In the ever-competitive world of e-commerce, standing out from your competitors has never been more challenging.
And if the reports of the state of the e-commerce industry from the last year are anything to go by, things are only going to get more challenging. As more and more consumers look to online storefronts as their primary way of doing shopping, the battle for customers is only going to get more intense.
In these circumstances, it has become more important than ever to have a strong digital presence, with recent industry reporting highlighting this new fact of digital life.
It is not enough to simply have a digital storefront where potential customers can get directed to, however. In the increasingly crowded and competitive world of e-commerce, active marketing strategies are proving to be essential to long-term success in this new digital environment.
Given that search engines such as Google and Bing are one of the primary tools that we use to navigate the internet, businesses hoping to make an impact online will inevitably have to come to terms with them. In particular, the need to ensure that your business finds its way to the top of the search results listings has become an important way of connecting with new and existing customers.
This is no easy feat, however. In the digital world, navigating the search engine rankings can often be a path fraught with difficulty and, at times, frustration.
Blogging: the secret tool of digital marketers?
One of the many digital marketing tools developed by search engine optimisation (SEO) experts to help them do this is blogging.
Ever since the first websites came online, blogging has firmly established itself as one of the cornerstones of digital content marketing. Blogs have been used as a way of generating online traffic and, where appropriate, driving sales.
Blogs have been relatively effective at doing this – particularly when used in conjunction with other SEO techniques. For this reason, they are one of the preferred strategies employed by digital marketers.
Not only do they provide you with a platform to connect with your existing and future customers, as well as an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert and thought leader, but they are also well-liked by Google’s search algorithms.
Blogs and SEO: what’s the deal?
Beyond giving yourself an opportunity to show off your expertise to your customers and to build up a relationship of trust with them, blogs also have a calculable impact on your website’s Google search engine rankings. This will in turn have a significant impact on the visibility of your website or business online.
Although social media engagement is often looked to as the most effective way of boosting your presence online, the data suggests that it is actually blogs that tend to have the most direct impact. This is largely because search engines such as Google aren’t typically the best at searching through social media platforms, but they are highly effective at reading, categorising and parsing the information contained in a blog post.
If the goal is to get as close to the top-ranked search result of whatever search terms your business or website is most closely associated with, blogs are a particularly effective way of achieving this.
One of the main reasons for this is because blogs are a great platform for including all the things that the Google SEO algorithms love most in this world. This includes keywords, authority links, internal links, content tags and other relevant information that the algorithms look out for!
Another thing that blogs have going for them is that they are an incredibly flexible medium. There are an almost limitless number of formats and article types you can adopt, all of which will score well in the search engine rankings. This makes it easy to generate fresh content for, with the inspiration for new blog types easy to find.
Blogging and SEO: publish or perish?
As you publish more and more blogs that are SEO optimised, you will gradually score better in the search engine rankings. The more blogs you publish, the more material search engines will have to pull from when it comes time to categorising and indexing your website in search engine results pages. This will improve your overall search engine visibility and create an uptick in website traffic.
The only caveat, however, is that this creates a need to be publishing fresh material fairly regularly. If not, you risk getting drowned out by your competitors as the existing content you have posted on your website will become stale over time. This will eventually impact your visibility and have a detrimental impact on your search engine rankings.
As such, when it comes to blogging, it is very much a case of publish or perish!
Boosting your visibility through blogs
Now that we have fully convinced you of the need to pump out blogs to keep your website high up in the search engine rankings, we can now consider some concrete steps you can take that will help you achieve this. With that said, here are some strategies you can adopt:
- Make sure that your blog is SEO optimised: If your goal is to stay high up in the rankings, you need to make sure that you are publishing SEO-optimised content. This means making sure that your blogs are packed with an appropriate amount of long-tail and short-tail keywords, that you are intelligently using internal and external website links, and that you use appropriate tags. Although these are just a few items to include, they provide a good starting point.
- Create a content calendar: Given that success in the blogging world is very much a case of ‘publish or perish’, having a content calendar in place that you stick to can go a long way towards helping you meet your targets. Make sure that your blogging schedule is both regular and consistent for full effect.
- Use analytics to learn and improve: Digital marketers have an incredible set of tools at their disposal these days. You would be short-sighted not to use the various SEO analytics tools that are available to you to track the success of your blogs. These tools will give you a metrics-based look at how well your posts are performing. You can use these insights to tweak your strategy where necessary.
If you have read all this and are now fully convinced of the importance of blogging as part of a digital marketing strategy, but still have some lingering thoughts or questions, please reach out to a member of the Purecontent team today.
