Is blogging dead?
With so much focus on video content in recent years, you'd be forgiven for thinking blogs are so last decade!
But blogging hasn't died, it's simply evolved. And by knowing what Google is looking for, you can move with the times.
To give you a few statistics, at the time of writing this post (July 2022):
There are 104,430 Google searches in one second (which makes over 9 billion searches in a day).
There are over 600 million blogs on the internet.
Blogs are read by 77% of internet users.
Why focus on Google?
In June 2022, Google had 91.86% of the search engine market share. Bing was the next at 3.2%. So, it’s a fair bet that making your blog posts Google-friendly is a good move.
But Google has approximately 200 ranking factors. That means considering 200 things to decide where your blog post appears on the results page.
You can’t hope to know what they all are (apparently Google employees don’t know all 200 either). But there are some key things you can do to help people (customers) find your blog posts.
I’ll be covering the following in this post:
Know what information your customers want
Remember quality over quantity
Write for humans first
Be mobile friendly
Become an expert in your sector
1. Know what information your customers want
It’s important to write with your specific audience in mind and understand what they want to know. This will help you work out topics to write about, and also the tone to use in your message (formal, fun, chatty).
Try answering the following questions:
What keeps your customers up at night?
What question are they Googling at 3am?
What things do they love doing?
For example, if your shop sells eco-friendly products. Are your customers searching for the best vegan moisturisers? Or how to help the environment by switching from single-use plastics.
When you know the topics they’re looking for, you can deliver it to them in the best way. It could be a blog post, but may be something else, such as a video showing what to do with old ends of soap.
2. Remember quality over quantity
Google penalises websites with thin content. If your blog posts lack in-depth information, it will affect their ranking on search results.
In the past, it was believed that posting more often equalled more visits to your website. But if that’s at the expense of providing helpful and detailed information, it could do more harm than good.
It's true that longer blog posts delivering good quality answers take more time to write. A rough average is around 4 hours, but they’re likely to rank higher.
Average blog posts tend to be around 1,200 words. But it’s no use waffling to increase word count. That doesn’t address the issue of thin content. It simply makes them difficult or boring to read.
If you’ve covered the topic well, 1,000 words is fine. Equally, 2,000 words is also ok when the subject matter needs it.
And remember, it’s better to have one high quality post than six mediocre posts.
3. Write for humans first
It's easy to get hung up on search engine optimisation. Keywords, title tags, meta data, etc are all important. But it's crucial to write for humans first rather than robots.
The Google algorithm can find and rank the content which provides value to the searcher. So there's no need to write for robots anyway.
Attempts to trick the algorithm include continually repeating certain words. Or including sentences full of keywords which don't make sense. But doing this will make the text difficult to read and end up alienating readers.
Instead, focus on creating great quality content (see No. 2 above). Know your audience and why you’re writing about a topic in the first place.
Are you educating, informing, inspiring, or entertaining them?
Then keep that in mind as you write.
4. Be mobile friendly
Most modern templates now have mobile responsiveness built in. It means your website will automatically resize (and still look good) on a mobile device.
This is important because Google now ranks by mobile first. So, even if your website has an amazing answer to a question, it will get ranked lower if it’s not mobile-friendly.
With web traffic worldwide now almost 60% on mobile devices it's easy to see why.
Website load speed is another reason for being mobile-friendly.
A faster website will help your click through rates. Think about searching for information yourself. If a page takes too long to load, you jump straight back to the search results and try the next.
So it stands to reason your readers will do exactly the same.
5. Become an expert in your sector
When you're seen as an authority voice in your specialist field, you become a trusted expert. It's good for your readers and great for the Google algorithm.
People will read your content because they'll want to know what you have to say.
But it’s not enough to simply write a flashy attention-capturing headline without the content to back it up. Because when readers click onto the post, they’ll find it lacking in depth. And that will cause them to bounce right off again (which, incidentally, is bad for SEO).
For example, I’m writing this post about blogging and SEO, because that’s what I do for my job. I’m trained in SEO and I write blog posts for my clients. I can back that up by showing you my credentials.
Let’s think about an outdoor adventure provider. Their customers might be looking for in-depth information such as:
How to train for a long-distance bike ride
What to look for in a sleeping bag
Essential items to pack for a trip into the mountains
The point is, you need to share relevant and long-form content about your area of expertise. So make sure that you’re not mixing messages by adding in personal posts such as parenting or gardening.
Antiquated blogging techniques
Some parts of blogging are dead, and for good reason.
So here are few things to stop doing:
Blogging about your personal life.
That type of content has moved to social media.Writing clickbait headlines.
These shock people into clicking but rarely satisfy user intent. And that’s important to Google. It’s a red flag when readers land on your website and bounce right off.Blogging about anything and everything.
If someone is searching for a solution to a problem, they want to know it’s an expert providing the answer.Writing tons of thin posts just to get something published.
Google looks for posts which provide in-depth and well-researched information.
In summary
Blogging isn’t dead, but it has evolved over the years.
For example, video is now an important part of content strategy. But if you publish a video on YouTube, write a transcript to go on your blog too. The reason is two-fold:
Some people prefer reading over video, especially if they are fast readers
Google is better at picking up keywords from text, so it will help your search engine ranking
And when you’re writing your blog posts, remember the following points:
Know what information your customers want
Remember quality over quantity
Write for humans first
Be mobile friendly
Become an expert in your sector
Finally, keep an eye on your old content. Look at how it can be improved, update statistics, and check for broken links.
