Creating a blog for your website can serve many purposes. For starters, it gives customers and clients a place in your marketing funnel to engage with your brand and learn more about your business. It also provides a way for you to educate your audience about your specific product or service and increase your credibility in your industry. Blogs also give you plenty of opportunities to optimize your website's SEO with better page speed, mobile responsiveness, keywords, indexing, and visuals.
So how do blogs help SEO exactly? Blogs are essential for your brand, but an SEO-friendly blog hinges on the aforementioned factors. For instance, dwell time (not to be confused with bounce rate) is the amount of time a visitor spends on your webpage before returning to their search results. With an updated blog, users are more likely to spend more time browsing, thereby increasing dwell time. The visual elements of your blog affect page speed, which can get bogged down by extra code and affect your ranking.
Additionally, most of Google's search traffic comes from mobile devices, so optimizing your blog for mobile can boost your SEO. Next, indexing pages on your blog helps search engines find content and then index it for when users use certain keywords to search for content.
You can build a website with search-ready SEO in mind if you understand how to optimize your website for SEO. By publishing blog articles consistently and prioritizing SEO while updating old content and creating new content, your blog will reach more people and boost your business.
Learn more about CMG Local Solutions' approach to SEO here.
How to Improve the SEO Ranking of Your Website With SEO-Proven Content Writing Techniques
Whether you're just starting a blog or have had one sitting idle for years, you need a content strategy to optimize your site's SEO. Here's how to optimize your website for SEO with some important blog writing tips:
1. Start with a pillar post.
As you might have guessed, you need a series of blog posts to optimize your website for SEO. A series starts with a pillar page, or a longer article that anchors the rest of your content. Pillar pages should be anywhere from 1,500 to 4,000 words and answer much more of your customers' questions than a standard blog post.
Think of a pillar post like a tree. The branches are shorter blog posts of that specific topic. An SEO-friendly blog post is between 600 and 1,000 words. Although longer posts are often ideal, what really matters is that you cover each topic completely.
2. Write relevant, engaging content.
Of course, you want your content to perform well in search engines, but it's important to remember to write for your audience — not search engines. When people search on Google, they're usually looking for answers to specific questions. Your posts should directly answer these questions.
Your content should also be thorough and skimmable, featuring easy-to-scan subheadings and short paragraphs. Most importantly, choose topics that people actually search for on Google. Remember, your blog is a way to connect with target audiences and help them with their problems.
3. Update old pages with the most traffic.
Did you know that updating blog posts that are already on your site can increase traffic by 75%? This is especially true for posts that have garnered a lot of backlinks or references from other sites, as optimizing them can improve the SEO ranking of your website.
Boost SEO when updating old content by incorporating newer, more popular keywords in headings and subheadings and even adding videos and pictures. It's also beneficial to add calls to action throughout your old content that asks readers to take a specific action. Essentially, the idea is to take something good and make it even better to help improve your website traffic and optimize your website for SEO.
Creating an SEO-friendly blog is a time-consuming process with many moving parts, which is why it could be helpful to partner with an SEO agency like CMG Local Solutions. Our experienced digital team uses cutting-edge technology to take your blog from good to great and achieve your SEO goals. Get in touch with us today to talk about how our SEO workflow process can work for you.
