The Importance Of Blog Articles For SEO
One of the things I advocate when it comes to improving SEO is writing content.
To any digital marketer, this seems fairly basic, but not always so to clients.
Therefore, this blog post will be an introductory article to the reason for wanting to publish so much content for the purposes of SEO, and how these pieces of content can impact the performance of a website.
Why Blog Posts?
For any website in any industry, blog posts are a really easy way to publish content of just about any kind.
The format of blog posts – like this one – is fairly informal and can discuss just about any topic you want.
Compare this with the structure of a product or service page, where the content and structure is fairly limited. After all, you need to ensure that you are writing content relevant to these pages.
But most importantly, the content that you publish on your blog should generally be similar, or related, to the overall topic of your website.
For example, if your website focuses on HPLC consumables, you are probably going to be able to write with confidence and authority about other aspects of analytical chemistry.
But what’s the point?
By writing about as many similar topics as possible, you are helping to prove to search engines that you are an expert in your related field, which in turn has additional benefits.
The Benefits Of Blogs Posts
One of the main benefits of blog posts, and one that is typically obvious is increasing the amount of traffic to your website.
Following basic SEO principles, by researching and targeting keywords, you can write about a particular topic with the aim of getting onto the first page of Google.
With all keywords that you target, it is useful to target long tail variations of keywords. Although longtail keywords have less search volume, it is easier to match the keyword intent and there is usually less competition.
For instance, let’s use ‘HPLC’ as the target keyword again.
Using Mangools KWFinder tool, I can find questions about HPLC that people are looking for answers too.
And if you can include content that answers these types of long-tail keywords, then you can start to target an increasing search volume potential.
However, generating traffic by targeting keywords with search volume is not the only thing to consider.
By publishing multiple articles within the same category, you are generating a ‘hub’ of similar content. Once you have these hubs of content, you can start optimising them to help benefit your SEO.
This is typically referred to as categorisation, which I will explain in the next section.
How Categorisation Works
If you have properly planned your content, then you most likely have multiple categories that you wish to target.
You can have as many or as few categories as you want, but you should ensure that you populate these categories with as many blog posts as possible.
A very basic visualisation of categorisation looks like the image below:
You should ensure that your blog posts are organised and use a similar, organised URL structure too.
This would look something like this:
domain/blog/category/article-1/
domain/blog/category/article-2/
domain/blog/category/article-3/
And with the more article you have in a category, the more opportunities you have to internally link between them.
Internal linking helps adding relevancy to your site and it also helps search engines like Google crawl and understand the content you are writing about!
Creating Relevant Content
Creating blog content is typically a cross-over between SEO and content marketing.
The SEO part of blog writing ensures that you research your keywords, plan your categories and the URL structure you are going to use.
But this task is relatively pointless if the content your produce is not up to standard.
Finding a writer that is proficient with writing for keywords in mind AND creating high quality informative scientific content is a must.
Finding a hiring a science writer may be the best option in the short term, but if growing your blog is a long term project, training your staff and helping them with dedicated life science digital marketing training may be the best option to go for!
EAT & YMYL
Two concepts that are common used in reference to scientific (and medical) content is EAT – expertise, authority and trust – and YMYL – Your Money Your Life.
These two acronyms basically mean that the content you produce is written by experts in the field you are trying to target.
For blog content to be high performing, you need to ensure that your are able to demonstrate world-leading knowledge through the content you produce, and with relevant qualifications and credentials to ensure your authority.
Need Help With Your Blog?
If you need help with any part of creating content for your scientific blog; research, planning, content creation or anything else, then don’t hesitate to get in touch to see how I can help or assist you!
