How Do Blogs Help My Website’s SEO? Complete SEO Guide

Every marketing agency says blogs help website SEO but how does blog SEO work and why should business owners care? Here is the bite-sized overview:

• Posting blogs adds extra pages to your website that rank on Google for new search terms.
• People click your blogs and ready your content.
• Ideally, these users convert into paying customers.

In short, writing blogs for SEO can directly lead to more sales! That sounds great, but it isn’t as simple as it seems. The blog market is saturated and AI makes it possible to publish dozens of articles every day. This doesn’t mean blogging for SEO is dead though!

In this article we’ll dive deep into how blogs help SEO, whether or not you should write blogs for SEO, and the different ways you can make blogs for your site.

The Complete Breakdown of How Blogs Help SEO and Your Business

Google analyzes sites by two metrics: content and performance. When someone enters a search term into Google (Ex. ‘dog watchers’), the search engine scans its list of indexed. It looks for all the sites that have pages talking about the subject. Then it organizes those sites by how other users have interacted with that content.

The more a page is viewed, the higher it gets on Google. The longer people read on a page, the higher it gets on Google. The more people share or link to a page, the higher it gets on Google. Why is this?

Google’s robots can’t actually tell what content is ‘good’. As a proxy for quality, Google measures relevancy (i.e. using the right keywords) and user engagement. The assumption Google has is if real people are engaging with content then that content is worth showing to other people. Therefore, websites with lots of engagement develop strong SEO and ranks high on Google. Website performance, however, can change the equation.

The robots and automation Google uses can objectively evaluate website performance. Some key metrics are:

• Load time (how long it takes for the user to see anything)
• Time to first contentful paint (how long it takes for the user to see their full screen)
• Site functionality (Do buttons work? Do things load correctly?)
• HTML to Text ratio (Are you providing more content than code?)

If these functionality metrics are not healthy, it will drastically impact your SEO performance. This is because Google wants their customers to have a good experience. If someone uses Google and arrives at a website that is dysfunctional (or irrelevant), will they be mad at that website? Probably not! They will be frustrated Google didn’t give them a good result. So, Google tries to only put quality content in front of their users, so people continue to use Google for search. Especially with the rise of AI, Google is taking special measures to keep their market share of search.

Here’s where blogs fit in: they allow you to be constantly posting new, engaging, and functional content. Each blog can address a customer’s question or teach them something new. You can discuss trending topics, announce new products and services, or show your business’s personality. In short, a blog can do just about anything. There’s one big key to this.

Each blog can use a unique set of keywords. Because you’re adding content all the time, and that content is addressing new keywords, you’re always boosting your site’s SEO. When you make an engaging piece of content about your industry or business, people read it. When people read it, it ranks higher and higher on Google. As pieces rank on Google, it helps your whole site rank higher. A rising tide lifts all blogs, after all.

Okay, that’s how blogs help your SEO. But why should a business owner care about this or SEO at all?

Websites are the best salesmen you can have. Don’t believe me? How many salespeople do you know that charge a one-time setup fee and then work 24/7/365 with no breaks, HR, or management requirements? As far as we know there’s no harder working salesman than a website. If – and this is a big if – it works well.

One of the keys of a website is this: it can’t get you new business if it doesn’t have users coming to it. Seems obvious, right? Can’t sell people you can’t talk to. SEO is how you get people onto the site through Google. As we’ve looked at, blogs are an excellent method for increasing your SEO. So, posting blogs brings people to your website. Then, if you have a good website and good content, those people convert into leads. Great!

But blogs aren’t for every business. Let’s look at some of the drawbacks.

Should I Have Blogs for SEO?

The idea of write blogs > improve SEO > get customers is very simple. However, many industries are already saturated with blog content. There are companies that have been promoting themselves through blogs since the internet was invented. Throw in social media marketing, email marketing, and other digital marketing strategies and it can be hard to know what to focus on. So, how do we know if blog SEO is the right investment for our business?

First, look at your website. Is it optimized for conversions? Here’s a great checklist to figure this out. If your website isn’t ready to convert then filling it with users will mostly be a waste of time. Instead, upgrade your website first then start blogging for SEO.

If your site is optimized for conversions, you need to analyze your target market. (If you don’t have a target market, here’s how to pick one) Is your audience using Google? Young people often use social media (think Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc.) instead of Google when looking for products and services. At the same time, elderly folk tend to use the internet rarely. So, blogging may not be a good fit if your audience isn’t using Google.

Finally, you have to be able to produce great content. It must be engaging, informative, and entertaining. Remember, if users don’t read your content then it won’t get boosted on Google! And let’s be totally honest, some people aren’t gifted writers. Writing good content is a difficult skill to master and it can take a long time to develop. If you aren’t the best writer, and you don’t have good writers on your team, then blogging will be difficult.

But wait a minute, doesn’t this put us in a bad spot? What if writing blogs is the right strategy but we don’t have the tools to do it well? In that case, we need to look at other options for producing blogs.

Options for Writing Blogs for SEO

Writing Blogs Yourself

The first and cheapest option dollar-wise is writing blogs yourself. Many business owners bring an unfiltered and authenticity to their writing that is appealing to customers. Depending on your market, a polished piece of prose might not be the right fit! However, writing the blogs yourself has a tremendous time cost. Every minute you’re researching, writing, editing, and posting is a minute you aren’t working on your business. Then inevitably you end up between a rock and a hard place.

Your blogs start generating business so you need to service that business. Which means you don’t write more blogs. Which in turn means you get less leads and so business slows down. Doing marketing yourself often creates a difficult cycle of feast and famine for the business. It can make it difficult to scale and grow without killing yourself working 90 hours a week. Luckily, there are two much better options!

AI Blog Writing Tools

There are many opinions about AI, but the one clear message is it’s here to stay. AI has many benefits and drawbacks but the best use of AI systems is doing tasks for you. Blog writing is no exception. Nearly every LLM (Ex. ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) can write blogs… with varying levels of success. The key to using an LLM is in the prompting. Anyone can tell ChatGPT to ‘write a blog for a plumber’. Few can find the best keywords, provide it an engaging topic, and develop the content it produces into something humans will enjoy reading.

Specialized tools like SEObot (not affiliated) can help in this regard. AI tools for SEO like this do the topic generation, keyword research, writing, and sometimes the posting for you. They can be a huge timesaver! However, they often are expensive. For example, SEObot’s introductory pricing tier only provides 3 blogs each month. A trained human writer could write that many posts per day. And you have to manage the AI bots. Frequently, AI tools produce output that isn’t engaging or is too generic. It must be massaged and edited to be useful. So AI tools for SEO are a mid-point on the cost and time price.

There’s a third option for blog SEO though!

Marketing Agencies for Blog Writing

As a marketing agency, we are obviously biased toward this option. Marketing agencies are staffed with skilled professionals who have proven SEO results. You can find agencies that only do blog writing for your business’s niche. You can also find digital marketing agencies that will improve your website, run your email marketing, and post on social media for you. This can help you outsource all of your marketing efforts so you can focus on growing your business.

But marketing agencies do carry the largest dollar value price. If you are paying for expert skills that frequently comes with an expert price tag. However, marketing agencies are often the fully done for you solution. Usually, you’ll have a discovery meeting and then can be hands off as the leads roll in.

So, what’s the best solution? As time becomes more valuable than money, move down the list. Start by producing your own content, use AI tools when you have a little cash, and then pick a great marketing agency when you’re ready to hand off the work entirely.

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