How Blogging Got Me To Number 1 On Google

People often ask me what I do for search engine optimisation to get Banks Business Solutions to the top of Google search results. My answer? I don’t.

I don’t pay someone to continually optimise my site and make changes so it’ll rank better. What I have done is content marketing. Social media is important and I’ll get on to that later, but for me, it’s publishing a blog twice a month that’s got me to the top of Google.

Google loves up-to-date content

If you don’t add new content to your website regularly, Google thinks that your website isn’t active anymore. It won’t trawl it so often for updates and you can quickly slip down the results page compared to businesses that do publish new content regularly.

The thing is, I haven’t updated the main pages of my website in quite a while, over two years for some of them.

But I do publish a new blog every two weeks.

The content of my blogs vary from personal experiences to WordPress tips and general business advice, but the content itself isn’t the most important factor here when it comes to SEO. It’s the fact that Google knows I publish frequently so it’ll come and check things out regularly and change my score accordingly.

So far, it’s kept me at the top!

Blogging gives the website more relevance to my target audience

Sales pages are essentially marketing copy, they’re there to tell my audience what I do and how I can help them, but there isn’t room on every page to highlight my experiences, case studies, the mistakes I’ve made and learned from, and small business tips and tricks.

That’s where my blog comes in.

I can fill my website with informative content that my target audience will find helpful. This is great for building a rapport, and for sharing my expertise and credibility as a virtual assistant.

But we’re talking about Google here.

Well, Google likes what my target audience likes. Google is a search engine, it’s there to direct its users to the most relevant webpage for their search query. If Google gets it wrong and sends them to the wrong place it doesn’t look good for Google, people might start using Bing or Yahoo instead.

My blog posts give Google additional information about my website and what I do. By linking pages and blogs together, it tells Google which information belongs together and why it’s relevant to Google’s users. That’d be difficult to achieve from just my sales pages alone resulting in a much lower search page position.

Promoting my blog drives traffic to my website

Social media marketing and blogging go hand in hand with each other. Blogging gives me plenty of content to share on social media, from just posting that I have a new blog to read to recycling the content into videos, graphics and quotes.

Social media gives me links.

Every time I post on social media and include the link to my website, I’m creating a new incoming link. Every person that clicks on that link is telling Google “hey, this is interesting”, the longer they stay reading my blog and exploring my website the more they’re letting Google know that “this website is really good”.

It’s social proof that my website is relevant and informative to my target audience. Exactly the kind of proof that Google looks for to determine if my website is better than a competitor for the search query that’s been used.

The more traffic my website receives, the higher up the search ranking my website climbs. If the blogs weren’t relevant and people clicked away quickly, my “bounce rate” would shoot up (literally people bouncing from my website back to Google) and my SEO score would drop.

And that is how I’ve managed to get to the top of Google (and stay there!) through blogging.

So, if you ever ask me about SEO, you’ll always find that I suggest blogging first. If you’re interested in finding out more about blog management for your website, get in touch with me.