If you’ve ever wondered whether or not your company should get a blog, or if you’ve ever questioned the importance of your blog – wonder no more! Creating a blog on your website has many benefits, with search engine optimization (SEO) being especially valuable. A blog is an easy – and even better – free way to add keyword-rich content to your website on a regular basis. The only caveat to this is that your blog must have quality content; search engines will not appreciate what you post otherwise. With that said, here are four SEO writing tips to help you write quality content, along with a case study that proves how important blogs are for SEO.

SEO Writing Tips for Quality Content

1. Don’t write to reach a word count or keyword count.

You may see some websites claiming they have a “perfect formula” for how long a blog page should be that is best for SEO. Instead of focusing on page length, zero in on writing something informative. As an SEO Digital Manager, I know this is hard to do. All I want to do right now as I write this blog is to stuff in jargon keywords everywhere I can. But I know what Google (and people like you) really care about, which is that anyone who reads this blog should find it useful. Google’s mission statement is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” If no one cares about what you’re writing, then Google sure won’t either.

2. You don’t need to pay for an SEO tool to find out what people care about.

Yes, SEO tools are great to help with keyword research, but they’re not the only solution. A free tool that we like to use at EGC Group allows us to type in a vague phrase which branches out and serves up questions related to the topic which people might ask about. (We can even pick which language and region we want the data to originate from.)

Here, I typed in ‘seo writing’, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

3. Don’t get fixated on your keywords.

I cannot stress this enough: Do not focus on one keyword that has a search volume of 80,000 and repeat it over and over. My recommendation would be to sprinkle in related keywords and long-tail keywords. Here is what I mean by “related keywords”: If you are trying to go after a very broad topic such as ‘countertops,’ use other keywords that indicate to Google what your page is about, such as ‘kitchen remodel’ and ‘quartz bathroom countertops.’ And by “long-tail keywords,” I refer to keyword phrases that are usually three or more specific words which usually tie in with user intent. Seventy percent of all web searches are long-tail keywords, which is why it’s more important than ever to optimize for them.

4. Get creative with your keyword placement.

Don’t just write blocks of copy that aren’t in any way interesting. Utilizing headers is a great way to break up copy, and they also serve as effective places where particular keywords can be added. Other easy places where keywords can be added – and that matter – include page titles, internal links, alt image tags, and meta descriptions. One of the biggest SEO mistakes is throwing away a valuable internal link by hyperlinking ‘click here.’ Don’t do it!

Instead of “Contact us here!” you could be saying “Contact us about our SEO services today!” (See what I did there? 😉)

Why Blogs Serve as Important Case Studies

Don’t believe blogs are going to impact your rankings? Well, I’m ready to prove you wrong. One of our clients had about 700 blogs on a subdomain of their website. Now, Google recognizes a subdomain as a completely separate website and therefore does not transfer any SEO value to the main website from the subdomain.

Near the end of 2019, we created a subfolder on the main website and redirected all of the subdomain blogs to the newly created subfolder. The results were pretty instantaneous. Here is a photo of this particular client’s search performance, and there was a huge jump when Google recognized nearly 700 blogs had been added to the website.

Now, I like to play devil’s advocate in situations like this – just to prove even further that I’m right. So let’s do it. One could argue that this is a seasonal trend and not really because of the blogs. Let’s say traffic went down around the holidays and people naturally started searching and visiting the website more frequently when the new year began. Well my answer to that is: phooey!

Looking in Google Analytics, there was a 55 percent increase in sessions the week the redirects were implemented when data was compared year-over-year. In this photo, the blue bar indicates 2019 and the orange bar indicates 2020.

So as you can see, traffic was very similar, year-over-year, throughout the month of December, but as soon as the blogs were added to the main website, the increase in traffic became clear.

With all that said, I’ve now proven blogs are important to Google. So go ahead and use these SEO writing tips to start adding quality content to your website today! If you want help writing quality content, contact us and we’ll take your SEO to the next level. (Mwahaha! I did it again!)