Blogging In Digital Marketing

Blogging in digital marketing is an important tool for attracting your target audience organically through the search engines. It can also help establish you as an authority in your field and provide potential customers with valuable information which helps build trust in your brand.

Through a blog, website owners create content and promote it as much as possible. If content starts ranking on Google, this is the best outcome because it means a website can attract visitors organically, without paying for advertising.

Google and other search engines rank content according to its relevancy, quality and the relative competition. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, there’s a fair amount of competition in pretty much every possible niche. So how can you be assured of getting a listing on the organic search engines as a blogger?

Blogging In Digital Marketing

Well sadly you can never guarantee your blog post to rank on Google. But there are ways to give yourself the best possible chance of a ranking. Google uses a number of algorithms and data points to determine whether a website or blog post deserves a ranking on the first page of the search results, and whether to put it first, second third or further down the page.

Here’s a few of the things Google (and others) use to determine whether to rank your content:

• Your domain age – how old is your domain name/website
• Backlinks – are a major contributor to your ability to rank, where are your backlinks from, is your backlink profile natural and organic?
• Time on page – Google sees how people interact with your content. Do they click away, or read through your content?
• Quality of your content – the length, subject and quality of your content all have a bearing.
• Relative competition – in a very competitive topic, it’s much more difficult to rank content than in one which is relatively unsubscribed.

Blogging In Digital Marketing – Finding Long Tail Keywords

One strategy used by bloggers is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. In a competitive topic, it’s very difficult to rank your content, especially if there are thousands of other high authority sites with similar or the same content. Short keyword phrases are far more competitive too, so it’s much more difficult to rank for them. To get round this, you can find long tail keywords of 4 or more words which have fewer websites competing for them.

Generally speaking, the longer the phrase, the less competition for that particular keyword phrase. Long tail keywords usually get less traffic than the short tail one unfortunately. But it’s far better to get some free traffic in the less competitive areas, than none in the most competitive topics.

To find long tail keywords with low competition, you can use a keyword planner such as Google’s keyword planner or Neil Patels ubersuggest.

Type your main keyword into the planner and look for long tail derivatives. Then, look on Google with a search of your chosen keyword. Google shows the number of websites which are listed for the term. With a low competition phrase, you’ll find a lot fewer competing websites so you’re in with a greater chance of ranking your content, (if you make a good job of it).

Blog Content & Syndication

Newer websites typically won’t rank as well as older ones which are more established. So if you’re starting out with a blog, expect to work fairly hard in the beginning just to get a small trickle of traffic. Over time, as more and more of your content gets shared and linked to, you should find your traffic grows.

The best thing you can do to give yourself a good chance is to write high quality articles which are an improvement on the competition. Use an SEO (search engine optimisation) plugin (I use Yoast SEO) to help you write SEO friendly content. Write over 1000 words for each post if you can.

Once you have finished writing, your job as a blogger isn’t over. You need to actively share your posts to give them the best possible chance. You can automate this process with a few plugins which help you syndicate your content as you publish. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for a few plugins I use for this.

See also “what is digital marketing?”.