You will undoubtedly see it regularly on almost every website you visit; a blog page where blogs are regularly written. There is also a good reason behind this, a blog page for which new blogs are regularly written has several advantages for your Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ). Curious about these benefits? Learn more about it in this article!
Increase traffic to your website via long-tail keywords
You will have already made a separate landing page for all your most important keywords. But what are you currently doing with your long-tail keywords? Long-tail keywords are often not used enough. Your blog is a great platform on your website where you can take advantage of these long-tail opportunities. You can also write a blog about topics that are not directly relevant to your company but are in the same industry.
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Think, for example, of a web design agency that writes a blog about the influences of e-mail marketing on website visitors. Not directly relevant to web design, but still relevant for visitors as they (most likely) visit the website to have a website made.
So a blog is great for long-tail keywords, partly due to the fact that long-tail keywords take considerably less effort to get high in Google because of the lower competition. You will then (well) rank with your entire website for more keywords, which will boost your overall organic traffic.
The number of long-tail keywords and how much traffic this can bring in is made clear in the data-driven research by Ahrefs below
The percentage of long-tail keywords is more than 90 percent of all monthly search terms. Long-tail keywords are therefore indispensable in a concrete SEO strategy.
Don’t forget the Google freshness factor
Anyone who has been engaged in SEO for a while will undoubtedly know what the freshness factor is, after all, it is an important ranking factor. Google’s ‘freshness’ factor is based on how often you update the content on your website and/or write new content for your website.
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This is divided into ‘content freshness’, or updating old content and ‘sitewide freshness’, based on how often the website places new content. All this is to ensure that your website and your content remain relevant to your target group. The blog ‘garden trends for 2018’ will no longer be relevant to the target group in 2019, so it is important to update that blog to avoid decay as in the example of AuthorityHacker below
This freshness factor is also very dependent on the content. For example, there is less reason to update an article about ‘the composition of the human body’ than a tech article such as ‘which headphones have the best price/quality ratio’. One article remains the same almost constantly and updating will not weigh so much in terms of freshness. However, in an article about the best price/quality ratio of headphones, it will weigh considerably, because it is true that headphones come and go.
Google recognizes this freshness factor in several ways:
- Content adjustments
- Customer interaction
- New backlinks to the article
- Publish date / last modified date
- Presence of keywords that indicate freshness
Keep in mind that simply reposting your blog post without actually making any changes will probably not work. Google will most likely ignore such minor tweaks.
Natural distribution of your content
Do you write a blog post on a website that receives a lot of traffic? Then a qualitatively written article that really attracts visitors and also provides relevant and useful information can often be shared on different channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, depending on the subject and the industry.
You may even find a link to your article posted from another website in your industry. As a result, your blog will increase even more in SEO value, so that your article will get even more traffic and perhaps even more links. This way you will be in a good way
Strengthen your category pages with it
Did you already know that you can strengthen your other pages via your blog? This is done through internal links to relevant pages on your website. By putting internal links in your blog posts you ensure that:
- SEO value (link juice) is passed on to the pages to which links are linked (as with external links, these must be relevant)
- Google sees more relevance between the article and the page you link to
- The more internal links that refer to a page, the more important Google considers this page
However, keep in mind that the number of internal (and external) links on a page and the correlation between the blog post and the page that is linked to affects the amount of PageRank, or page value, that is passed through the internal link. For example, a blog with 10 questionable internal links will transfer significantly less value to the linked pages than a blog with 2 relevant internal links.
Besides that a large number of internal links on a page will decrease the value of an individual internal link, it is also not neat. When there is an internal link in almost every sentence on a blog, this does not read well for your visitors and since Google has increasingly focused on user experience signals such as bounce rate in recent years, this will not help.
You can see in the images above that the ‘pages’ with 1.6% value have no internal links at all. Page ‘A’ has only one internal link, of a page that is not very valuable. Page ‘C’ has considerably more value but also has only one internal link, however, this internal link comes from a very valuable page.
You may think that social media can do nothing for your SEO purposes. Nothing could be further from the truth. While Google always insists that social media signals are not direct ranking factors, multiple data-driven studies have proven that social media can indirectly weigh heavily on your SEO activities.
For example, you can share a new blog on Facebook to ensure it gets indexed faster, but also to get strong links naturally. Your blog can be read via a social post by a company or employee in the industry, so there is a chance that it will be shared on the website and you. Depending on the topic of your blog (think of data-driven research or infographic, or simply an in-depth article) you can also link to your blog as an authoritarian source.
