Why We Blog

Remember just a few years ago when blogging was still relatively new and seemed sort of bizarre? The art of blogging seemingly went from serving as an outlet for foodies and fashionistas on a budget, to the lifeblood of your website’s search engine presence. While we do enjoy sharing timely, industry relevant content with our readers, blogging serves an even greater purpose than the simple transfer of information. 

Google Is Watching

Ok, so maybe Google isn’t actually watching, but Google does interact with and monitor your website on a daily basis. The code of your website is constantly being crawled by robots, scanning each page for information including links (both good and bad), images, headlines, keywords, and fresh content. Guess what? Each time you post a blog, you’re essentially adding an entirely new page to your website. The next time Google’s bot scans your website, it will count the new blog page as a positive factor when calculating your overall search engine ranking.

What Google Is Looking for in Your Blog

All right, if you blog more than your competitors, you’ll top them in the search engines, right? Not so fast. While Google’s algorithm appreciates new pages, it also takes the actual content into consideration. So, if you were thinking, “Great, all I need to do is write a few great blogs and keep reposting them,” think again. Duplicate content will actually negatively impact your search engine ranking. The only way to reap the true benefits of posting a blog is composing original content, thus no good short cut. You’ll also need to consider what keywords to use and how often, but that topic is a blog series within itself.

What People Are Looking for in Your Blog

It turns out that with algorithms aside, Google wants to see what people want to see. While Google does indeed have a lot of technical benchmarks, its main purpose is to deliver web users with information they’ll find entertaining and engaging, educational and accurate, or all of the above. When people spend time on your site reading your blog and sharing it with friends Google will better recognize the information you’re posting as interesting content that other people will want to read–making it rank-worthy. Writing content that people will not only want to read but will want to share is no easy task, but staying true to your brand and letting your personality shine is a great place to start.

The bottom line is that while we can do our best to keep up with Google’s ever-evolving algorithms, there’s no surefire formula that will take your business to the top of Google. The good news is that when you dedicate your blog to sharing interesting, authentic content as part of a multi-faceted digital marketing strategy, Google will have no choice but to take notice.