Blogging has always been a crucial aspect of SEO, and it has come a long way over the years. There are countless blogs on the Internet that cover everything from world news to video games to obscure television shows. Naturally, there are plenty of business blogs that were created to boost traffic to company homepages. Business blogs make great marketing tools, and maintaining a casual blog makes for a great hobby, but some experts seem to insist that blogging is dying. According to one article in The Guardian, blogging by American teenagers and millennials declined sharply between 2006 and 2010, which was about the same time that social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook rose to prominence.
Yes, the number of blogs in the blogosphere seems to have decreased in recent years, but blogging is not dead: far from it. There are still countless WordPress and Blogspot blogs on the web, and even sites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr are at heart blogging platforms. Blogging is still very much alive, but it has also changed and will continue to change as time goes on. Here are some tips that business bloggers should consider if they want to keep up with the changes in 2015.
Know the Competition
A big part of running a business is dealing with competition. This is true at all stages of business management, and managing a blog is no exception. What many business owners fail to realize is that online competition is different in many ways from regular business competition. While a brick-and-mortar store may lose customers to other stores that offer similar services and are nearby, a blogger has to worry about losing page views and readers to other blogs that provide similar content to their own. These similar blogs represent online competition.
Beating online competition is of course very difficult, but knowledge of one’s online competition can also translate to fuel for getting more page views. According to an article posted on Point It Digital Marketing, the key to finding a site’s top online competitors is to think of three to five keywords that describe a website or business and search for them using those keywords. The top-ranked results are that site’s biggest online competitors.
Use the Right Keywords
Once the top online competitors are known, the next step will be to determine what keywords and phrases are the most important to them. The most important keywords for a site are usually found in its homepage title tag and in its meta keywords tag. They can also be found in the meta keywords tag on other pages of the site. There may be hundreds or even thousands of keywords that contribute to a site’s Google ranking, but relatively few of them will be relevant to the business’ particular industry, and fewer will be search terms that customers might use organically. Blog posts should focus on incorporating the most natural-sounding terms that are relevant to the field and the topic of the post.
Blog Often and Write Naturally
The most important part of maintaining a relevant blog is and always has been to write often. According to Kevin Gibbons of Search Engine Watch, “A blog that is rarely updated does more harm than good.” Writing with good SEO in mind means avoiding keyword stuffing and creating links to less-than-reputable websites; these mistakes will destroy a site’s search engine ranking quickly. Content is still king, and good content trumps over-optimized content every day of the week.
Reports of blogging’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Blogging is always changing with the rest of the Internet, but it is and will always be an important part of SEO. As long as a blog remains active and adheres to proper SEO techniques, blogging will always be worthwhile to a business.