It cannot be said enough that integrating a blog into your SEO strategy has become almost essential. Today, there are many reasons why business leaders want to add a blog to their website.
To boost your visibility or to stand out from the competition, it is essential to communicate about your company, your products and/or your services.
In this article, we will see why blogging is a tool of choice for anyone wishing to increase their traffic and generate more leads.
What is an SEO blog?
Blog is an abbreviation of the English compound word “Web log”, which means “Journal”. It is used to describe the periodic publication of articles on a digital medium.
The blog quickly became a great success thanks to its innovative and intuitive nature.
Used wisely, it allows you to communicate about your company and your activity in an effective way. It offers great editorial freedom and interaction with visitors, thanks to the possibility of posting comments on each article. The blog allows you to publish articles instantly or schedule them for later publication.
Having become an essential ally for marketing and communications managers, the blog still has a bright future ahead of it and is now an integral part of an effective SEO strategy.
What is the difference between a blog and a website?
Too many businesses settle for a website that doesn’t optimize their visibility enough.
Considering that a website is a set of resources accessible via a web address, called a URL, that it is hosted on a web server and that it allows the publication of textual and multimedia content, a blog is a website.
A blog is a type of website in which it is possible to publish articles, also called posts, in chronological order.
Initially reserved for professional bloggers, companies now use it to communicate about their activity. Storytelling, news publications, product communication… Everything is possible with a blog.
Naturally, the blog can be integrated into merchant sites as well as showcase sites.
As you will have understood, the company blog is an SEO lever that should not be overlooked!
Why create an SEO blog?
There are many benefits to creating a blog, in my opinion, the main ones being:
- Optimize your natural referencing: in fact, via a blog, you can work on numerous keywords
- Generate qualified traffic: in addition to generating traffic, we will be able to attract the visitors we want to target
- Convert traffic into leads: the blog is the perfect place to generate leads, particularly by implementing an Inbound Marketing strategy.
- Boost awareness: traffic means awareness, of course!
- Improve brand image: the blog, if associated with a good content strategy, will help improve its brand image.
- Attracting new customers
- Building customer loyalty
I could mention other advantages, in my opinion creating a blog for a company is not up for discussion: it is an obligation!
Now let’s take a closer look at the eight main benefits of creating a blog:
Blogging improves your visibility
Creating a company blog is an excellent way to optimize your visibility on digital media. Ranking high on the list of actions to be taken to boost your natural referencing; the blog has become an interesting added value and, moreover, easy to set up.
Creating relevant content is the number 1 key point of any self-respecting SEO strategy. Creating a blog will allow you to publish quality content and use keywords corresponding to your sector of activity. Keywords correspond to queries searched by Internet users.
To choose your keywords well, several tools exist on the web. The blog allows you to obtain qualified and sustainable traffic which will ultimately generate more turnover.
Generating backlinks
Having a well-designed and optimized blog is a sure way to increase your traffic. Thanks to the creation of new quality pages on the one hand, but also thanks to the generation of backlinks.
Backlinks are links from site A pointing to site B and help increase the authority of a website, and therefore its visibility.
If your articles are interesting, you will get spontaneous inbound links to your site. Backlinks allow Google bots to see the relevance of a website.
Added value for the customer
Creating a blog is not only an SEO issue. It also has real added value for your customers.
A true showcase for your business, a blog is useful for showing the human side of a company and for giving substance to society. Like social networks, a blog conveys the values of the company and allows you to create a real relationship of trust with customers and future customers.
It also helps answer frequently asked questions and, thus, help the customer in their browsing journey. Corporate blog posts are considered high-value branded content.
Through the blog, the company can demonstrate its expertise to its customers and build a solid brand image.
Improve your internal networking through your company blog
Internal linking involves creating internal links, that is, creating links to strategic pages on your website.
These links must be created in the most natural way possible, to avoid being penalized by Google. To do this, rationalize the number of links per page and vary the anchors as much as possible.
Good internal linking should give juice to the most important pages of your site. On your blog, you can make links pointing to products or product categories that you want to push.
Strengthen your image with relevant and optimized content
The blog is a very interesting source of traffic acquisition. The denser its content, the more pages of the site will be displayed in the search results (SERP). However, there is no question of posting for the sake of posting!
Google has a powerful algorithm that allows it to detect poor quality content as well as companies that “cheat.” Techniques aimed at fooling bots – known as “black hat SEO” techniques – are increasingly quickly spotted by the largest search engine, although new ones are popping up every day.
By creating dense, relevant, and optimized content, you significantly increase your chances of generating more traffic and more leads in the long term.
How do you optimize your blog for SEO?
As we just said, the blog is an important vector of traffic. However, to attract many qualified visitors, it is important to respect several SEO rules. So, here are eight tips to better position your blog articles in search engines!
Have an SEO audit carried out on your blog
While it is possible to properly reference your site’s blog yourself, you should not forget that natural referencing requires skills and tools that are sometimes complex to use and expensive.
Having an SEO audit done can save you time and prevent you from making mistakes. Use our online price simulator to find out how much an SEO audit costs based on the characteristics of your site.
Exploit the thematic cluster
In the past, SEO has focused primarily on optimizing individual posts. While this is important, you can boost your blog’s SEO by using “topic clusters.”
The principle is simple: you select a pillar topic, linked to your main activity, as well as a target keyword. Then, you determine sub-themes (between 7 and 10), linked to your main topic, each including a more specific keyword, often long tail .
So, you directly define several article ideas in order to link them together via the internal mesh. This will have three advantages:
- Offer your visitors a complete and informed vision of the subject.
- Keep Internet users on your website longer (an important signal for SEO).
- Help search engine robots crawl and understand your content better, which improves their positioning in the results.
To find thematic content around a keyword or topic, you can use tools like Semrush or AnswerThePublic.
Another tip: type your main query into Google and look at the suggestions at the bottom of the page, in the “Related searches”. Here is an example using the keyword “manage your emotions”:
Write for Featured Snippets
“Featured Snippets” appear at the top of Google’s organic results. They often come in the form of bullet points, definition boxes, FAQs, or even comparison tables.
Featured Snippets provide quick answers to common searches, often starting with “who, what, where, why, and how.” Here’s an example of Featured Snippets when you search for “best invoicing tools”:
To learn more, we invite you to read our article: SEO: the different types of Featured Snippets.
How do you create content optimized to appear as rich snippets?
- Ask questions in headings and subheadings, then answer in a short, concise manner.
- Use bulleted or numbered lists whenever possible.
- Target search intent to write better titles .
- Opt for long tail keywords.
Ensure the readability of articles
Readability is an important SEO factor for search engines. Articles that are pleasant to read, ergonomic and properly structured often rank higher.
How to improve the readability of articles?
- Use short sentences.
- Consider transition words to make reading smoother.
- Add subheadings to structure the text.
- Keep paragraphs short (3-4 lines maximum).
- Air out the text.
- Prefer the active voice to the passive voice.
- Proofread to avoid spelling, grammar and syntax errors.
Use SEO plugins
Are you using a CMS like WordPress , Joomla or Prestashop? There are extensions that help you optimize your blog posts. These usually give you a score, as well as a checklist of best practices.
You can quickly see the strong points and the points to improve to better reference your ticket. Practical!
Below is an example with the WordPress Yoast SEO plugin:
This type of plugin also gives a readability score (see the previous tip) which allows you to improve the structure and writing of your articles.
Write long and comprehensive articles
According to a 2020 study by Backlinklo , content that ranks in the top 10 of Google results contains 1,447 words, on average. According to an infographic by CoSchedule , the blog posts that perform best are around 2,500 words.
These figures are easily explained: long content is often detailed and illustrated with concrete examples. It has many keywords, which helps search engine robots to index it.
In addition, visitors will stay on it longer. However, the time spent on a page counts as a ranking factor! If Internet users stay there for several minutes, Google will judge that your article is relevant and therefore move it up in the results.
If you already have a lot of content on your blog, you can group them together in a single article. You will have fewer pages, but they will be of higher quality and, therefore, more likely to be referenced in the first results.
Add visuals to your SEO blog
Search engines love visuals. Plus, they have SEO potential! Images and videos appear on search engine results pages. Google even has a dedicated image search section.
In your articles, consider adding visual elements to break up the text and convey additional information.
Photos, graphs, infographics, tables, diagrams… These elements improve the readability of the article while offering you new SEO opportunities. Indeed, the titles, the alt tag, the alternative text, and the description are all places to place your keywords to optimize your natural referencing.
Customize your URLs
The structure of your URL is an important ranking factor. Avoid automatically generated URLs that are not always optimized. Be sure to include your main keyword so that Google robots index your pages on relevant queries.
You can even create directories by theme, in which you will compile your 7 to 10 articles on the subject. This allows you to add a common (and main) keyword to all your URLs.
For example, if you have a blog about food and you want to write articles on food diversification, add a subdirectory.
Conclusion
As you will have understood, creating a blog has become almost essential in an SEO strategy and also has a commercial and marketing dimension.
Improving SEO, strengthening customer relationships and conveying a positive brand image are all things that a corporate blog is capable of.
Also, SEO is a long-term job. If you are rigorous and regularly feed your blog with quality content, you will see the benefits of your site’s traffic in the following months.
Patience!
To make things easier for you, you can opt for a content strategy.
The best SEO company offers you packs to help you set up your content strategy. From a semantic audit, an SEO expert finds content ideas to generate traffic on your site.
Professional editors write the content, optimized for natural referencing and ready to be integrated and formatted in HTML.
Don’t wait any longer to become visible on search engines.