11/05/2018
You should always be creating blogs for your website, but how much should you actually be writing? Find out below.
Blogging. It can be one of the most time-consuming things if you’re not as dedicated to posting as you should be. Be it content writer or business owner, blogging for your website can sometimes get in the way of slightly more important tasks. What’s worse is more and more us marketers are being told that blogging is becoming obsolete. Stats say that 80% of users would rather watch a video than read a blog post. So, why bother?
Well written content is still an essential part of any website. Whilst videos and live streams may attract more engagement, you’ll still need to consider fleshing out your site with blog posts. Why? We’re going to tell you. Find out what you need to know about blogging, below.
Blogs are short for weblogs, effectively they started as logs on a web page (hence the name). Blogging is no new thing on the internet – hell, it’s becoming the old thing now. In the mid-00s, blogs on the internet grew at an astounding rate, until there was almost a blog for everything. Now, businesses and brands use blogs as part of their content marketing and SEO strategy too. The general consensus was that blogs should be above 500 words, to be of any value. But, in terms of SEO content, blog lengths have fluctuated over the years due to Google updating their algorithms. As for blogs for the sake of blogs, you don’t want to bore your readers or leave them unfulfilled either.
So, we keep mentioning that blogs are fading out of what users want to see. It seems everything is moving towards video, but that doesn’t mean blogging is set to become completely irrelevant. For starters, there are still people that would rather read a blog than watch a video (albeit it a smaller minority). Some prefer written content because it engages their brain more. Considering things like recipe blogs, people want to have the information to hand in front of them, and not continuously scroll back and forth through a video. There are some instances where blogs just work.
Regarding SEO, blogs are so important to help you rank on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. First off, it gives a website more content, as well as keeping it new and up to date as well. You can target certain keywords in your blog that you hope to rank with on search engine results pages (SERPs). Every time you create a blog on your site, you’re effectively adding a new page. This increases the size of your site and helps you stand a better chance of ranking on different keywords too. Finally, it allows you to join up pages on your site through links in the content, allowing it to be crawled more easily by search engine robots. These robots find relevant data, which allows your website to stand a better chance of ranking for related search terms.
So, blogging is essential. Whilst it may not attract as much engagement as videos and other forms of media, blogging is a vital part of your website. But, if you think you haven’t got the time to write, you probably want to know how much you should be writing…
As we’ve said, the standard for a blog post is around 500 words (and if you’ve reached this point we’ve hit our mark). But, blogs can be as long or as short as you like – as long as they provide something of value for the reader. See, the key is that blogging in terms of content marketing needs to be enriching information, entertaining or something of value to the reader. So, the amount of words and detail is within the subject and is solely dependent on what you’re writing about. The more information sometimes, the better.
Writing for SEO is different to writing blogs for content marketing however. There are some different techniques that need to be followed for blog writing regarding SEO. For starters, you should be aware of updated algorithms on search engines. Back in December, Google said the best crawlable content by search engine robots was around 2000 words – meaning some long blog posts. The key to blogging for SEO is to ensure that you target relevant keywords for your website within the copy, as well as create links that help search engine robots move around your site. These robots use the links to ‘crawl’ around a site and gather data, so the more links in your blog the better.
However, by writing 2000 words, you run the risk of putting off readers. Blogs are supposed to be quick snippets of info, so ideally, you don’t want them too long. Writing for SEO and for content marketing is different, but your blog posts should find a nice middle ground.
Regularly posting blogs allows you to fill your website up with content, and these posts can vary in purpose. You could write one blog every month for SEO and a couple just for content. As long as you’re constantly creating blogs and content for your website, then you’re doing the right thing.
If you’re still concerned about creating blogs when video is the done thing, don’t be. See, you can use your blogs as other forms of media too. For example, at Revive, we turn our best-performing blogs into videos – containing all the information of the blog in a short video form. You can see our video below.
Source: Most Popular Social Networks in 2019
Youtube Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McoJGgHu5PI&t=3s
You can turn them into infographics and podcasts too, for those that want to listen on the go. There are so many things you can use your previous blog posts for. You can turn them into different forms of media content to appease all audiences – those who like to read, listen or watch.
It’s a great way to hit all platforms with your work and allows you to repurpose content in an efficient and effective way.
If you don’t have time to manage your blogs or create video content, we’re here to help. Yes, we have in-house content creators for both video and written content (for both SEO and content marketing). So, speak to a member of the team to inquire about content creation for your business.
