There are several benefits of blogging – both direct and indirect. In 1996, Bill Gates coined the phrase, “content is king,” which holds true today. He was able to foresee the importance of content and how it was going to become the new form of broadcasting. And, he predicted that anyone would be able to create content and become a publisher. Here are some of his exact words:

“But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.

One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.”

But, even today many companies still struggle to add blogging as part of their marketing plan. To shed some light on the benefits of blogging, We’ve put together a list of 12 SEO benefits of blogging.

Blogging can positively impact a company in many ways, but blogs also add a lot of SEO benefits. Here’s the impact it can have:

Direct SEO Benefits

1) Increased Visibility

When you develop a blog, you’re able to reach a wider range of search queries. For instance, if a person searches “Why blogs are good for seo,” the search results are mainly going to generate blogs like this one.

Blogging works well to get your website to appear in search results that your website’s main pages are able to rank for.

If you’re not blogging, you’re missing out on a whole pool of potential visitors.

A while ago Jayson DeMers wrote an article published in Forbes on the impact blogging can have on a website and said:

“In terms of search engine rankings, I like to think of blogging as fishing. The more hooks you have in the water, the more likely you are to catch a fish. In the same way, as you add more content to your site, more pages from your domain become indexed in search engines. This improves organic search visibility and increases website traffic.”

2) Easier to Rank for Specific Keywords

If you’re trying to rank for certain keywords, such as “benefits of blogging”, the best way to rank is to focus a blog around that topic. When people are searching for that keyword, they’re looking for information because they’re not entirely sure how blogging can benefit them.

But the advantage that blogging has is attracting people that are searching for information and then converting them into leads by offering unique offers such as a free SEO website audit.

3) More Indexed Pages

Search engines want a website to be credible and trustworthy. They want to offer reliable information to website visitors, and one of the ways they’re able to measure this is by seeing how many indexed pages a website has.

Generally, having a larger website correlates with being a better source for information. But search engines recognize that this doesn’t always hold true, which is why is smaller sites are still able to outrank larger ones.

But your company has a consistent blogging strategy, then you can work to index more pages over time.

Below, you’ll see how Home Depot returned 11,700,000 results in Google’s search engine. When you compare that to Dykes Lumber, a lumber company in the Greater NYC area, their weren’t nearly as much results returned by Google.

4) Makes it Easier to Acquire Backlinks

There are a variety of strategies businesses use to build backlinks, but one example is to write a better blog on a topic that other people have blogged about, and then do link outreach to people that have linked to their content.

You can see that one of the websites that has already discussed this topic is FarReach.

To gain some backlinks, one of the link building tactics I can use is to reach out to people that linked to FarReach’s blog.

By using a backlink tool, I was able to see that the blog below linked to it.

Link outreach is an important step in crafting a great blog post, and it’s often overlooked. The Link Builder’s Guide to Email Outreach breaks down how to effectively go about reaching out to people.

5) Improved Internal Linking

The whole premise behind internal linking is to aid website navigation, establish hierarchy, and spread link juice. It’s much harder to have an effective internal linking strategy without blogging.

When you first start developing your content strategy, you’ll find it difficult to link internally. But, over time you can develop an internal linking strategy that optimizes your website for search.

Here’s some resources you can use to improve your internal linking:

6) Fresh Content

Google appreciates up-to-date, relevant, and useful content.

By consistently blogging, you can continually offer fresh content to search engines.

7) Improved User Experience

A key part of SEO is user experience, and it will continue to play a greater role in where your website ranks.

Search engines want to offer users a unique experience that engages visitors. Blogging allows companies to do this and be creative with the content they create. One way you can be creative with your blog is by creating an infographic blog. These blogs are appealing to users, which should be the focus of your SEO efforts.

Indirect SEO Benefits

8) Helps Build Authority

When you blog, you’re educating potential customers on a particular topic.

As you continue to blog, you’re establishing yourself as an expert in your field. This leads to greater trust and familiarity among search engines, because they’re able to see that others find your content to be useful.

9) More Valuable Content on Your Site

Every blog post is an opportunity.

It’s opportunity to attract new visitors, target specific keywords, and offer content that your audience will appreciate. The more time you spend on creating content that is valuable, the more likely they are to revisit your website.

10) You Can Answer Your Customers’ Questions

Rarely in business do you have the opportunity to handle a potential customers’ concerns and questions before even speaking with them. By building a blog and answering the questions potential customers are asking, you’re doing just that.

This is a good way to not only increase sales, but also to increase user engagement statistics.

11) Improve Your Social Media Efforts

When you align your blogging and social media strategies, you make it easier to engage with your followers and build relationships. The more engaged followers become, the more they’ll interact with your brand.

12) More Traffic!

Any time you can drive more people to your site, you’re creating another point of interaction with your brand. It helps generate brand awareness and leads to repeat visitors.

Popular blogs also have a long stage-life, making it easy to attract visitors from organic search for several years.

Topics: SEO