SEO makes your website more visible to people who are using search engines, which, today, is most everyone. By using the right keywords, including links, and creating relevant, useful content for visitors (among many other factors), improving SEO is a necessary step in reaching business goals.
While optimizing your web pages is important for generating more traffic, blog posts are a very useful tool for enhancing SEO. Blog posts can provide authoritative content that answers users’ questions while improving SEO. When the right audience reads an informative post, it’s a win-win for them and for your site and its metrics.
Does Blogging Help SEO?
Before you begin blogging, your main question may well be, does blogging help with SEO? If done well, blogging can greatly enhance SEO. Blogging boosts SEO by demonstrating that your site and its content has relevant answers to visitors’ questions.
Blogging is so beneficial to SEO because effective blog posts can improve various SEO ranking factors. A regularly updated blog featuring quality content about topics relevant to your audience can significantly affect how well your website performs in search rankings. How so, exactly? Here are just some of the ways:
- Create opportunities for internal linking
- Organically target keywords
- Increase time spent on page
- Provide fresh and relevant content
So how do blogs help with SEO exactly? There are several metrics that can demonstrate and evaluate successful blogging.
The Metrics that Determine Your Blogging SEO Success
Dwell Time
Dwell time is the length of time that a visitor spends on a page of your site. If you’re writing blog posts that are several hundred words long, you would hope that visitors spend a couple of minutes, at least, on your page. Dwell time measures from the moment a visitor clicks on your page from the search results to the moment they leave.
Dwell time indirectly tells search engines how valuable your content is to a visitor. The longer they spend on a page, the more relevant the content. Longer dwell times, in turn, improve SEO rankings, because search engines want to produce results that are the most relevant to searchers.
Page Speed/Load Time
Page speed and load times reflect how quickly your site’s pages load. Fast load times are important, because, in truth, visitors just won’t stick around for slow-loading content. Plus, slow-loading pages negatively affect user-experience, which search engines do not like. So what can slow down your blog pages and other web pages from loading quickly? Here are some examples:
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- Junk code that serves no purpose
- Unnecessary or unused plugins
- Images with large file sizes
- Embedded videos
For cleaning up code, a user-friendly tool such as HTML-Cleaner can highlight junk code and delete it with one click. It requires no coding knowledge. Looking at your blog page, you can see if there are unnecessary plugins like video players and other features that serve little use.
In terms of images and embedded videos, they can be adjusted, if not deleted. Smaller images with lower resolution will typically take up less space and memory. Videos can be linked to using YouTube or another video site. The fewer features on a page, the quicker it will load.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile device usage accounts for more than half of Google’s search traffic in the United States. Therefore your blog, and your website, must be optimized for mobile users. If your content isn’t readable and user friendly, mobile phone readers will not stick around. When that’s the case, SEO rankings can drop.
In response to the influx of traffic from mobile devices, mobile first indexing refers to Google’s predominant use of mobile versions of websites in determining indexing and ranking. Fortunately, optimizing a site for mobile comes standard with most pre-made site themes. But still aim to keep page design and layout clean and simple, as that’s best for mobile browsing and works well for desktop browsing too.
Date of Indexing
Beyond providing accurate and relevant results, search engines also strive to provide current results. The date that a search engine indexes content affects the search results that get displayed. Search engines constantly find and add content to their indexes, which is known as indexing. These indexed pages can then be displayed as search engine results pages.
Blogs are very helpful for indexing because they provide an outlet for new, authoritative, and relevant content. Google and other search engines like things fresh, and blogs are typically regularly updated with content that can drive search traffic. Therefore indexing and staying current are more examples of why a blog is important for SEO.
Contact Us for Help with SEO and Blogging
Hopefully you’re convinced that blogging helps with SEO. Now that you know that, we’d be glad to discuss blog writing tips for SEO and how your blog can be an effective part of your overall SEO strategy.
With SEO, precision matters, so let our team of experts take a look at your site and business to figure out exactly where and how you can improve your SEO and company blog. Contact us to learn more about our services and about how our team can help yours.
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