Perhaps the easiest form of search engine optimization (SEO) you can do for your website is creating and maintaining a company blog.

Though a lot more goes into blogging the right way for SEO – keyword research, meta descriptions and titles, correct headers and sub-headers, alt-tags, etc. – consistently adding good content to your blog section is a start to improving your search visibility online.

The better your blog is optimized for SEO (which we won’t dive into here – though we can help you create and curate a wicked blog), the better chance you’ll have in boosting your website in organic search results, giving you that coveted ‘free’ traffic and more online traction.

In fact, companies that blog can gain twice as much web traffic compared to those who are blogless. Here are a few more reasons why blogging is still key for SEO in 2019:

Fresh, Relevant Content

Google loves fresh content just as much as Jason Segel loves fresh cereal.

Consistently adding new content to your site tells the search engine that your website is relevant and up-to-date, which Google will give priority to in search results pages. Think about your own searches – you wouldn’t want Google to suggest a site with information from 2002.

Unlike the rest of the pages on your site, which will mostly go unchanged (company history, about us pages), a blog gives you the opportunity to continuously post new content. And the more fresh content you publish, the more pages you’ll have for search engines to index, giving you a better chance to appear in search results.

Obey the Topical Match Engine

Google’s evolving algorithms now favour sites that are complete, encyclopedia-like resources on its topic.

Rather than looking for certain keywords, Google tries to understand the entire scope of a site, making it more of a topical match engine than a keyword match one. According to Google’s ‘Topical Search System’ patent, the search engine “can perform a search based on topics appearing in a query, rather than simply keywords included in the query.”

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In other words, it’s difficult to be found for a topic on your site if you only have a single page or an article optimized for a single keyword. You’ll need to create more content to represent the topic holistically, and blogging is the easiest way to do this. It demonstrates thought leadership to your human audience, and shows your robot audience (search engines) you’re a good source for the topic with all that quality content you’re churning out.

Keyword Integration

Every blog post is another opportunity to inject more keywords into your site. With smart keyword research, you’ll add phrases and keywords commonly used in your industry or that pertains to a topic, which helps your blog – and therefore, your site – be more easily found by searchers.

Blogs are best for long-tail keyword strategies, which are hyper-focused on particular subjects or full queries (i.e. how to get mustard stains off white t-shirts) that are used in the research and discovery phase of the buyer’s journey. Be wary of keyword stuffing.

Inbound Link Opportunities

Blogging is the best way to earn inbound links from other websites, which is one of the top SEO ranking factors in 2019 (here are the rest of them). When you publish valuable, sharable content, it may be referenced or linked to from other websites or blogs. This ‘link juice’ will boost your SEO foundations substantially.

Remember that gaining inbound links is a natural process, and any attempt to manipulate this method of SEO will be penalized by Google.

If you do want to accelerate inbound link generation, start posting those new blogs on social media. The waves of antipathy from anonymous accounts will surely follow. Hey, it’s 2019.

Drive more traffic to your site with a company blog filled with quality content you know your audience will love. Get in touch with our content marketing team and we’ll get started on your content strategy.