If you’ve been wondering if blogging is still worthwhile in 2024, the definitive answer is: yes, it really is. If you’ve been wondering how to start a blog in 2024, we’ve got some useful tips to help you get there!
What Is a Blog?
The answer might be obvious to some, but a blog is essentially a website, or a part of a website, featuring articles (like this one. Hi! Welcome to our blog).
There are many creative ways to leverage a blog for your business. Some go down the informative, educational blog route, while others go for a more entertaining, personal approach in their blog posts.
The style, content and tone of voice should be geared towards your target market.
Blogs can feature reviews of your products or services, case studies, how-to posts, listicle style content and even deep-dives on topics relevant to your offerings or your industry more widely.
Why Should I Have a Blog?
- Blogs build trust and loyalty
- Blogs help to create brand awareness
- Blogs generate new leads
A blog is a great way to show off your industry knowledge and expertise, and as a side-effect, build consumer trust in your business.
If you can show your potential customers that you really know your stuff, they’ll have an easier time parting with their hard-earned cash because they already know your product or service will be a worthwhile investment.
If you’re looking to drive traffic to your website, blogging is the way to go.
The more content you put out, the more keywords you naturally find yourself using, the more you pop up on the SERP (search engine results page). With a bit of SEO know-how, you can significantly expand the reach of your website.
Blogging also gives you access to potential leads in related markets that you might otherwise struggle to reach.
If, for example, you own a business that sells beautiful, high-quality kitchenware, a blog page featuring mouth-watering recipes could bring in a whole lot more traffic to your website. Slip in some photos of your kitchenware in action, provide a few subtle links and calls to action, and suddenly your product pages will be getting more views too.
Benefits Of Having a Blog
Blogging Gives Your Brand a Personality
Injecting some personality into your blog can go a long way to increasing brand loyalty.
A whopping 78% of people perceive a relationship between themselves and a company using custom content.
Not only does giving your brand some personality make your business more memorable, it gives the impression that your business is made up of real, trustworthy people—not just faceless robots.
Blogging Provides Fresh Content
This is particularly important if you’re operating in an industry where your blog content needs to be topical.
At the end of the day, Google is a research tool.
If you wanted to find the best technique for cooking a steak, would you look it up in a book from 1958? Or would you see what current chefs are doing in 2024?
Read also: Content Is King
A simple premise in research is that something that is current and fresh is (probably) better, because it has built on the knowledge that came before it.
When it comes to topical content, Google agrees.
Whether it was recently posted, or just thoroughly rewritten and updated, putting fresh content on a website gives positive signals to Google that it’s still relevant. As a result, your website will be more likely to pop up on the SERP.
Blogs Give You a Natural Place to Integrate Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific than regular keywords.
If the keyword is ‘frying pan’, a long-tail keyword could be ‘non-toxic healthy frying pan’.
Long-tail keywords typically have lower search volume (fewer people googling them), but searchers who use them may be more likely to make a purchase decision: put simply, the searcher already knows what they want, so they’re looking for that exact thing.
Competition for popular keywords (like ‘frying pan’) is so high that it’s virtually impossible to rank anywhere near the top spots on the SERP.
The more specific the search term, the lower the competition, the higher your chance of ranking.
Even better: because long-tail keywords are so specific, they’re usually easier to target too.
In our frying pan example, a blog post titled ‘Best non-toxic frying pans for healthy cooking’ would have much less competition, and you’d stand a chance of landing at the top of the SERP.
Blogging Creates Content for Google to Index
For your site to show up on the SERP, Google has to index it. If you want to read more on exactly how that happens, check out this post here.
There’s some debate about whether or not blog posts are crawled (and indexed) more quickly than static web pages, but some research suggests websites with blogs are indexed up to 434% more than websites without blogs.
Blog posts enrich your website with well-researched, informative, engaging content that provides Google with the information it needs to connect internet users with your website. The more blog pages—the more content for Google to index.
It’s no surprise that businesses with active blogs receive 55% more visitors than those without.
Blogging is Great for Linking
Blogging helps SEO with ‘internal linking’ and ‘external inbound linking’.
Read more: Blog SEO for Beginners
Internal linking within a website (such as a link from a blog post to a product page) not only helps users navigate your site with ease, it also helps Google understand what your site is about.
Once Google understands the relevance of your content, it may rank your content higher on the SERP.
External inbound linking (links from other websites to your website) tells Google that your content is valuable and worth reading, which again will help it rank higher.
Businesses with blogs on their website receive up to 97% more inbound links than those without.
Blogging Gives You Content to Repurpose for Social Media
After putting in the time, research and effort to craft a blog post, you’ll have a ready-made vault of valuable content to share on your socials.
You’ve already done the leg-work, so you can easily turn that long-form piece of content into a handful of Instagram posts that’ll keep your socials active (and the algorithm warm!).
Blogging: Best Practices
So, what are the best practices when it comes to blogging?
Quality Over Quantity
At the end of the day, the quality of your content will determine its ranking ability. This is the most important SEO factor.
Google loves E-E-A-T content—that’s content that demonstrates expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It also loves content that’s on the longer side—1000 words or more is ideal.
While Google will promote content that is well-researched and well-written, it will suppress low-quality content in the SERP. Poor content can even harm your website’s ranking ability overall, not just on the page featuring that content.
Read also: Content Writing Tips for Beginners
If you can only devote a few hours to your blog every week, make sure you don’t compromise on the quality. Fewer high-quality posts will serve you better in the long-run.
Be Unique
Duplicate content, or content that has been copied from elsewhere on the internet, can harm your ability to rank.
If you copied and pasted content from another website (even if you wrote it), you could harm the ranking ability of both websites.
From Google’s perspective, unique content provides value and improves authority. It will also organically generate more inbound links.
From a human perspective, unique content gives website users a reason to come back to your blog in particular.
Don’t Forget the Visuals
Articles with images get 94% more views as opposed to those with no visual elements.
A wall of text can be pretty intimidating. Breaking up your blog post with relevant, eye-catching pictures makes your content less overwhelming to readers.
Bonus points if you include video: video content is 50 times more likely to drive organic search traffic than plain text. Source.
So, is Blogging Still Worth it in 2024?
Done well, a blog can be a valuable asset in your digital marketing toolbox that brings huge SEO benefits. That said, it takes some time and skill to get it right, and even more expertise to get the full SEO benefits.
If you’re looking for some help with getting a blog up and running, reach out today.
- Blog SEO for Beginners: Top Tips - February 12, 2024
- The Anatomy of a Blog Post: 10 Essential Components - January 29, 2024
- Here’s Why You Should Start A Blog in 2024 - January 13, 2024
