As we’ve said many times before, blogging is one of the most versatile digital resources any organisation can use.
Able to assist with a wide variety of business processes and strategies, the effective development and utilisation of a business blog can completely change the way you approach certain aspects of your business.
Whilst this versatility is without doubt fantastic, it often means we receive a lot of enquiries asking about what exactly a blog can do, if it can meet this business need or if it can assist with that process.
Simply put, the answer is almost always yes – blogging really is that versatile and as long as you take the time to develop it correctly initially, there’s no reason why it can’t exceed your expectations and assist with your exact requirements every single time.
Due largely to the increase in popularity of Google’s algorithm updates and how they can have a substantially negative – or positive – impact upon a website’s rankings for specific keywords, we’ve started to receive a lot of questions about blogging and SEO.
And in recent weeks, these questions have largely been based around link building.
What is link building?
Link building is exactly as its name suggests – the building of links.
Links have historically been an impacting factor upon search engine optimisation and where a website ranks for its chosen keywords. Whilst once you were able to rank highly by simply having a lot of links pointing to your website, with each link having your keywords in its anchor text, search engines have become a lot more savvy to the link building process, even penalising those websites who aim to develop links in less favourable ways.
Link building and blogging
A lot of the questions we’ve been asked lately have been around whether blogging can impact positively upon the link building experience. Organisations and individuals alike are understanding the importance of blogging when it comes to SEO in general, but many don’t fully understand how – or if – link building can tie in.
The positive news is blogging can have a great impact upon link building. As with various aspects of SEO, link building needs to be carried out - and links need to created – organically, something that blogging can naturally do through the regular publishing of high quality, unique content, carefully interspersed with a small amount of your chosen keywords.
And what’s more, it can, in certain circumstances, be a substitute for your link building activities.
You need to build links organically
Let’s imagine you were contemplating investing in link building and your options were to purchase links on hundreds of low quality websites or use blogging. Here, blogging should come first every time, as it’s the option whereby you can create links to your website on a regular basis organically.
If you already had links on other websites, however – websites that were related to your company, were of a high quality and which you had control over – this generally shouldn’t be stopped in place of blogging. Instead, blogging should supplement such strategies, increasing the number of links you create naturally.
Furthermore, as blogging is so versatile and it can impact upon various parts of your business at once, if you only have a limited amount of money to spend, it will often be better invested in blogging than, in this instance, solely on link building, where you will only see one benefit and not what could potentially be at least half a dozen from blogging.
Remember, blogging is first and foremost a communication tool. Although it can benefit and supplement your strategies, every one from marketing through to SEO, it should do just that – supplement them.
Blogging can build links regularly. It can drive traffic to your product pages. It can help to improve sales by providing a more personal, informative customer experience and it can do all of this whilst acting as a substitute for other techniques, particularly if the techniques are old or potentially damaging to your business.
In an ideal world, however, blogging should be that key supplementary tool that you need. The one that can build extra links or which can drive more traffic to your website, rather than being the lead in the strategy and by implementing a blog properly and maintaining it regularly, you should soon be able to see the results that you’re both expecting and needing.
