Why Is Consistency Important in Blogging?
One of the most popularly used phrases for blogging success is – be consistent that we keep on hearing almost every day!
But even then, in most cases, when you ask a business if they have an active blog or not, usually you’ll get a response somewhere between ‘yeah, kind of’ and ‘not really.’
With so many things going on around them, businesses often tend to forget about one of the most potent tools they have available at their disposal – their own blog! Why?
Simply put, blogging is an incredible way of making yourself heard in the online world. And the more you are heard, the more are your chances for traffic and lead generation.
Blogging consistently and strategically will help you boost your Google ranking, drive more traffic to your website, and increase your conversion rate.
A lot of bloggers who either do blogging as a hobby or just part-time may be wondering what it is about consistency that makes it so crucial in this field? Well, that’s precisely what we are going to discuss in this blog and try to make you understand why you should take it seriously when choosing to blog.
How Can Consistent Blogging Grow Your Audience Over Time?
Blogging is the key to attracting new users to your website and, at the same time, making valuable assets that can be shared across multiple social networking sites, which will shore up your traffic levels and brand awareness in the industry.
How Can Blogging Impact Your Google Rankings?
Many businesses are not even aware of the fact that merely having a blog on their website can actually boost your ranking by four times more than what it is now. And that is a massive increase! This makes it pretty clear that the search engine sure loves the websites that post high quality, valuable, and informative content consistently, thus rewarding them with better rankings on SERPs. Hence, by publishing content targeted to essential keywords or search phrases relevant to your industry, you can successfully boost your Google rankings.
Build Trust and Authority WIthin Your Niche/Industry
Creating long-form content lets you dig deeper into any specific topic, provide valuable information to the readers, and thus establish your brand as a trustworthy authority in the area your business is focused on primarily. Give a bit more time to your longer posts – carry out in-depth keyword research and write content that provides answers to questions that others might not have even thought of yet. Distinguish yourself from the competition by getting ahead of the game.
Apart from all this, blogging also provides brands with the opportunity to be discovered, heard, and understood. Make sure you grab this opportunity well. Snackable content is another great asset to your marketing efforts. These are quick to consume and share. It lets your brand share its unique take on your industry or spread the word about a newly introduced product/service quickly. So make sure you have enough of these in your toolkit.
Do Not Underestimate the Power of Internal Links
Internal linking is an excellent means to encourage visitors to explore your website further, regardless of whether you are linking to another web page or blog post on your site. In addition to this, internal links also pass link authority, which is a bonus point since it helps the linked web page rank better in the search results.
Blog posts are also an ideal place to anchor links to other relevant links that provide additional information about the particular blog, enabling the viewers to check what else you have got to offer to them.
Blogging Consistently Is the Key
At the end of the day, remember your content’s quality is just as crucial as how frequently you publish and update the existing posts on your website. However, striking a balance between the frequency and quality of your content can get quite tricky, but once you get it right, there’s no stopping you from being successful.
Power Up Your SEO and Page Rankings
Google (and other search engines) use web spiders to crawl and index the rising number of websites that exist on the internet today. Google algorithms rank your website depending on a range of factors such as authoritativeness, mobile-friendliness, inbound links, relevancy, and so on.
That being said, the more frequently you publish content on your website, the more chances you will have to bolster your SEO and rank better on SERPs.
Since we are discussing all the ways blogging helps increase your SEO rankings, it is also worth mentioning that consistent blogging could also result in incoming inbound links from other sources online. If a reputable website cites or reposts your content, it serves as a powerful signal to the search engine that the information present on the page is valuable and your website is trustworthy.
Do Your Homework Properly – Keyword Research
Blogging without the use of the right keywords? – Sounds weird, doesn’t it?
Find out how people are finding your business online by performing in-depth keyword research. Bear those search phrases in mind while writing your content, and be sure to include the most potent keyword phrases within your post’s title and headings.
Updating the existing content on your website often lets you dedicate separate blog posts to a broad range of keywords to help people discover you when they perform a relevant search query on Google or any other search engine. Plus, this presents you with an excellent opportunity to talk to your specific target demographic using specialized keyword phrases (such as local audiences) while maintaining the scope of keywords you want your page to rank for on the SERPs.
Pro tip: Voice search is a growing trend in the industry, and it is promoting longer and more conversational search queries taking place on the web. You can make use of any one of the many tools available in the market to unveil the language your target audience is using to perform searches, which will help you in optimizing your content for voice search.
Make a Viable Content Calendar to Start
Now it comes down to finding a starting point! In case your website already has a blog, the best thing to do is to analyze it and find out what is currently working and not working for your site.
Start by updating your existing content (search engines love when websites do that), detect the content gaps, and pinpoint the topics that you want or should make a part of your overall content strategy.
Next, prepare a monthly publishing schedule, and review the resources, writers, photographers, videographers, etc., you have available. Many companies make the mistake of making the entire content publishing a one-person job either due to lack of resources or management. Avoid making this mistake. Try and get the whole organization involved in this process to increase the overall effectiveness.
As soon as you have the information about the total number of writers you have and figured out the total amount of time available that you can invest into this process accordingly, you can proceed to fill out your calendar with the posts that need to be written or updated. Doing so will give you a good idea of where you should start.
Lastly, keep in mind that consistency and targeting keywords are indispensable to your blogging success no matter what your blog topic is.
How Often Should Your Business Post a Blog?
While planning and building out your publishing schedule or content calendar, you must remember the particular purpose why you chose to blog in the first place. What is it that you want to achieve by blogging? Do you want to drive more traffic to your website? Are you focused on getting more leads or conversions? Or perhaps you just want to scoop up everything along the way? Sounds pretty overwhelming, right?
But if you are not sure who you are speaking to, i.e., your target audience or what “they” want or expect to hear from you, at times, that is a good place to take a U-turn, go back and decide how to proceed while reviewing your posts’ analytics.
If you observe that your posts are performing interestingly well, you know you hit the jackpot. Or, if you notice a post dying a slow death, you may want to review it once more and then decide if you wish to remove it entirely or update it with new and better keywords or content.
This brings us back to the question – how many times should your business post a blog? According to research, blogging consistency positively impacts traffic as well as leads. Businesses should ideally publish about 3-4 times a week or a minimum of 15 blogs every month.
However, it really depends on what your business is all about, the organization’s size, the industry you operate in, etc. It may take you a while before you figure out what works best for your business. Just be sure to monitor your content performance frequently.
Wrapping It Up
Having read everything discussed above, some of you might be wondering if it ‘really’ matters how many blogs you have published on your website. We’d like to clear that up too. Yes, it does matter. In fact, it matters a great deal, and this is backed by research.
Websites that post blogs often on their blog received twice and even thrice as much traffic as the sites that publish blogs infrequently. Forget about websites that don’t even have a blog.
To summarize, when committing to blogging, you are in reality committing to one of the easiest (and low-cost) means not just to establish your brand as a reputable authority online but also to make sure your voice is reaching your target audience consistently, thus keeping on top-of-mind of your potential customers.
It is a time-tested strategy that has worked wonders for businesses always. Go ahead and integrate it into your present strategy. Remember, all it asks is for you to be consistent and maintain a good quality of your content.
Happy blogging!