Is blogging important in 2020?

Blogging has been around for at least two decades. What started as personal journals of nerds, soon became mainstream with everyone beginning to blog. There are close to 1 Billion blogs around the world, do you want to add to the crowd? Does it even matter in 2020 to blog? As I wrote exactly a year back, blogs are still important and are an asset to your website.

The main reason people think blogs aren’t relevant is they don’t seem to get the results that they got even a few years back. Yes, it has become a lot more competitive, but the underlying concepts and rules are still the same for blogging. The rules haven’t changed, but there are just a lot more people running the race.

Even though Google keeps changing the algorithm frequently, causing you to lose sleep over it, blogs are still one of the easiest ways to rank on Google SERPs. If you start a blog today, you can’t expect to be on page 1 by next week.

SEO is a slow process. It will take a few months even to get ranked on pages 4, 5, or 6 for your keyword. That too is only possible if you do it right. Many of our clients come and say, I have been writing blog posts, but I didn’t work. I didn’t get any results.

Unless you are a big brand like Amazon, Nike, or Apple, you can’t rank immediately. You are just starting, and Google still needs to understand your site and gauge how important your brand is. I always say my clients, “Don’t expect to see any results before six months.”

To ensure you get it right, there are a few tactics that work, even today.

Optimise your blog

You need to ensure that your blog is optimised. You should make sure you focus on the right keywords that are relevant to your niche or industry and whatever you are trying to sell. If you are selling Orchid plants, you should start writing about growing and nurturing various types of orchids, what kinds of insects or pests would you face, how to protect your flowers from them organically, etc.

Think about the problems your clients would face even if they didn’t already buy from you. You need to focus on long-tail keywords, even if it means you don’t get thousands of searches per day. Also, if you solved the burning problem of one visitor from your post, you would get a customer for life.

Keyword Density and Advanced Tactics

Many experts claim to use various tactics to get the right keyword density and using other advanced techniques like LSI, etc. I generally keep away from those complexities.

I use the Yoast SEO Plugin on my WordPress sites and make sure I try to get a green light for most of the factors it shows.

Mostly it means using the keyword in the title, introduction paragraph, description, slug, use headings, and good images, etc. The more “greens” you get, the better optimised your post is.

Go after Easier and Long Tail Keywords

When you are starting as a new blog, you should try to rank for easier keywords. There are many tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, etc., which give you a difficulty score. But if you don’t want to pay for those, you can also use UberSuggest which gives a keyword difficulty score for each keyword. Try to write posts that have a score of 40 or less. Those are all easier to rank.

Optimise for Mobile

Your site needs to be optimised for mobile devices. Google finds that every year more searches are coming from mobile devices. If your website doesn’t look good on a mobile device, your visitors are going to bounce as soon as they come.

Having a faster website also helps as Google uses page speed as a significant ranking criterion. Use the Google Pagespeed Insights tool to analyse and measure how fast your website is, on both desktop and mobile.

Use Google Analytics the right way

Many businesses, don’t use the free tools that Google provides. Google Analytics gives you a lot of insight into your visitors. But it’s not just installing a piece of code in all your pages and calling it done.

You need to analyse where your visitors are coming from, which referrals are causing the highest conversions, what pages are converting better. Sometimes you would get a lot of traffic to a particular page, but it won’t convert at all. Identifying those types of pages and cleaning them would get your better results.

Go beyond just SEO

I have seen a lot of sites just creating their site post content and wait for traffic to come in. There was a client who wrote a super authoritative blog post about a topic in a crowded niche. She kept waiting for traffic to come in and start ranking. But since she was a new site, she couldn’t rank on the first page yet.

If she didn’t get any traffic, Google doesn’t get a good idea of whether your content is good or not. She could’ve waited for 6 months to start ranking or she could drive traffic from other sources.

I suggested she try other channels and driving traffic via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. She even ran a small paid campaign to drive visitors to the page. Once Google got a decent sample of visitors coming to the page, staying and reading it, she started ranking on the first page within 3 weeks.

You should try to get all kind of help possible to show that you are the best in your industry. The best way to do it is to be present on all channels as possible. Become the most seen brand and, soon you will be considered as the expert. Start building human connections.

Conclusion

These are some of the ways to make your blog and blog posts relevant and succeed in 2020. Even though it’s going to be harder as more sites come, if you are consistent with your effort, you have a better chance at succeeding than your competitor.

If you want help with your site ranking better, book a free call with us, and we will help you identify 3 easy fixes that you can do to your site to rank better.