Do You Have To Have A Blog To Rank Organically?

Everything we read these days when it comes to online marketing seems to be all about content.

Content is king! Write it, and they will come! Your website needs to have a blog! SEO is all well and good, but once your site is optimised, the blog is how you keep building your online presence.

Having a blog is said by many online marketing specialists to be essential to great SEO, but do you have to have a blog to rank organically?

The short answer is no.

You don’t HAVE to have a blog to rank organically. If you have several other pages on your website that are well optimised for one or two keywords each, you’ve got the opportunity to rank for these keywords.

However, if you do have a blog, it opens you up to being able to rank for a whole heap of more keyword phrases. A blog gives you the chance to target long tail keywords which often have much lower competition on them.

An example could be a business that sells wedding dresses. Their website should be optimised for search terms like ‘wedding dresses’, ‘designer wedding dresses’ and ‘buy a wedding dress’.

If this business has a blog, they could write blogs with titles such as ‘how to find the perfect wedding dress’, ‘the do’s and don’ts of choosing your wedding dress’ and ‘finding the right wedding dress for your body shape’.

As people these days are becoming more and more specific about the information they want, they are using longer and longer search phrases. This means that targeting shorter keywords is near impossible these days especially in high competition niches. It is going to be much easier to rank for ‘where to find designer wedding dresses in Sydney’ than ‘wedding dresses’.

Blogs also allow you to create internal links to other pages on your website. If your site doesn’t have a blog, you are limited to the pages you have to create the content and links you need to help you rank for the terms you are targeting.

However, having a blog which is regularly updated (at least twice a month) allows you to use your existing keywords more on new blogs, and create links on these keywords (called anchor text) to other pages on your website.

Having a blog also helps you to attract people who are at different stages in the buying process. You can create content aimed at attracting new visitors, content for people who are interested in what you offer but aren’t necessarily ready to buy, content that attracts people who are in the research phase of their buying journey and content that helps people make that final decision to make a purchase.

In short, you don’t need to have a blog to rank organically, but having a blog opens up far more opportunities to rank for a broader range of search terms – which can only help to drive more traffic to your website.