How Blogs Help SEO
- Alex Anderson
- Jun 6
- 6 min read
When people ask me how blogs help SEO, my answer is simple: done right, they can be one of the most effective tools to drive high-quality organic traffic to your website.
But that’s only part of the story. Beyond boosting your search rankings, blogs also give you the fuel to:
establish your expertise
nurture leads
build content you can repurpose across your entire marketing funnel.
After writing hundreds of SEO blogs, I’ve seen what works — and what doesn’t. In this post, I’ll break down the biggest lessons and results that keep showing up.
The Benefits of Blogging for SEO
SEO is used as a digital marketing strategy to increase the visibility of your website when people search for information, products or services related to your business.
Google processes over 8.5 billion searches every day.
Digital marketers want to capture organic traffic from search engines because typically organic leads are deemed higher quality leads. Quality leads are leads that have a higher chance of converting into a paying customer.
If your target audience is already using search engines to look for information related to your industry or brand, they have a higher likelihood of being interested in your products or services.
Blogging for SEO is an important part of an inbound marketing plan because you can create informative digital content, specifically targeted at certain audiences, designed to solve their inquiries.
Think: Your blog is the trusted expert and search result they’ve been looking for!
13 Benefits of Blogging for SEO
When done correctly and strategically, the benefits of blogging for SEO can include:
Increased site visibility
Building brand recognition
Generating more traffic to your website
Building expert/industry authority
Enhancing your paid media efforts
Opportunities to acquire backlinks
Improved user experience
Creating core content that can be repurposed into other media
Enhancing your social media efforts
Capturing higher quality leads
Nurturing leads
Nurturing current customers
Creating media opportunities
Why Do Blogs Help SEO?
At the most basic level, blogs help SEO because they offer a spot on your website to target more keywords than you are on your main website pages.
A PSA on Cutting Content from your Website
Here’s a short story about a client that opted to redesign their website to be more “streamlined” and “minimalistic” prior to working with me.
Let’s call this client, “Client X”.
Client X decided that they wanted a beautifully designed website - one with animations and an incredible user experience. They wanted to “cut the clutter” and remove as much copy as possible. They took their website to the copy chopping block, and got exactly what they wanted.
The website was absolutely beautiful - but in doing this redesign, cutting the words on page and removing their blog - they lost half of their organic website traffic in the process (see below).
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for beautifully designed, streamlined websites with concise copy - but when you remove a ton of keywords from your page, and don’t have a blog, you’re missing out on hundreds of opportunities to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
I brought this to the attention of Client X, and now they have the best of both worlds - a beautiful site, with a blog, strategically designed to capture organic traffic through new keywords.
Targeting More Keywords
Keywords are a critical way to capture organic leads, especially when you use blogs to target long-tail keywords: longer, more specific keywords (four words or longer).
Blog writing for SEO provides an opportunity for businesses to perform keyword research to find out which search terms people are using related to your industry, product or service.
The math is simple: More blogs = more keywords = more organic exposure
Here is an example of a client I blog for who strategically decided to capture as many possible keywords related to their industry through blogging.
In just six months of blogging for SEO we were able to triple the amount of organic traffic to their site from over 1,500 visitors to their site each month to over 5,500 visitors to their site each month.
Imagine being able to reach hundreds if not thousands of potential customers MORE every.single.month!
Keeping Your Content Fresh
Not only does blogging provide new opportunities to share stories about your brand, showcase accomplishments like media features, and provide a medium for brand education, but it also feeds search engines like Google exactly what they want - FRESH content.
Similar to how most of us don’t like to eat food past its expiry date, search engines like Google want to ensure they’re serving up relevant, timely and fresh content to their users.
By blogging frequently and updating old blogs, you signal to Google that you’re a trusted expert - one that carefully cares for their website and for their users.
And remember, you can always repurpose a well-written blog into other forms of media such as:
Social media posts
E-books and downloadable PDFs
And more!
Acquiring Backlinks and Obtaining Digital PR
Word of mouth still remains one of the most powerful forms of marketing today.
Candidly, 99% of all of my own clients come through word of mouth.
Word of mouth marketing works because people want to invest in opportunities and experiences from the people they trust.
Acquiring a backlink and obtaining digital PR is similar to word of mouth marketing.
A backlink - when one website links to another - is a signal to Google, as well as your blog readers, that another website believes in your content - so much so, that they will link to it.
Earning a backlink has a significant impact on your website’s ranking position as well as overall site visibility.
While many websites successfully obtain backlinks organically, creating a blog that includes news, stories or newsworthy, educational content is one of the best tools to use when pitching to other brands, influencers, bloggers, and media outlets.
Not All SEO Blogs Are Created Equal
Writing high-quality content that ranks on the 1st page of Google and converts leads into paying customers is harder than it sounds.
A Search Engine Journal study found that 25% of people click the first result in Google, while only 2.5% click the tenth position.
The holy grail for any blog post and SEO writer is to be on the first page of Google and most ideally in the first three spots.
So how exactly do you get on the 1st page of Google? It’s both art, science, SEO training and some crazy deep dark Google algorithm secrets that very few people know (and no, sadly, I don't know all the secrets, but I can guess at some).
Here’s a brief overview of blog writing for SEO.
Blog Writing for SEO
Start with a smart SEO strategy using pillar blog posts
Pick the right targeted keywords that you actually have a chance to rank for
Include these keywords in your meta tags and meta descriptions
Link to high authority websites
Write scannable longer posts
Use a smart internal linking strategy
Add alt text to images
Create a link building strategy
Write the perfect headline
Do everything above and write for humans too
The list above is only just scratching the surface of blog writing for SEO, and it’s absolutely critical to know that the technical backend of your website plus how you upload your content will also determine the success of your content.
If your pages aren’t indexing, if your site speed is horrendous, if you aren’t using meta tags, it’s time to reconsider your approach to SEO.
Are Blogs Still Relevant with AI Search on the Rise? Absolutely — But the Game Has Changed
With Google’s AI Overviews and the rise of generative AI tools, it’s fair to ask: do blogs still matter for SEO?
The answer is yes — but not in the way they used to.
Today, ranking isn’t just about stuffing keywords or publishing endless surface-level content. Search engines are getting better at scanning for depth, authority, and usefulness. AI tools scrape the web for sources — and if your blog delivers genuinely helpful, original insights, it becomes part of the training data, the citations, and the sources AI draws from.
In other words: blogs don’t disappear with AI — they quietly fuel it.
At the same time, writing for and with AI has become its own skillset. Prompting, structuring, and editing AI-assisted drafts requires a level of expertise that most content teams are still developing. The goal isn’t to replace human strategy, but to blend AI’s efficiency with human judgment, voice, and originality. That’s where real SEO value is still being won.
Stay Competitive, Stay Visible
Look, I’m a huge fan of the saying “good content is good content.”
At the end of the day, digital marketing trends will change, SEO algorithms will evolve and who knows what the next big marketing disruptor will be (ChatGPT anyone?).
But, if you have good content in your pocket - it can always be repurposed, reused, and remarketed.
Blogging for SEO as an exercise in understanding your target audience, learning about what concerns them, what answers they’re looking for and how to meet your audience where they are.
Blogging requires you to write informative, engaging and highly strategic content - all of which is the foundation to any successful marketing plan.
Yes, blogs help SEO, but they also help build good, and often great content - and great content is worth its weight in gold.
