SEO content has always been a central component of search engine optimization and digital marketing. Google’s bots crawl through existing content on its index of websites to decide which ones are relevant to certain search queries. While their algorithms differ slightly, other search engines more or less function similarly.
There are two ways of leveraging content for SEO. One method is guest blogging or writing SEO content for publication on a third-party website. The other method is onsite blogging, or writing content that will appear on your website.
Small businesses often overlook on-site blogging when securing SEO services. The truth is that they’re lowering the chances of ranking favorably when they ignore the need to set a blog up on their websites.
Benefits of On-Site Blogging
On-site blogging provides numerous benefits to on-site optimization. For starters, they increase the instances in which certain keywords that you’re ranking for appear on your website. Google no longer counts the keyword density on each specific piece of content that you’ve published on your website. However, Google’s algorithms do put weight on keyword density all throughout your website.
In this case, blogging helps in on-site optimization. Creating SEO content for your own website’s blog also increases the number of keywords in your optimization plan. In Google’s eyes, it makes you an authority in your niche as long as you use the right keywords in your site content. You can gain significant domain authority this way.
Another reason why blogging is beneficial to SEO is that it infuses fresh content onto your website. Most web pages are static. Your About US page is likely to remain the same for many years unless something changes with your business’ profile or mission-vision statement. Blog content, on the other hand, is inherently dynamic. Posting blogs continuously makes your content fresher in Google’s eyes, and that’s another factor for search engine results pages ranking.
Last but not least, publishing your own content allows you to gain organic links to your website. For example, posting links to your new posts on social media as they appear makes your audience aware of your latest content. It also enables them to share such links to your post on their own pages. Of course, knowing how to promote your blog content on other avenues like forums will also be a big boost to your rankings.
On-site Blogging vs Guest Blogging
Aside from on-site blogging, guest blogging is another popular method of content marketing. The goal of guest blogging is to publish content on high PR domains in your niche. Every published content contains one link back to the website. It’s more of a link-building technique. Although it carries the name blogging, its purpose is actually very different from blogging on your own website.
One big difference is that guest blogging benefits the third-party website more than your website. It adds to the amount of niche-relevant content that is hosted on their website. As long as the content is properly optimized, the external website could rank for the same keyword that you’re targeting as well. It’s not a one-way street, of course – each boost that the guest blogging site receives flows back to your website as well.
Although both methods establish your website and the third-party website as authorities in your niche, the balance leans more towards the external site. For instance, you would have to tailor your content according to their specifications. Your tone has to match the tone of their existing content in most cases. This means that you’re not giving your own voice to the write-up like you could if you’re blogging on your own website.
Lastly, guest blogging takes a lot of your time. It doesn’t take very long for SEO content research and creating content, but what takes really long is identifying the websites that accept guest posts. You would also have to pitch ideas to the website administrator, and only start writing when your proposal is approved.
Here’s the big elephant in the room: guest blogging and on-site blogging work hand in hand in digital marketing. You should not pick one over the other considering the differences in their purposes.
How to Do Blogging Right Through Your Website
You’d need to blog correctly if you want to maximize the benefits of onsite blogging. Fortunately, it’s not rocket science. With the right tools and an infinite amount of patience, you can pull off the perfect blogging strategy and transform your business into a reliable authority in your niche.
Learn and Do Keyword Research
All of your efforts at research and writing that smashing blog is for naught if you’re not targeting the correct keywords. Keywords that have minimal search volume are not ideal because nobody is interested in them. Instead, you should be targeting keywords with high search volume and, when you can, those with minimal competition. These keywords have a high amount of interest and potential traffic in them that you have to try and capture.
Due to semantics, Google also tends to rank a website high for keywords that are relevant or related to the keywords that they’re targeting. That’s why it’s important to pick the right keywords – you’ll be missing out on a lot of opportunities if you center your content plan on the wrong ones.
Plan Your Content Ahead
It’s important to create a content plan that looks ahead for at least two months. One benefit of this is that you can concentrate on writing your content. When you know what to write next ahead of time, you can focus more on research and writing the best blog post. That’s not possible if you’re having headaches thinking about your next topic immediately after writing your first one.
Planning content in advance also helps you identify expected trends that you can take advantage of. Events like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Presidents’ Day, and many others are great events to leverage for content. Your blog posts are a sure hit among your audience in social media if you’re able to write a themed blog on these events.
There are many types of content that you can write. You can do industry roundups, for instance. You can also survey your customers and potential clients for topic ideas and write articles on frequently asked questions or advice. Sky’s the limit, so be creative.
Be Consistent
This is another reason why you should be planning your content ahead. In blogging, you need to observe a consistent schedule. Google actually looks for freshness in your content when deciding your relevance to search engine queries. If you don’t consistently update your content, you lose some of that freshness and potential rankings.
As mentioned earlier, writing your content in advance helps you concentrate on quality. It also gives you time to schedule your posts’ publication. This way, you can ensure consistency without getting stressed out by deadlines. You could write your content for one week, schedule them, and focus on other aspects of your online marketing afterward.
Invest in the Necessary Tools
Ensuring the quality of your content means that you have to invest in certain tools. Correct grammar, for instance, is crucial to blogging. Not only does it affect quality, but it also affects your readers’ experience. Some of your audience may be very particular about this. These are the site visitors that will definitely click the Back button if they don’t like your content because of grammar and other factors.
SEO experts refer to this event as a “bounce.” Unfortunately, user experience and bounce rates are big factors in Google’s algorithm. They signal to Google’s bots that the user did not find the website interesting, which means that the content is probably not relevant to their search.
Fortunately, tools like Grammarly can help you smooth out those kinks in your grammar. Aside from Grammarly, you should also invest in tools that check for plagiarism. You’d also need tools that help you rewrite your content to avoid flags. Plagiarism is a very serious issue. Your website could be banned from ranking due to this violation.
On-site blogging is as important as guest blogging in search engine optimization. Guest blogging lets your website accumulate high-quality backlinks and receive “link juice” from third-party websites. On-site blogging makes your website authoritative, relevant, fresh, and interesting for your target audience. When done correctly, both of these methods combined can give you the rankings that your business deserves.
