Why Blogging is still a Digital Marketing Best Practice in 2024
Deciding how you are going to market your business and creating a marketing plan can be more challenging than the marketing itself! There are countless marketing options that you could put your energy into, but the trick is knowing where to focus your attention and your marketing budget.
Many experts suggest putting significant energy into your website blog. It’s great for giving your existing customers detailed information, but it’s also an SEO method which can get you found by potential customers searching the web. The challenge is trying to find the time to write your articles, or if you were to hire a writer, would they be blogging in your tone and giving accurate information?
Blogging and SEO – What’s the Link And Will It Attract More Customers?
What is a blog? A blog is the section of your site where you can add articles and posts that can be commented on, liked and shared. You should always keep your blog relevant to your services because when you’re blogging for marketing, you want to attract people who are interested in what your business sells. For example, an IT company could write posts about the current top cybersecurity trends. However, this wouldn’t be so suitable for a professional chef’s blog.
As simple as this sounds, many people mix their channels up, so you need to start with figuring out who your target audience is, and writing specifically for that niche.
Many people wonder why blogging is important and may even think that Vlogging (Video logging) is the new blogging; It’s not! Instead, Blogging keeps leading the list of marketing best practices, time and time again, and there are a few good reasons for this. Many people turn to Google as soon as they want to find the answer to a question, and with a blog, your article will have been copy written specifically to answer a question that people commonly search. If well written, Google will recognise the relevance of your article and rank it highly in the search results for the question you’re answering.
Blogging is a long-term strategy that keeps on giving. The more detail you write, and the more you continue to improve that content over time, the higher you will be ranked by search engines. Blogging isn’t a set and forget task. It’s extremely important to continually maintain your blogs, ensuring links aren’t broken, and that content is up to date. If you post a blog and never edit it, Google will recognise that its old content and de-rank it as time goes on.
Although writing excellent content in blogs isn’t the be-all & end-all of your SEO rankings, this marketing strategy certainly help your sites searchability, allowing the use of inbound links and other techniques signalling to Google that your content is detailed and likely to be attractive to readers.
Ways Blogging Improves SEO
1. Blogging keeps your website up to date
People want to see that you’ve been posting regularly and recently. No one wants to see that your site hasn’t been updated in 3 years. They will assume that you aren’t offering your services anymore or you’re out of touch. By having a blog, they can see that you posted last week, meaning that your information is current.
2. People may linger on your site
This is good because Google notices the most popular sites and one criterion of this is how long people spend on a site. By adding blogs that people want to read until the end, you are keeping people on your site for longer.
3. Connect with your audience
This may not have a direct correlation to SEO but there are certainly indirect effects from connecting with your audience. They may be more likely to refer others to the site or share your posts on social media. In this way, having blogs for marketing can help drive traffic to your site, which can increase SEO.
4. You can include keywords
Part of SEO is that it scans sites for keywords which are popular in user searches. For example, ‘blogging tips for 2020’. When you include these keywords and phrases in your blogs, this can raise your SEO ranking, assuming that people are searching this term. That’s because people looking for information want to be directed to the most useful site possible. So, if you have searched ‘blogging tips for 2020’, it makes sense that Google offers choices that answer that search phrase.
5. Others may link to your site
Why would you want other people to link to your site? Aside from the obvious outcome of increased traffic, others linking to your site have more benefits. It establishes you as a credible and reputable website. Google prioritises these types of sites for SEO. Websites with blogs can have up to 97% more links pointing to them.
6. Warning
Don’t use Ai to write your blogs. If you do this, you’re not creating authentic content. Ai only spits our regurgitated content. AI is great to use for your guidelines, but make sure you edit your blogs considerably, localising the article and making it relevant to your local readers. Ai is getting good, but Google can tell, and Google is renowned for penalising those who cheat the system.
2024 Blogging Trends
There are a few recent trends in blogging for SEO. These are worth keeping up with because they can help drive even more traffic to your site.
Google Algorithm Update
The first is that there has recently been an update HCU. The helpful content update. If your content isn’t helpful, then you’re missing the point in Google’s eyes. With Ai recently introducing itselves into our mainstream lives with Chat GTP and blooging software, Google’s putting pressure on businesses only to output useful information.
Previously, in 2020 there was ‘BERT’ algorithm. This update prioritises accurate and original content. But HCU is another level again demanding authentic and genuine content that’s written by humans. With BERT, checking your facts and not copying content from other sources was, and still is essential!
The BERT algorithm is related to deep language processing within the context of the information. In other words, it helps machines understand what information is on a given site.
It will now look for keywords within a string of words, without them having to be in the right order. This makes your content strategy, including blogging with keywords, much easier as you don’t have to have them in the right order anymore to come up. You can now insert keywords into blogs much more naturally, rather than forcing in a certain phrase.
Detailed Content
The other top blogging trend so far in 2020 is that people prefer longer, more detailed content. That’s why getting detailed in your blogging can help. Another way to fulfil this requirement is through podcasting.
When you create podcasts, they generally go in-depth on one topic and from this, you may transcribe the audio or even write a blog to go along with each podcast that contains similar information.
This is a great way for busy business owners to get two content pieces while only investing once in research. Simply record the podcasting and hire a copywriter via Thinkroom to do help you with your content strategy.
By creating a blog section on your website and updating it regularly, you can entice many more potential customers onto your site. They can be more likely to engage and stay on-site longer, which, as we know, Google loves.
Want help in your digital content strategy? Contact Thinkroom.
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