Your Blog Content Is Your SEO

It’s incredibly cliche, but only because it is so true: content is king.

For many years, when people have talked about how to get more traffic to your website, the conversation has skewed toward learning SEO. Make your web page search engine friendly! And then a long list of things gets thrown out there. Like how you need to link build until the entire internet is pointed your way. You need to throw a certain number of keywords onto all your pages. Put this awkward phrase in your heading, and another in your second to last paragraph, and then yell at Google until it works.

Google is not impressed.

The most important thing to a search engine is that their page results provide value to their customers. Quality content should be entirely focused on providing value to the customer. Therefore, creating a blog full of quality content is the new key to getting your website noticed by search engine traffic.

Let’s look at how this works in more detail.

Semantics Are Everything

Search engine optimization has moved away from making a long list of keywords and then targeting them. Google has gotten smarter. Instead of searching out exact key phrases, they are looking for semantics.

For too long, you could write an article where the content really talked about circles, but in a few strategically placed spots, the writer dropped a keyword phrase about apples. Technically, an apple is kind of a circle shape, so it’s somewhat related, but it’s not what the article is talking about. The user who searched for that phrase about apples and landed on the page talking about circles did not find content that interested them.

Now, search engines look over your content and through semantic keywords, they can figure out what your page is talking about. The circle page would have words about ovals and other circle related content that would support for Google that the page in question was actually about circles, and that’s the traffic the search results would send that page’s way.

Semantic search is one way that Google is looking for valuable content.

In the wider view, your whole website has semantics that tell Google what your domain is about. When you blog, you create a catalog of valuable content that gives context to your business for Google. You blog about topics related to your business and your customers’ interests and it tells Google what kinds of people would be interested in your website.

The internet can be a great equalizer between businesses large and small. Search engine traffic is the perfect example of this. Those with larger budgets had figured out a certain set of SEO tips, like link building, and for a while, they could pay to have thousands of pages linking to them. These strategies don’t work with search engines these days. And that means you don’t need to be a billion dollar business to have a website with valuable blog content that Google loves.

It does mean that to be noticed by Google, you need to put effort into creating a site that is rich with valuable content for your customers.

Link Building Has Evolved

Link building still works with SEO, but how we do it has evolved.

It used to be that sending hundreds (or better yet, thousands) of links toward a page with targeted keywords was the best way to vote a site up in Google’s ranks.

These days, natural link building is better. When you blog, you naturally link to your own content, which tells Google “these pages are related within this site”. And when other sites link to your page, and you to them, you’re doing the same thing.

It takes far fewer links to tell Google what it needs to know, and the old strategy of pointing thousands of links in one direction convinces them something is wrong.

Blogging Gets You Noticed on Social Media

Social media is all about sharing. When you have a blog, you have content to share to social media, which keeps your social media presence alive, engaged, and familiar with visiting your website.

SEO is organic these days. The more naturally active things are, the happier Google is. Social media shares and visits are a very organic environment.

And you can be sure that social media activity is something Google is considering for ranking.

Blogging Adds a Lot of Value To Your Website For Your Customers

Google is primarily concerned with what Google offers its users. It’s the top search engine, and it wants to stay that way. The internet has gotten much bigger. There is a lot of content out there and a lot of it isn’t worth anyone’s time. Google wants to be the source for the best content. They want their users to trust that they will find what they are looking for at their search engine.

This means that SEO is all about valuable content. If your content is the most valuable, then the search engines want to put that page higher up in their result pages so that their users can happily find it.

The more valuable content on your website, the more traffic search engines will send your way.

That also means the happier the users on your website will be, which means your website will have a greater conversion rate, which is the whole point of your website, right?