The rise of the company blog has been a prolific one, with ‘blog’ content cropping up on all manner of brand websites, ranging from IBM and Caterpillar to Marriott and Whole Foods Market.
This rise in company blogging is unsurprising really, considering the widely documented benefits of content marketing; the way it enables you to connect with your audience on a more personal level; helps to drive successful social media campaigns; assists potential customers in finalising their purchasing decisions and enables you to tell your brand stories, to name a few.
And where better to host all of this fresh new content online than on your own company blog?
But onsite blogs have another often-overlooked benefit – and it relates to search. While publishing content on offsite platforms, such as social networks, has its own merits for SEO, having a home for your brand’s content on your own domain can do wonders for your search marketing efforts.
Here are six reasons why your company blog could just be your ticket to SEO success:
1. Satisfy Search Queries
Onsite content and SEO go hand in hand. As users within your target market search for answers to their most pressing questions online, search engines look to serve them with the most relevant results for their query. By producing content on your website that answers these said questions, you can improve your rankings and become more visible to potential customers.
This is where your company blog comes in. Quality content that lives on your blog and that is written with search in mind can help prospects to find your brand online organically. Just make sure that blog posts supply a search demand and offer information, advice or entertainment that is relevant to both your brand and your audience.
2. Target the Long-Tail
The way we search is continually evolving to become more conversational, and search engines are recognising this, taking into account the context of search queries to deliver the appropriate results. A blog allows you to target a wider set of relevant keywords and subjects through the creation of posts that target the longer-tail keywords that your audiences are searching for. By focusing on producing content that really answers the questions that your target market is asking for – you can reach users at the awareness and consideration phases of the purchase funnel; possibly before they are even aware of your brand.
3. Creation of New Pages
The addition of a blog to your website allows you to continually create new pages of content that are visible to search engines. This helps your search efforts on two levels:
Firstly, because regularly adding fresh content to your site via your blog will encourage search engines to crawl your website on a more frequent basis (which is a good thing because Google prioritises up-to-date relevant content within the results pages, and so this may lead your pages being indexed faster).
Secondly, the creation of additional pages means that there are increased entry points to your website, allowing you to capture new audiences at all phases of the purchase funnel. (Remember, users do not search only when they are ready to buy.)
4. Help Build Your Authority
Your blog provides the ideal platform for voicing your brand opinion on hot-topics affecting your market. This enables you to become an authority in your field and to lead conversations within your industry, consequently making your brand the go-to source for users searching for your specific expertise. As more users visit your website as a result of related searches, and stay on your site to digest your content, search engine bots will recognise that your website is an authority on a specific subject. This will subsequently mean that your pages are indexed higher for relevant queries.
5. Keep Users Onsite
Web crawlers take many signals into account when assessing whether or not your content is relevant to the search that the user has performed within the search engine. For example, if a user lands on your website as the result of an organic search, but then leaves the site straight away, this signals to search engines that the content on the site may either be of poor quality or irrelevant to the search query.
By providing the right kind of content for your audience, you can start to reduce bounce rates, and with carefully placed calls to actions (CTAs) and internal links within your content, users will be encouraged to remain onsite and browse more of your content. As more and more content is created, your blog will grow naturally meaning that internal links can be used to improve the customer journey throughout the rest of your website. This not only helps users, but also helps search engine bots to crawl your site and index more of your content.
6. Brand Engagement
Content should be one of three things – entertaining, interesting or useful. The better your content, the more likely users are to share it with their friends, colleagues and peers socially, building a natural backlink profile and an increase in referral traffic to your website from other sources.
Publishing content that uses rich media (infographics, pictures and videos, etc.) on your blog may help to create potential link bait campaigns that will encourage audiences to share the link to your website on social channels and other media platforms. As your content gets shared offsite, this will also help search engines to recognise your website’s authority in your niche.
Image: Aleksi Tappura