Can blogging help your website rank better on Google?
Posted on 3 May 2019
It’s understandable that blogging takes time. Especially blogging consistently – which is recommended if you want your website to rank well. As well as this, you also need to make sure that your blog content is of high quality, you’re writing the right content for your customers and it’s all put together in a way that will rank well on search engines.
The short answer is that blogging will help your website rank better. We know this because we’ve run some experiments since we started blogging in November 2017.
What we found.
When we started blogging, we were throwing out content for our customers (or at least trying to), all for the purpose of building a following. What you’ve got to understand is that for a lot of types of businesses SEO is usually pretty hard. It would be a lie to say that getting a website to number 1 for the owners dream keywords would ever be easy. Now, with location based keywords like “Builders in Hampshire” it does get easier. We’re stripping out a lot of competition. We’ve removed everywhere but Hampshire and making the effort to get to position 1 much more likely.
You may be wondering why this post is supposed to be about Blogging but you’re reading about SEO keywords and how location based phrases are easier to rank. Well… different types of businesses are harder/easier to rank. Website design is competitive. There are many companies out there building websites. Some are very good and some are not so good, just like any other trade. When you’ve got a type of business where there are a lot of competitors, it can be like trying to rank a local shop worldwide on Google and Bing. You’d need a lot of time and effort to accomplish such a thing.
One thing is for sure though. A lot of web design/marketing/development type businesses know about SEO. The ones that do have got an understanding of how to make a website rank better. By ranking better on Google and Bing you’re going to get more visitors. If you know how to make a website rank better on Google and Bing it’s not going to cost you anything other than time. It would be easy to put a lot of effort into you’re own website, where others may pay you for your skills, experience and time if you didn’t know how anything about SEO. That’s how a lot of these agencies and freelancers think. So now there are a lot of web design businesses out there spending hours into ranking better than their competitors. It’s a never ending race to the top.
We’ve established it’s hard to rank well on Google and Bing if most of your competitors are competent with SEO.
Okay. Trying to explain that was necessary for the rest of the post. When we started our blog we didn’t get much extra traffic, what we did find though was that our position on Google and Bing started to change. For the better too.
It didn’t happen overnight but after the posts started appearing it was pretty clear what was happening. We tried creating a new post every 2 weeks to a month apart. This is where being more consistent could of possibly made things different. When the blog posts would have more time in between things would go like this;
- We write a blog post – Website is #10 for a desired search term (Not the blog post but the home page)
- 1-3 Days later – Blog post is now showing up on Google as it should and is starting to rank by itself – Website starts to climb, the same search term has put us to #7/8 now
- 1 Week in, the blog post is doing pretty well, it’s had a few reads. More importantly though – The website has now jumped to position #1/2 for the same desired search term, we’re experiencing more traffic site wide, more calls and more emails.
- 2 Weeks in, we should of probably started on another post by now but we’re busy. We’ve got other projects on and our customers need to come before us writing content for everyone and ranking better on Google – The website has now fallen back to #7/8
- 1 Month later, this is where long and short term SEO have showed their faces. After this much time the website is either back at #9 or #7/8, when we started it was always back to #9 but then as time went on and we went through the same loop we noticed the website would hold the better positions for longer amounts of time.
What does this tell us about Blogging on a website?
If you blog consistently, write for your intended viewers and don’t pay too much attention to keywords. Anything is possible. In terms of where you’re website is on Google. Just as long as you keep creating content, keep it fresh and set yourself an interval and stick to it, your website will rank better without any intervention.
Please note though that SEO is made up of more than just content. If your website is taking a long time to load, doesn’t have many backlinks, doesn’t have the right keywords, doesn’t work as it should on mobiles, etc. It will be hard to rank regardless of how much content you create through a blog.
If you need any help with getting started, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.