A good blog and how it improves your website's SEO.
Posted by James, 28 May 2021 (4 minute read)
If you’ve been keeping up with JW’s Thoughts of a Copywriter, you’ll know that it’s a regularly updated blog. So this week, I thought I’d pause and reflect on why a good blog is such a powerful tool for any website – especially the way it improves SEO.
But what is SEO? And how does a good blog lend itself to improving website engagement and traffic? Well let’s find out!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and refers to the ways you can place your website higher up search engine result pages (or SERPs).
In terms of improving a website’s SEO, you’ve basically got two options: organic and artificial. The artificial option is quicker – but costs money. For example, you can pay Google (or even social media sites like Facebook) to advertise your website and ensure that it places more highly. On Google, these sites can be identified by the word ‘Ad’ (see below). The other option – organic SEO – takes a little longer. But it’s cheaper and also a far better long-term strategy.
Why a good blog and SEO go hand-in-hand?
A good blog and SEO are the perfect bedfellows. This is because a good blog utilises many of the things you need to improve SEO organically – and ultimately how your website ranks on search engine result pages.
Fresh, regular content
One thing Google’s algorithm looks for in particular is fresh, regular content. And a blog is a great way to do this. By their very nature, blogs are designed to be updated. There’s no real limit on how often you should do this. But it’s best to add a new blog post at least once a month – ideally more often (I generally go for every two weeks).
Another real asset of a good blog is the word count, which seamlessly lends itself to the kind of content search engines look for. Blogs are almost always over 300 words. A page with less than this rarely ranks well on search engines (the optimal range is somewhere between 600 and 700 words).
Key word placement
SEO is all about key word (or key phrase) optimisation. And blogs are a really effective way of doing this. Take a look at ‘Clever copywriting and the unusual places you find it’ from JW’s Thoughts of a Copywriter. I was looking to optimise the phrase ‘clever copywriting’. So I placed it throughout the blog to guarantee someone who searches for the phrase ‘clever copywriting’ is more likely to find my page. You’ll also notice that it’s prominently placed in both the main heading (H1) and the meta description – another way of optimising key words or phrases to ensure that your blog places more highly on search engines.
Backlinks
Another thing search engines love are links to other websites (or ‘backlinks’). Again, a good blog is a seamless way of doing this. And it’s particularly effective if you link to websites that rank highly and already have plenty of traffic. If you look to the right, you’ll see another short example from my blog about online copywriting courses. You’ll see that I link to the BBC, Disney and John Lewis (amongst others) – all websites visited by large numbers of worldwide users.
And don’t forget that internal links in blogs are important too. This is because internal links are a great way to improve your website’s ‘bounce rate’. The bounce rate refers to the number of people who visit a page on your website and then don’t go on to visit another one. You basically want your bounce rate to be low – if it’s high, people aren’t sticking around for long… So scattering a few internal links to various pages of your website on a blog post is an excellent way of using it to improve SEO and increase user engagement.
Images and alt-text
Search engines don’t just trawl the internet for text. They also look for images, videos and other types of media. So another fantastic asset of a good blog is how easily you can incorporate images and optimised alt-text. Alt-text is basically the description of an image – hidden to your visitors, but not to a search engine like Google.
JW Copywriting Services is here to help with all your blog writing needs. So take a look at my blog writing service and get in touch if you’d like to discuss using one to improve your website’s SEO. And remember to follow me on Twitter (@JWCopywriting) and like my Facebook page.
In two weeks, I’ll be looking at some of Don Draper’s best copywriting advice!
Speak soon,
JW