SEO Blog Writing Myths to Ignore
Blogging is an essential part of an SEO campaign. Every blog post is a new page on a website that creates an additional opportunity to rank prominently in search, driving organic search traffic, and to be linked to, helping to earn SEO trust.
While there’s an abundance of advice out there about how to approach blog writing from an SEO standpoint, we’re finding that some of it isn’t quite spot on. Here are some of the most common SEO blog writing myths:
Every blog post needs to be keyword focused
Keywords are still at the heart of an SEO campaign, but the search engines are much smarter than they used to be and do a great job of understanding the intent of a searcher. Not every blog post needs to target a specific keyword and include that keyword in the title, description, headings, and other website elements.
However, if you’re writing a blog post that’s relevant to your industry, it’s going to be naturally optimized with industry keywords anyway. And focusing on the writing and the reader instead of on keywords typically results in a better performing blog post since it flows naturally.
Quality is better than quantity
Of course quality is important. We’re not saying it’s not. Business blog posts are all held to a specific standard. They must provide value and be free of annoying spelling and grammar errors. However, blog posts aren’t research papers. As long as the reader takes some great nugget of information away from the blog post, it served its purpose.
Somewhere along the way this “quality not quantity” mantra popped up, yet quantity matters, too. You need to post on a consistent schedule, but not at the expense of quality.
Longer posts are better
Piggybacking off of the last point, there’s also a misconception that all blog posts need to be a certain length (and that longer = better). Research suggests that long form blog posts generate more organic traffic and social shares. But if you think about it, does every topic really require 800+ words? Not at all. And it’s also important to keep in mind that to some people, a long blog post is a turn off.
As soon as they click on it and see how long it is, they bounce right out of there. Sometimes it’s perfectly acceptable to write 200 words on a topic, as long as there’s something valuable within that 200 words. Trying to stretch a blog post just to reach some quota that was pulled out of thin air can really do a disservice to the blog post, since it will turn into a bunch of fluff.
We’re not saying that you should ignore keywords and post a lot of short blog posts. What we are saying is that blogging for SEO isn’t so black and white. As long as you’re writing for your target audience and helping them in some way, that’s what matters.
Categorized in: SEO
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