Blogs seem to be a necessary part of every website these days whether you are a manufacturing firm selling plastic moulds or a finance company with multiple insurances, mortgage, and investment packages. However, they take time, effort, research not to mention the fact that they can also be an overhead for your business if you hire a third-party company to write you blogs. You can end up going through all of this effort and then open up your traffic analytics and find that no one has read your blog.
This begs the question as to whether blogs are useful or not…
Blogs are important if your firm gains traffic via organic search
If your business gets the majority of website visitors from places such as Google or Yahoo search, then even though your blogs are left unread, they do play a part in your SEO. Many of the major search engines rate websites not just by the page that is being ranked but also by the amount of content that is linking to that page.
Most of the time we write blogs that link to other blogs, or directly to one of our main service pages. Blogs that link to other blogs usually end up linking back to the main website or one of the company’s main sales pages which is important for SEO.
In this case, the use of blogs is important for your business whether those blogs are being read or not. Effectively your blog strategy plays an important part in your organic search rankings.
Keyword density in blogs is also important for organic search
Blogs can also be useful to increase the relevance of your website on a certain topic. For example, if your business sells online privacy software services like this firm, then you would write plenty of blogs that relate to why online privacy is important.
The keywords privacy software services will come up quite often in these blogs, and the search engine algorithm will pick up the fact that this is happening. Better still, those blogs that relate to ‘privacy services’ will be linking to the main sales page where privacy services are sold by your business.
This strategy is used legitimately by many marketing companies and is used in almost all organic search strategies. The more your website points to the main page for that topic, the more content is counted towards that page, and as such its relevance and importance via your internal linking strategy is increased in the eyes of the search engine algorithm.
Blogs can be used to increase landing page and website authority
Another reason written blogs are used, read or not read by site visitors, is for link building strategies. For example, you may write a blog about online marketing in general and then write another blog to be placed on an external website and link back to the blog on your website.
In turn, the blog on your website will then link either to another blog that eventually leads to your main landing page or directly to your main landing page. This helps to build authority across multiple pages on your website, and it is a good tactic to spread out any links being built to your site as some search engines can penalize your website for building too many links to a single page.
Blogs are not important if you are using paid search
If you are using pay-per-click advertising, then it is unlikely you are going to send people to your blog pages. Blog pages also have no bearing on your search rankings when it comes to PPC or how your ads are displayed on other industry-relevant/targeted websites.
This is because there is no ‘search algorithm’ or ‘content algorithm’ that takes into account internal links, the site’s authority, or the amount of content on your website. In fact, it is quite on the contrary.
When you use PPC, especially Google Ads, it is the page speed, on-page content, headers, and mobile capabilities of the website that are taken into account for things like Google’s quality score.
Should you continue writing blogs for your website?
If your website is gaining traffic via organic search, then take advantage of the power blogs can offer. They can beef up the content count leading to your landing page, you can use them for link building, and you can use them to increase the keyword density and relevance of your website for the services or products your site is selling.
The only time blogs are not relevant is when you are using marketing strategies in which blogs offer no benefit. However, even if you are not concerned with organic search engine traffic, never remove blogs if they are getting hits, traffic and if your site readers are reading them. If you are getting a decent number of people reading your blogs, then you should try to increase the number of blogs you write and you never know, you could start to become an authority in your niche!
Find out more about content marketing here…