Why Should My Website Have a blog?
Many companies don’t understand the importance of having a blog, they see it as an unnecessary ‘fluffy’ addition to their website, but there are two very good reasons why you should add a blog to your website:
1. ADDING VALUE FOR YOUR EXISTING CONTACTS
By giving insightful, free bits of information that are relevant to your business, your clients will find your content interesting, helpful and valuable. It’s a great way of keeping in touch with your contacts and converting those that aren’t yet customers. You can do this by emailing them when you publish a new blog post, and pushing the content out to your social media channels. This will also bring more traffic to your website, keeping your customers and prospective customers engaged.
Jeffrey Lant’s “Rule of Seven” states that you must contact your buyers a minimum of seven times in an 18-month period for them to remember you, and this should definitely be part of your marketing mix.
2. TARGETED SEO BENIFITS
Not only are you missing out on adding informative content, but also on that content’s untapped SEO potential. Having an area of your website where you talk in-depth about industry topics and optimising that content specifically for search engines is where a blog shows its real value.
Why Does a Blog Help My SEO?
Google loves content, it loves relevant content, and it does its very best to match the most appropriate content to the user’s search query. Some search queries are very broad and therefore very competitive because of the variety of sites that rank in the top 100 for that key phrase. However, there are alternative relevant search queries that aren’t as competitive which we refer to as ‘lower hanging fruit’.
See the example below using SEO software Ubersuggest,
which shows a broad search query of ‘workwear. As you can see, it suggests related search terms, and out of that list ‘workwear embroidery’ is the low hanging fruit we can aim for. It shows an SEO difficulty score of 22, with a great search volume of 2,900 searches per month.
While it might seem simple to add an extra page to your website for your new content, it might not always be appropriate, especially if the key phrase is a question, not very ‘on brand’ or isn’t in ‘marketing friendly’ language. For example, a low hanging fruit for the key phrase ‘workwear’ might be ‘best brand for women’s workwear?’. This might not be appropriate for ‘main page’ content, but could quite comfortably fit within a blog page.
So How do I Rank for these Search QUERIES?
It’s not enough to just add the content to your website, it needs to be structured in a search engine friendly way, these are the elements that should be considered:
META TITLE & DESCRIPTION
Meta titles and descriptions are used by Google to display your website within the organic search results. The search term should appear in both the meta title & the meta description.
The below search results were for the search term ‘Workwear supplier West Sussex’. The large text is taken from the meta title and the text underneath is taken from the meta description.
H1 TITLE
You need to have the search term in your main page title, also known as a H1 tag. The actual search term must be included somewhere in the title, or form the full title.
CONTENT
The search term should appear at the beginning of the first paragraph of the text. It should also appear in the main body of the content several times without appearing to be inappropriately stuffed. The content length should be at least 500 words or more.
Rank Math (SEO ranking software for WordPress) ranks content based on length it’s reference guide is;
- More than 2500 words: 100% score
- 2000-2500 words: 70% score
- 1500-2000 words: 60% score
- 1000-1500 words: 40% score
- 600-1000 words: 20% score
- Below 600 words: 0% score
H2, H3 & H4 TITLES
Ideally your content should be broken up with additional subheadings, your focus key phrase should also appear in one or more of those.
IMAGES
At least 1 image should be used with the key phrase in the Alt text, image ALT text is supposed to be the text that appears on the screen if the image fails to load or to be read out by screen readers for visually impaired users. However, search engines use it to understand what the image is about and having the key phrase in the alt text helps the page rank.
INTERNAL LINKING
Internal links are a superb way of improving SEO score. Including links from your blog post to other relevant pages within your site will give your visitors a better experience and show search engines how it relates to other content on your website..
Hopefully, you’ll now understand the benefits of having a blog on your website, but the next question is, do you have time to write it?
HELP, I CAN'T OR DONT HAVE TIME TO WRITE A BLOG!!!
Mediabreeze can help you on your quest for organic traffic, to find out more check out what our blog writing service has to offer.