Blogging Helps SEO a Lot and Here is the Proof

Does blogging help SEO? It definitely does. In fact, blogging is one of the most efficient ways to boost your SEO.

In this post, you’ll learn how blogging helped us with SEO for websites in very competitive niches. I’ll explain how we managed to increase Google organic traffic by more than 372% in a very short period of time.

You’ll also read:

• Why having a blog is important for SEO?
• How to use blogging to improve your SEO (Not the typical SEO advice you read in other blogs).

Before getting into why having a blog is important for SEO, let’s see a few examples of how we used blogging to increase organic traffic for a number of websites in different industries.

Google Organic Traffic increased by 106% in 6 months with Blogging!

What you see above is the Google Organic traffic report for one of our clients. It’s a business website in the education niche.

With blogging, we managed to increase the Google traffic from 6,165 users per month to 12,742 users per month in just 6 months. That’s a 106% increase!

Blogging helped us increase Organic traffic by 372% in just 5 months!

This is another example from a business website in the travel industry, one of the most competitive niches online.

Organic traffic increased from 4,280 users per month to 15,960 users per month in only 5 months after we started blogging. If you like percentages, that’s a 372% increase!

Important Note: The reason I don’t disclosed the URL of the above websites, has to do with my NDA agreement with clients. Most clients don’t want this kind of publicity because they don’t want their competitors to know.

Why having a blog is important for SEO?

Now that you are convinced that blogging still works for SEO, let’s see how having a blog help with SEO.

You can target more keywords

Blogging gives you a great opportunity to target keywords that you cannot target with your landing pages.

Let’s assume that you have a website selling online SEO Courses and digital marketing services (like this one).

You already have optimized landing pages for each of your services and an optimized homepage for your main keywords.

That’s great, but your organic traffic will be low. Why? Because it is very likely that hundreds of websites (bigger and older than yours) are already targeting those keywords.

You can try and get some backlinks to improve your SEO and rankings but soon enough you’ll realize it’s too difficult to get other webmasters to link to your product pages organically.

What should you do? That’s where blogging comes to the rescue.

You can start a blog, perform your keyword research to find out what other search terms people use that are related to your products and services, and start publishing content.

Depending on the SEO keywords you have chosen, you can use different techniques to get high rankings.

You can either choose to go after long-tail keywords that are more targeted and easier to rank for or go after more popular keywords by publishing long-form content and creating content silos.

You create more opportunities for natural link building

For a website to rank high on Google, it needs high-quality backlinks. A great way to get those links and increase the authority of your domain, is through blogging.

Other bloggers are more likely to link to a good blog post rather than to a product or service page.

These links may not have a direct effect on your rankings, but they will make your domain stronger and this will benefit all pages on your website.

Statistics show that companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites.

Great way to get more Brand mentions

Incoming links are not the only way to convince Google that your website deserves good treatment in search. One of the most neglected off-page SEO techniques is brand mentions.

Google loves brands and blogging can help you position your brand in front of more eyes and this can lead to social media engagement (likes, comments, tweets) and mentions of your brand in places that would be impossible without blogging.

A great method to demonstrate your Expertise (EAT).

One of the factors that Google is looking at while accessing the value of a website is Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness (EAT).

If you maintain an active blog, you have the opportunity to show to your visitors (and the World) that you are an expert (E) on your chosen topics.

If this is packed with incoming links and brand mentions then you also win the A part (Authority), which will gradually lead to Google Trust (Trustworthiness).

When you have secured all EAT factors, your SEO will be boosted and blogging is the most secure and efficient way to do this.

How to use blogging to improve your SEO

Blogging can help SEO only if done correctly. If you create a blog and start publishing random blog posts, it will not be of any help.

Don’t target the same keywords as with other pages on your website

One the biggest mistakes people make with blogging is to target the same keywords as their landing pages.

When you start blogging, you should do your keyword research and find keywords that are related to your main keywords but not the same.

For example, on this website I have a page selling SEO Services. In my blog, I don’t target this keyword but other related keywords like “How much SEO Services Cost”.

If you target the same keywords, you will confuse Google as to which page is more valuable for you and this is something you should avoid.

Capture users at all stages of the buying cycle

The beauty of having a blog is that you can use it to capture users at different stages of their buying cycle.

For example, if you have a website selling snorkeling cruises, you should not only blog about snorkeling but you can expand your reach and get people looking for things to do in the location of your business.

Let’s say you are located in Florida, you can target in your blog posts keywords like “Fun activities to do in Florida” and mention snorkeling, as one of the options.

If you follow this approach, you’ll never run out of ideas and when you do this consistently you’ll end up with a number of useful posts covering all related topics around your products or services.

This is the same approach that we have followed in the websites listed above and it helped us tremendously.

Don’t ask questions in your titles but provide answers

When writing your blog post titles, don’t ask user’s a question but give them the answer.

For example, consider the title of this blog post which is “Blogging Helps SEO a lot and Here is the Proof”.

The title answers the question “Does Blogging help SEO?” but instead of having that in the title, I gave users a direct answer.

Now everyone clicking the title to read the blog post knows what to expect in terms of content and makes your titles stand out from the rest.

Doing this with your blog post titles, will make your titles more interesting and encourage users to click when they see them in the SERPS or in social media.

Create an SEO action plan

Avoid publishing content without a purpose. Do some preparation work in advance and decide what you will blog about, which keywords to target, how to promote each post and how to measure the effectiveness of your blogging.

All of these items should be part of a well-defined SEO action plan. Having a clear strategy and step-by-step plan in advance makes the whole process a lot easier and more efficient.

SEO Optimize your blog posts before publishing

After you write a blog post, don’t hit the publish button if it’s not optimized for SEO.

Learning how to write SEO friendly blog posts is not hard, all you have to do is follow some basic SEO rules to make your articles easy to understand by search engines.

You can read this guide for more information: How to blog effectively in 10 easy steps.

Promote your blog posts after publishing

In an ideal scenario, after publishing a blog post, you should spend enough time promoting it and try to get some backlinks to increase your rankings. That’s how SEO works.

In reality, not a lot of people do this. The majority of people hit the publish button and wait for the magic to happen or they just move on to the next blog post.

If you follow the same approach, you minimize your chances of getting any return (in terms of rankings and website visits) from your blogging efforts.

What you should do as a minimum is to publish the blog post on Facebook and use Facebook ads (Boost Post), to get it in front of people that might be interested in reading it.

Facebook allows you to select your target audience based on interests and demographics and you can use this to narrow down your audience so that it reaches the right people with minimum spent.

If you want to do this properly, besides promoting on Facebook you should create a list of bloggers who blog about similar topics and already link to similar articles and email them and try to engage in a conversation with them and ask them for a link.

Measure the impact of blogging on your SEO

One of the reasons that make a lot of people believe that blogging does not help SEO is that they don’t measure the effectiveness of blogging on SEO correctly.

You may have read articles claiming that there are too many blog posts on the Internet and that publishing another post, will not get you any traffic but they are simply wrong.

Blogging does work for SEO, the examples above are just two of the many we have as an agency and if you search closely, you will see that a lot of people/businesses use the same techniques, and works for them too.

Looking at your overall organic traffic is not the way to measure how your blog is helping your rankings and traffic.

The reason is that within a given period your traffic fluctuates because of Google algorithmic changes and seasonality (search volume of a keyword varies per month).

So, by just looking at the total organic traffic per month, you won’t get an accurate picture if your blog posts generate traffic to your website.

What you should do is find a way to track the performance of the specific blog posts and see how they are improving over time.

You can do this using Google Analytics by filtering your organic traffic per page or better through Google Data Studio.