Integrated digital communications: why blogging is good for SEO and social media

26 June, 2013

Blogging you can pull in a great deal of traffic to your website and help you gain exposure for your product brand or services. When first introduced, blogging was more of a content publisher but it didn’t take the online community long to become aware of how blogging can be used as an SEO tool. Search engines nowadays are very sophisticated and while blogging is still great for SEO, it must be done in a way that prioritises a great reader experience in order to score highly in search engine algorithms.

Here are just a few of the business benefits associated with blogging and reasons why blogging is good for SEO…

Blogging gives you an enormous reach

Blogging allows you to share ideas with an almost unlimited number of people, on a global scale. Your blog gives you the potential to build your own media asset – your own publication, with as large a readership as you are capable of building. This opportunity was unthinkable for small business owners even a decade ago. This point alone makes blogging a wonderful business investment.

Blogging is a great tool for building a tribe

Blogging is one of the best tools for building a community or tribe by allowing you to demonstrate leadership, rather than claim it. By being brave enough to talk about your own personal point of view, you demonstrate your ability to be a leader, rather than a follower.

Many bloggers choose to amplify what the most popular opinion is on their subject. However, those who are prepared to show their leadership through their true (perhaps controversial) opinion are likely to quickly become known as a powerful thought leader.

Blogging helps you attract new clients and sales leads

Blogging is a great way to attract highly targeted enquiries from potential customers. By blogging regularly about your core areas of commercial interest, you position yourself as knowledgeable in your field. Then, when they need expert help they can trust, you become a very attractive option – far more attractive than going to Google and looking for a stranger or taking a chance on someone they don’t know.

Why blogging is good for social media

Blogs provide regular new and original content to share through your social media channels, and can help build buzzing online communities by providing discussion topics for social media channels.

The rule of thumb for updates is to have an 80/20 split with 20% of your updates self promotional, and 80% not (ie sharing links etc from others). If you use the 20% self-promotional updates to share links to your blog content, you’ll give your followers something more valuable to read than a product or service sales page. Also, this will really help drive traffic to your blog and in turn website as you’ll bring people from social media sites back to your blog.

In order to receive the best exposure for your content, you will want to determine when the majority of your audience is online to work out the best time to post. Buffer offers great analytics for Twitter, to help track tweet statistics. And Facebook Insights can help you with timing your Facebook posts.

Why blogging is good for SEO

(1) Linkbuilding opportunities – internal links

As you start to get rolling with your blog writing you will eventually start to come across internal linking opportunities (ie links to other parts of your website). Linking together like-minded blog posts and utilising keywords will help cross-sell and encourage visitors to stay on your website, which ultimately strengthens your onsite SEO.

(2) Linkbuilding opportunities – external links

Don’t forget that good search engine optimisation requires some external linking to outside quality resources. It’s not all about one way links pointing to your website or blog. If you want to have a well-rounded SEO approach, you should also link to good quality offsite content.

If your content is good your community will acknowledge it by either sharing it with their community or by linking to it. At some point others will write similar content and will want to link to your posts to provide credibility on that particular topic.

(3) Linkbuilding opportunities – guest blogging & backlinks

Backlinks are links from another website into your website, and they are great for SEO. Guest blogging for other websites is a great way of building audiences and creating backlinks.

Linkbuilding, including guest blogging, is great for SEO. But beware – don’t rely on a single tactic too heavily as search engines will frown upon it.

Be careful not to target too many websites/ blogs with the same content. Any credible blog will pride itself on original content. So they won’t thank you for it and it’s likely to do more harm than good, damaging relationships and perhaps provoking a public backlash – something that needs to be avoided at all costs.

Also, pick your platforms carefully, you need to ensure that there is a synergy with the sites you are targeting and audience match, otherwise customers will be left confused and perhaps put off altogether.

There is debate over how much guest blogging you should do, but my advice is same as always – don’t spam, don’t over-do it, and make all guest blogs feel like a natural fit with well written original content.

It takes time and commitment to regularly update a blog (many business owners outsource it as they simply don’t have time), but I hope that this blog has helped to highlight some of the reasons why blogging is good for businesses and worth the investment in time and effort.

Do you regularly blog on your website or is it something you are considering but not sure how best to deliver regular content that your audience will find engaging?

What kinds of blogging topics and tactics have worked for you?

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