Why Blog Content is Important in the SEO World

There are a few different elements that play a major role in any comprehensive SEO campaign, and blog content is an important one in numerous settings. Equally vital for small businesses up to large corporations, blogging may have once been something of a choice or a luxury in the online marketing world – but those days are long gone, and success in today’s SEO realm counts quality blog content as a prerequisite.

At SEO Werkz, we’re happy to assist with a wide range of online marketing and SEO services, including numerous areas of web design and development that feature several forms of content, blogging among them. What makes blog content so important within the SEO and marketing realms, and how will working with quality professionals like ours improve the reach and impact of both your blog content and other forms of on-site content? Here’s a primer.

Blog Content Basics

For those just entering the SEO or content world, here’s a quick download on what “blogging” really is. Also sometimes called a “weblog,” a blog refers to an online medium that includes short posts sharing information – either personal or informal – about various topics relating to a group, individual or business entity.

Within the marketing world, blogs are used to communicate with customers and share important industry or company information. Blogs are updated regularly and meant to be concise, plus have a known impact on search engines like Google and the way they categorize websites (more on this in a bit).

Data on Blogs

Using data from resources like HubSpot, Cursive Content and others, here are some of the know impacts of blog content on website quality and search results:

• Companies that include blogs on their sites receive over 400% more indexed pages than those that do not, and are 13 times more likely to have a positive ROI.

Why They’re Beneficial

If you’re not quite sure why blogs are so powerful that they lead to the kinds of results we just listed above, there are actually several reasons. Here are some of the primary benefits of blog content to business websites:

• Ranking improvement: As we touched on above, blog content is a huge factor in how your site ranks for organic searches within Google and other search engines. Blogging accomplishes several tasks that crawlers view positively, including increasing the number of total indexed pages on your site – this, in turn, drives increased traffic and helps boost your rankings as a result. The phrase “content is king” is regularly heard in SEO circles, and this is a major reason why.
• Trust and authority: We also noted above how over 80% of people trust blog content, and this is an extremely important factor in SEO success. Blogs are a primary way businesses can build their reputation with client bases, from offering authoritative and newsworthy information to bringing personality and friendliness to the table – all in the same breath. Blogs give your company a voice and a way to communicate with your audience, plus to keep them informed of your business and industry.
• Brand awareness: For many companies, blog content is among the bedrock foundations of their marketing efforts. Blogs can be shared across social media channels and within email marketing campaigns, allowing for them to “go viral” in limited, positive ways that will expose a larger swath of people to your brand and services.
• Lead generation: The more indexed blog posts you have, the more opportunities there are to convert the traffic to those blogs into leads. One vital piece of blog content is the call-to-action, which is a link within the content that allows prospective clients to leap directly from that page to product or service pages.
• Cost efficiency: Blogging is one of several forms of inbound marketing, as compared to forms of outbound marketing like paid advertising, email marketing and others. And while each of these has a place in the overall marketing sphere, inbound marketing tends to be much more cost-effective – and blogging is a great example, producing fantastic ROI given the resources needed for it.
• Customer connection: While one big piece of any blog is to provide customers with information while also making the site attractive to search engine crawlers, there’s also a personal side to this area. Blogs allow you to humanize your business, both through the actual content itself and further conversation surrounding it that might take place on social media channels or within blog comments. Customers who see positive interactions between a brand and its clients will be much more likely to engage with that company.
• Long-term ROI: We mentioned ROI above, and few SEO elements produce it more effectively. Blogs begin generating traffic and leads instantly from the date they’re published, and will continue to do so once they’re indexed by Google – in fact, there are popular blogs on many sites that continue to generate leads years after being published.