed to answer people’s questions and address their pain points, which makes it helpful and more likely for people to find. Google’s algorithms then show this content to people searching for particular keywords and queries online. When people’s search intent matches the content you’ve published, people will click through and land on your blog. This is a way that strong content optimizes your website and blog on search engines.

Does Blogging Actually Help Your SEO?

Yes, blogging helps your website’s SEO tremendously. That’s because blogging satisfies numerous Google search algorithms and produces tangible benefits that are important ranking factors for how search engines position your website and webpages in the SERPs.

So how do blogs help SEO specifically?

Let’s take a closer look at all the ways blogging helps SEO.

How Blogs Help SEO: 20 Benefits That Help SEO

Here’s a detailed list of all the benefits you bring to your website optimization when you create a blog, publish regularly, and monitor the performance of your content over the long run.

1. Search Engines Reward Fresh Content

Search engines are always looking for fresh or new content to index. That’s how search engines work. They send their crawlers or bots—terms covered in our comprehensive SEO Acronym guide—from website to website, indexing and then ranking the information they discover.

2. Blogging Drives Organic Traffic to Your Website

When you publish more content on your blog, which could be a subfolder of your website or its own subsite, there are more opportunities for people to see and interact with your content. This is particularly true if your content is well-optimized for a specific keyword, query, or phrase and contains superior content to that of your competitors.

In these situations, search engines will rank your content higher in the SERPs, thereby giving more people the chance to see it and click through to your website. These site visitors then count as more organic traffic to your domain in total.

3. Blogging Provides Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that never goes out of date or style and is always going to be relevant. When you blog regularly, especially with how-to guides and listicles, you create evergreen content. For example, an article like How to Start a Blog is a prime example of evergreen content.

Evergreen content ranks higher on the SERPs and will bring you more traffic because people are always going to be searching for topics that are timeless. Writing content, therefore, that always has high search interest is a way of optimizing your blog for SEO.

4. You Will Rank for More Organic Keywords

Each blog post you publish on your blog will rank for more organic keywords. This is whether or not you actively perform keyword research to inform the outline of your article. That’s because content always ranks for specific keywords.

Now, whether you actually rank for keywords that have a high search potential or volume is based on what you write about. Nonetheless, the more words you write on your blog, the more opportunities you have that people conducting organic searches will find your blog for specific keywords, phrases, or queries. In other words, your blog will be shown to more people on Google, and you’ll get more impressions and site visitors.

5. Get More Leads With a Blog

Some of that additional organic traffic in the form of site visitors to your blog will also convert. This means they will also purchase from you, whether you’re selling a product or a service. Writing new content on your blog positions you as an expert in your field or niche.

As a result, your content acts as a lead-generation tool. It’s telling new people who read your blog that you know what you’re talking about and can solve their problem (for whatever specific industry you’re in). This will have a positive impact on the number of new leads you’ll get.

6. Blogging Gives You More Internal Linking Options

Internal linking sends important signals to search engines, telling them how your webpages and articles are related to each other. This means Google can better understand how your content is organized on your website, which helps it index your blog posts more efficiently. When your blog gets better indexing from search engines, your target audience can better find and click through to your blog, optimizing your organic search visibility.

For instance, on our blog, we’ve written and published blog posts about statistics, with one linking to the other to tell Google that they’re related and to better help with web indexing.

7. You Can Target More Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are keywords that are more than one word long. Generally, they’re three to five words long and are search phrases. As a result, they reveal a more specific search intent by people. This means the people using these keywords are more committed to finding information or completing a purchase.

Long-tail keywords, due to their specificity, have a lower search volume than shorter keywords and so are less competitive.

The more content you publish on your blog, the more you will rank for these long-tail keywords, helping your SEO. In fact, you can ideate and write a blog post exclusively based on the long-tail keywords you want to get it to rank for.

8. You Can Target More Short-Tail Keywords

The inverse is also true: You can target more short-tail keywords, between one and three keywords long when you write more content on your blog. Short-term keywords are the opposite: These are keywords that are also known as head terms. They’re very short, broad, and general compared to long-tail keywords.

Due to their broadness, short-tail keywords have a greater search volume than long-tail keywords and are less competitive (ie, harder to rank for). Still, the more short-tail keywords you include in your blog posts, the more you have an opportunity to rank for them. This allows your website to be discovered by more people, optimizing your website in organic search again.

9. Earn More Backlinks Naturally With Your Blog Content

A tremendous ranking factor is your backlink profile. One of the most vital aspects of Google’s ranking algorithm is the sheer number of linking root domains that point back to your website. This means that, the more backlinks your website gets, the higher you will rank in the search engines, which his great for SEO.

The good news is that blogging regularly increases the sheer number of referring domains that will link back to your website naturally. Natural acquisition of backlinks means that you earn backlinks from other blogs and websites that voluntarily link to your content because they believe the value and quality of your content merits it. When you publish high-quality content on your blog, which has a unique angle and features information people can’t get anywhere else, you greatly increase the number of natural backlinks that you will earn.

10. Connect and Engage With Your Audience

Blogging allows you to connect and engage with your audience because it gives you more opportunities to create content that they care about. This includes content that addresses their pain points and answers their questions.

In addition, you can also interact with your audience when they leave comments under each of your blog posts. Responding to those who leave comments demonstrates that you take your audience’s feedback seriously. In turn, this encourages those who have left comments—as well as those who are just reading—to return to your blog time and again because of your responsiveness. And the more sessions your blog records on a regular basis, the more that raises your blog’s rankings on the SERPs.

11. Show Up in More SERPs

Speaking of the SERPs, blogging helps boost the number of SERPs in which your webpages show up. Each time you write and publish an article on your blog, it gets indexed by Google or other search engines like Bing. This means numerous SERPs will display your content, essentially one set of SERPs for each keyword query or phrases that your article is indexed for.

Of course, the more you show up in the SERPs, the more people have a chance to click through and visit your blog, raising its visibility on the web.

12. More Content Helps Broken Link Building

Broken link building is when you take advantage of the fact that links on other websites and blogs no longer work properly because they point to a webpage whose URL has changed. You would then reach out to the site owner or blog editor, point it out, and then ask them to replace that broken link with one of your pieces of content.

That’s only possible if you produce enough content in the first place to have something of value to offer site owners and blog editors in your industry or niche. Having a blog that you regularly publish content to will boost how much material you can offer when you spot broken links. This is yet another benefit of a blog for SEO.

13. Demonstrate Your E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is an online marketing acronym that stands for:

  • Experience

  • Expertise

  • Authoritativeness

  • Trustworthiness

A crucial component of Google’s search algorithm, E-E-A-T determines what websites and webpages should rank higher in the SERPs based on the credibility and value of the content, both from a UX and information standpoint.

So the more you publish blog posts—especially if they provide actionable information and are optimized to load quickly—the more you are helping your blog’s E-E-A-T ratings. The higher Google thinks your content demonstrates this trait, the higher your blog will rank in the SERPs.

14. Capture Site Visitors at all Stages of the Buyer's Journey

The great benefit to SEO that your blog provides is the site visitors you’re getting from organic search. These people are in various stages of the buyer’s journey:

  • Awareness

  • Consideration

  • Decision

Therefore, you can tailor various blog posts you publish to different parts of their buyer’s journey. For those in the awareness stage, you can create more general content based on short-tail keywords. For those in the consideration stage, you can add more complexity and actionable directives to each blog post, based on longer tail keywords. Finally, at the decision stage, your blog content could be more around product-led content, where you’re actively soft-selling your brand as the solution they’re looking for.

By tailoring content this specifically, you can appeal to everyone at all stages of the buyer’s journey.

15. You'll Get More Brand Mentions

Brand mentions are so important for your online visibility. A blog greatly increases this visibility because of the prolific amount of content that you can publish. Such visibility gets even more amplified when you produce high-quality content that’s shareable and when you distribute it properly through the right channels (ie, social media).

The more readers mention your brand, the more people will in turn visit your website and blog. It’s a continuous loop.

16. It's an Opportunity to Answer Google's People Also Ask Feature

Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) feature is ubiquitous on the SERPs, practically for every keyword query that you type into the search engine. PAA is a list of the most commonly asked questions by people who conduct searches related to your query.

Getting featured on a PAA box for any keyword is a strong way to advertise your website since PAA is featured on top of organic search results. This means people will see this first, before they scroll down the SERP. You can increase your chances of getting featured on a PAA box when you publish a blog post that answers popular questions that people have for your topic, usually in the form of an FAQ. PAA boxes also convey authority and credibility, increasing the likelihood that searchers will click back to your website to read your full snippet of information.

17. Get More Guest Posts (Free Content) for Your Blog

The more you blog, the more content you publish. Due to the reasons listed above, you’ll draw more organic traffic and site visitors to your website. Sometimes, some of your visitors will contact you to offer your blog a guest post. A guest post is a one-off article written by someone or a company not affiliated with your brand.

The idea is that they provide you with high-quality content your target audience is interested in, while you provide them with exposure and potentially a backlink in return. It’s a time-honored way of building authority and backlinks on the web. From your perspective as a blog owner, a guest post is yet another piece of content you can publish on your blog, which gives you more chances to rank for organic keywords, climb the SERPs, and demonstrated your E-E-A-T, in addition to all the benefits mentioned above.

18. You Can Build Thought Leadership for Your Team

Thought leadership is when people look to you for guidance and unique takes and insights on topics in your industry. It sets you apart from your competitors and motivates people to return to your blog to keep reading, thereby boosting your SEO. By creating and publishing blog posts that take strong stances on issues in your niche, along with unique how-to processes, you can build thought leadership for your whole team.

If you have a team, encourage them to write articles from their unique perspectives on your blog. This spreads the credibility and value of your blog content among all your team members and makes them stronger in their roles, too.

19. Increase the Chances of Your Content Going Viral

Going viral is something that’s quite rare on the web, to be sure. According to estimates, only about 1% of blog posts actually go viral. Don’t be discouraged, though, as this phenomenon isn’t really in your control.

However, it does pay when a blog post goes viral since it’ll bring in multiple times the number of your regular site visitors and sessions, doing wonders for your SEO.

The best chance you have at virality is to simply keep publishing unique content that has a hook and an interesting angle, along with distributing each blog post in various channels.

20. Develop Opportunities for More Content Repurposing

The content on your blog can be repurposed for all of your other marketing channels, including social media, ebooks, email newsletters, and even paid ads. In short, you’re helping to maximize your content distribution campaigns when you blog regularly.

And the more content you produce and publish on your other channels, the more efficiently you can direct the traffic there back to your blog, boosting its organic traffic and SEO further. Everything is really related in sound content creation and marketing.

Blogging Absolutely Helps SEO

For anyone asking how do blogs help SEO, we hope we’ve made a convincing case that a blog is essential to SEO. Making your website visible to your target audience on the web, so that its organic traffic keeps growing, is an achievable goal when you regularly publish strong content on your blog.

Work with a content marketing agency like The Glorious Company to produce top-tier, optimized content on a regular basis that grows your website and business. Contact us today!

Have any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below!

Related blog posts you don’t want to miss:

Content Marketing vs Digital Marketing: What’s the Difference?

How to Start a Blog and Make Money in 2023

What Is Content Marketing? What You Need to Know

Marc Schenker https://thegloriouscompanyltd.com
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