Does blogging help with SEO?

Facts, figures, and SEO practices that prove once and for all that blogging does help with SEO  

Optimizing the core pages of your website (Home, About, product pages, etc.) is vital. It ensures your company shows up in searches. But applying good search engine optimization (SEO) practices should extend to every page you create for your site, including your blog posts. 

Businesses that dominate the online space in their industry realize that blogging does help with SEO. Done well and often enough, optimized blogs increase the number of times a site appears in search results, which  leads to more opportunities to attract ideal customers. 

We’ll delve a little deeper into the SEO benefits of blogging later. But first, let’s look at whether blogging is actually worth the time, energy, and budget.

Proof that blogging does help with SEO 

Getting an effective business blog up and running isn’t a quick or cheap digital marketing tactic. You need to plan your content, find a writer, gather images, and perhaps hire a developer to upload it all. Such an investment needs qualifying. You want to know whether it’s going to work. Luckily, there’s strong, stat-backed evidence proving that blogging does improve SEO results. 

For example, companies that publish blogs get around 55% more website visitors than companies who leave their blogging ambitions on the backburner. They also draw 67% more leads, and increase their indexed links by 97%.  

Stats to show that blogging does help SEO.

While these big survey results are impressive, they often include huge corporations and large businesses. You know, the type of companies that have the budget and workforce to make sure blogging improves does help their SEO. But blogging isn’t a digital marketing tactic reserved for big business with huge SEO plans. 

I’m an SEO strategist who specializes in working with small and medium-sized businesses. In my 20-plus years working in this field, I’ve seen firsthand the huge difference regular blogging can have on SEO goals, especially for smaller, local businesses. From my experience, I can say with confidence that publishing content even once a month can return head-spinning figures.  

What happened when my small business client added a blog to their website

Before February 2020 my client, a small floristry business in Las Vegas, had an ad hoc approach to blogging. Inconsistent posting and treating SEO as an afterthought meant their blog drew little attention.

By working with them to define their SEO goals, it was clear that blogging had a role to play. And by including blog posting in their SEO strategy, we started seeing a huge increase in organic traffic.

  • Regular blog posting boosted organic traffic by 3,005%. 
  • Comparing April 2020 to April 2021, they saw a 796% increase in organic traffic (along with a 145% increase in transactions and a 186% increase in revenue).
  • They performed 84% better in Q1 2021 than they had in Q4 2020.

Creating optimized articles has turned their blog into a valuable marketing asset that brings traffic to their business, which results in more leads and sales.

With clear evidence that blogging really does help SEO, let’s look more closely at what aspects of SEO it directly impacts.

Four ways blogging directly benefits SEO 

SEO is a lot like a cake. (Yes, it can be a chocolate one if you want.) To make a cake, you combine lots of different ingredients. Similarly, SEO is made up of lots of smaller parts. Some of those parts are quite technical, and there only to satisfy the programming side of search (a bit like the bicarb of soda in the cake recipe). Other parts are designed to please us humans and our curiosity (like the chocolate flavoring and texture). 

A well-baked SEO cake strikes the perfect balance between the technical and the human. As an SEO strategist answering the question “Does blogging help with SEO?”, I’m naturally drawn to the benefits of publishing content that directly impact the technical part of SEO. It’s what I tinker with every day, which is how I know there are four clear ways content marketing helps with SEO. 

1. Rank for more keywords

At the heart of every solid SEO roadmap are the keywords—the words and phrases related to your company and industry that your target audience regularly search for. Fitting all the keywords you could possibly rank for into your core website pages is impossible. And ‘keyword stuffing’ (as it’s called) does more harm than good. 

The best performing content has one clear focus keyword. This tells the search engine’s crawler bots what the page is about. And when the bots understand what’s on a page your search visibility increases, improving the chances of attracting people to your site.  

2. Attract backlinks

Backlinking is when one website links to content on another website. It contributes to domain authority—how trustworthy a search engine believes your site to be. Put simply, the more sites that backlink to your content the greater your domain authority becomes, and the more love you get from the search engines. 

By regularly posting juicy, well-crafted blogs you’re giving other site owners lots of opportunities to link back to you. For example, if you’re a photography company and you publish blogs on wedding photography, baby photography, and nature photography, you may find wedding, parent, and wildlife sites linking to your articles and referring to them in their own content.  

3. Guide visitors through your site

One thing a website visitor should never be left wondering is where to go next. And this is especially true for anyone who lands on your site via one of your blog posts. You should have plenty of internal links—links to other pages on your website—so they know where to go next once they’ve finished reading your content. 

How does this help with SEO?

  • It encourages people to stay longer and go deeper into your site. 
  • It shows search bots the structure of your site hierarchy and how your pages are organized. The more pages that link to a single core page, the more value search places on that core page.    

4. Blogging keeps Google happy

The world’s largest search engine is always on the hunt for sites that publish accurate, up-to-date, and useful information. The more pages you have for Google (and other search engines) to index, the more search sees you as a good source of information. 

Blogging doesn’t only benefit the technical side of SEO

Blogging can be a huge help to your human audience, too. Your audience wants your knowledge and expertise. Publishing blog articles is your chance to share that information. And once they have the details they need, those people—your customers—are in a stronger position to make an informed decision on that particular topic. Do this well enough and often enough, and they’ll start relying on you and your company as a trusted authority.   

Reaching authority level means using some elbow grease. But with a little organization and time, it’s certainly achievable. And it all starts with mastering your content marketing strategy.

Barb Davids - SEO Consultant

Barb Davids is an SEO consultant and owner of Compass Digital Strategies. Driven by data and analytics, she works hard to get business-changing results for her clients, such as 256% more website traffic and 22% more leads. Connect with her: Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter