4 months now since the last blog entry on the site. It makes me cringe a bit how much I used to bang on about regular fresh content when I was heading up the SEO dept at Ambergreen. It’s easy to say, and in practise, it’s not that difficult to do, but in reality, it’s the easiest thing to push to the back of the queue when your to-do list is beginning to get intimidating.
It’s always made sense to get fresh stuff on a site – loads of businesses are doing great jobs keeping their social accounts up to date, but I still see sad old blogs on many a site, with articles titled ‘check out our new website’ from 4 years ago, followed by nothing.
I think maybe the perception is that this type of content needs to be long-form and detailed, but there’s no rule that says it has to be.
A lot of the social content could be posted on blogs easily – the fact that it’s not is I think mainly down to ease of use and familiarity with the tools, and also perhaps because most folk don’t really consider their on site blog to be as valuable. You certainly don’t get the ‘like’ dopamine hits that a well received facebook post send your way.
But if you can get it updated regularly, you get loads of search visibility benefits. The fact that you have fresh content is a great sign that you’re an active business to search engines, and as you begin to accumulate a backlog of blog posts on the site on various thematically relevant topics, you start to see more traffic arriving from top of funnel queries. Information gatherers who are at the start of a customer journey finding out about you while they research solutions and products.
It adds to the overall authority of your site too. A sensibly placed link or two to an optimised transactional page within each article helps reinforce that page importance, and well, there’s the other human benefit in that it gives your site visitors something interesting to read outside of product descriptions, letting them engage with your brand on an entirely different level.
This is already getting too long for a blog about how blog articles don’t need to be long, so I’ll attempt to end it with a 2020 resolution to post more often and more… lightly?
We’ll see…
