A business blog creates SEO waves that spread far beyond the blog itself. It offers continual new opportunities to rank for keywords, helps your website stay cutting edge and strengthens your site's overall structure, in a way that makes it easier for search engines and humans to navigate it. In fact, brands that blog reportedly get 55% more website vistors than than those that don't! 

 

Read on for all the ways blogging can help your eco business scale up quickly... 

Effective SEO means appealing to both search engines and humans. So, ask yourself... how much faith would you have in a business website that hasn't been touched since before the global pandemic? The search algorithms feel pretty similar. 

 

Pages from websites that haven't been updated recently are instantly classed as less relevant, and marked down in search results, accordingly. Human searchers may be left wondering how up to date the information is and if your business is even still trading(!) 

 

A regularly updated blog ensures a steady flow of up-to-date material, which keeps your website feeling fresh and relevant and helps site visitors see you as a trusted source of information. Plus every new blogpost is a new opportunity to rank for the best, most topical keywords! 

Search engines may rank pages not websites, but they still view each page through the lens of the website it belongs to. This means, blogposts don't just exist in their own right — they help to build crucial context and structure around the rest of your pages through indexing and internal links. 

 

In SEO, indexing is the way information from web pages is stored and categorised, to make it easily accessible the search engines. Not every page is indexed and if a page isn’t indexed, it won't be ranked in searches. Google prefers websites with lots of pages, so just having a regularly updated blog increases the chances of your pages being indexed — in fact, websites with blogs have an average 434% more indexed pages than websites without them.  

 

Internal links are hyperlinks between different pages on the same website, which create pathways and help users and search engines to navigate your site and understand its content. A blog's sheer fluidity, together with the expanse of topics it can cover, create endless opportunities for internal links. Writing a blogpost explaining the environmental problems caused by balloons? Link back to your page of plastic-free party products. Talking about how sustainable your products are? Double down by linking back to your sustainability statement. (See what I did there...:-)) 

If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you may have noticed I talk a lot about longtail keywords.  

 

Longtail keywords refer to highly specific search terms used to attract more relevant traffic to your site — and blogposts are the perfect place to target them. This is where you can get into the weeds on niche issues that don’t fit into your main service pages. Where you can draw in people who don’t even know they want a collapsible reusable coffee cup yet. People who are curious about ebikes, but a long way off from buying mode.  

 

Longtail keywords are specific. They're niche. And they're exactly what you need, as a sustainable brand, to harness SEO to greatest effect. Your entire business model is based on offering a new and better way of doing something old... you’re breaking the mould. Longtail keywords are a way to reach more people who may be open to your message... even if they don't know it yet!  

 

A long-tail keyword strategy can even lower your carbon footprint... and the entire internet's! A major bonus for an environmentally conscious brand. (I go into this in my blogpost about green SEO strategy but I also highly recommend Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood, for a deeper dive into the topic!) 

Backlinks are a crucial part of SEO because they give your page credibility, by showing search engines other people rate and value your content. They’re also one of the most challenging aspects of a fully formed SEO strategy. (Check out my last blogpost for more on this!) 

 

There are many reasons why blogposts are a great place to attract backlinks. They can provide helpful, in-depth information which people are more likely to share, or even use to back up their own ideas. They're a place to make arguments, challenge existing wisdom and pull out little-known facts. 

 

In fact — would if surprise you to learn that websites with blogs receive up to 97% more inbound links than those without one? 

 

Are you sold on a website blog but not sure how to make it work in practice? I offer a range of blog-related services to ethical, sustainable business like yours. As well as writing and/or editing your posts, I can audit an existing blog, create topic lists, blogging schedules... and even prepare a bespoke blogpost template and house style to fit your brand!  

 

In short, I'm committed to finding a way to support you, whatever your budget, and help you maximise your impact with SEO blogging!