The goal of SEO (search engine optimisation) is to get your business to feature as high up in the search results as possible. And one of the most important elements to help you achieve this is blogging, writes SEO and marketing expert, Karen Dauncey.

Even if writing isn’t your strong suit – and let’s face it, most of us break out in a cold sweat at the thought of having to pen a masterpiece – where there’s a will, there’s a way. A blog is something that can be easily outsourced to a professional without breaking the bank.

Whether you DIY or contract a pro to do the job, publishing fresh content on your tradie website by way of regular blog posts is great for your SEO. But we’re not talking about content as merely a space-filler. The trick with online content is that it needs to satisfy the needs of both Google as well as the readers.

In order for it to make a meaningful impact on your SEO and where your webpages show up in the search engine pages, your blog needs to meet certain standards and criteria.

Big ticks for blogs

To be effective, a blog post should be:

• Original
• Well-written and easy to read
• Relevant to the target market
• Provide something useful to the reader (e.g. answer a question, offer advice, solve a problem, discuss a trend, give guidelines on a task, etc)

Why blogging is good for your SEO

The search engine bots crawl websites constantly, looking for new information that they can use to serve up more accurate results when a person enters a particular query or phrase into the search engine.

By regularly updating the blog or news section of your website, you’ll be giving these virtual crawlers fresh content to index, plus you’ll be providing an added-value service to your own visitors.

These are the three main reasons why blog posts are important for your website’s SEO:

• They provide new, original content
• They provide excellent opportunities for keyword usage
• They invite backlinks from other high-quality websites

We’ve discussed why fresh content is important, so let’s look at keyword usage and backlinks in terms of SEO and blogging.

Blogs and keywords

Carefully researched keywords are the backbone of a successful SEO strategy and they need to appear on your website in order to attract the attention of the search engines. Writing a blog gives you a great opportunity to weave your targeted keywords into the copy in a very natural, organic way.

Blogs also provide excellent opportunities for targeting long-tail keywords (i.e. phrases which have at least four words in them). This can be especially valuable for smaller businesses which cannot compete with larger, established competitors for some keywords.

Keywords can be incorporated through headings, subheadings, captions and in image Alt Text descriptions, as well as in the general body of the blog.

Blogs and link-building

Link-building is an important element of good SEO and blogs offer up great opportunities to include internal links to other relevant pages on your website, as well as to earn external links.

Basically, an external link is the online equivalent of a testimonial. It’s a stamp of approval for your website and it tells Google that your site offers quality, reliable, useful and valuable information. The more links you have – both internal and external – the greater the chance that Google will reward you with a higher page ranking.

Links are also a means of establishing your reputation in the industry, which in turn can attract more visitors to your site.

Additional benefits of blogging for SEO

In addition to what we’ve talked about already, here are some more reasons why blogging is important for SEO:

• Visitors stay longer on your website (dwell time is a key factor for SEO)
• Helps meet Google’s metric of Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-A-T)
• Provides useful content for social media posts and helps build social media following

Google applies the concept of Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-A-T) when it evaluates the overall quality of a web page because it wants to ensure that only the best content reaches the top of its ranking pages.

Blogs with a high E-A-T score (i.e. content that is well-written, well-researched, grammatically correct, credible, useful and which establishes the author’s industry leadership) are more likely to rank higher in search engine pages.

Listen to KBB tech expert Tracy Sheen talk about E-A-T:

And when it comes to social media, blogging is a good way of building your brand and engaging with your customers on your socials. A new blog post gives you an opportunity to share the link across your network (such as Facebook and Instagram) and while this won’t directly contribute to your SEO results, it will improve your online visibility and hopefully drive organic traffic.

Blogging will help your business build relationships with existing and new customers. It’s a great way to educate your customers, provide guidelines or tips and create connections. You may even find that customers leave questions or reviews on your blog, which opens up even more opportunities for engagement and for understanding customer needs and offering value-adds.

And if your audience loves your blog, they may even share it which broadens your reach, heightens your online visibility and could drive traffic to your website.

All in all, there’s plenty of upsides to blogging and every tradie business which wants to be found online needs to make it an SEO priority.

This article was first published on Kochie’s Business Builders, read the original here.

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