Everyone has that one person that is their go-to. They are who you may depend upon most in life to help you get through and figure out things. For search engine optimization, that would be blogs (yes, I’m personifying SEO and blogs. It’s 2020, I don’t have a lot going on). SEO depends so much on blogs, it’s crazy. There are, of course, other ways to boost your SEO, but blogs are by far one of the fastest and easiest ways.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up a little and explain how search engine optimization even works, shall we?
What even is search engine optimization?
Have you ever wondered how Google sorts the sites that come up when you search something? How it decides which goes first, which gets to be on the first page of a search? That is all due to one little magical acronym SEO (search engine optimization). If you take a close look at the name, it will explain a bit of what it is to you. It is optimizing your site for search engines. What does that look like? Well, as long as your site is on the first page of a search related to your business, then your site has good SEO. It is optimized. Because who, in all reality, is willing to wade through more than the first page of a search? Only the truly desperate.
But you don’t want people to have to be desperate in order to find your site. You want them to find you quickly and easily. This is why SEO is so important. This does lead us to another question: how does SEO work?
Search engine optimization works through keywords. These are words and phrases that people use to search things. For example, when you search “Christmas flamingo,” Google (or whatever search engine you’re using) will sift through the internet for anything that has the words “Christmas flamingo” attached to it to bring you pictures of flamingos wearing Santa hats. So, when you optimize your search engine visibility, you take some keywords that are related to your company and attach them to your website. There are many different ways that you can do this. But we at Avant8 like the blog approach best.
Why does it love blogs?
As a content writer with Avant8, I spend most of my time writing blogs like this one, but for our clients, instead of ourselves. These are helpful, short articles chock–full of information about our clients’ good and services, and full of a chosen keyword. The idea behind these blogs is that if we put them on our clients’ sites, not only will their customers find them useful and informational, but it will also attract the attention of search engines.
When search engines try to hunt down websites with certain keywords, they also look at the word count of the context that it’s used it. If it’s a higher one, around 1,000 words, the search engine is going to move it higher up the list. So, when you have a blog (or several) on your site that is at least 1,000 words and talks about one of your keywords, you’re more likely to be not only on the first page of a search, but high up on that page. It’s also a good idea to keep these blogs regularly updated. Not only so that you can keep your customers up to date with the latest information about your industry, but also because search engines are going to prioritize new information over older.
The thing is, writing blogs takes time. The content team at Avant8 writes about 85 blogs (amounting to about 85,000 words) every three or four weeks. But that is the main thing that we do. While we do switch gears from time to time to write copy for websites or to work on social media, we’re mainly here to write blogs. As a small business owner, you probably don’t have time to write a ton of blogs to stick on your site. And you don’t need to. Writing two or three a month could still give you a bit of a boost in your SEO ranking. If you’re struggling to think about what to write even with your keywords, research your competitors. See if they have a blog on their site and if so, what do they write about. Just be wary of plagiarism. Not only is it, frankly, super uncool, but search engines will check for that and stay away from plagiarized sites.
Or maybe you do want several blogs every month, but just don’t have the time. That’s where we come in. Our content team will learn everything we can about your industry and produce high-quality blogs that are not only informative, but also SEO friendly. Our SEO team will then take over and make sure that the blogs are as search engine optimized as can be. We pretty much experts at this stuff at this point. Afterall, you don’t produce over 85,000 words of great SEO content a month without figuring out a few things along the way.