Is Just Writing On Your Blog Enough To Get Your Blog To Rank In Google?
Bloggers want to have their sites rank well in search engines. Not only because it is pretty cool to type something into Google and see your own website show up, but because it means an increased number of people will read what you write.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) advice for how to improve your website's rankings in search engines comes in many shapes. The most commonly shared strategy is to increase the number of backlinks to your content, because the more backlinks to your site, the better your site will rank in Google.
Another strategy is to post regularly on social media, and include links to all of your new blog content. The thinking is that people will discover your posts on social media, then click through to your website. Also, having activity on social media platforms that references your site may be a ranking factor that Google considers.
A third category of advice involves posting content to your blog consistently and more frequently. The more posts you have, the more opportunities there are for readers to find you. But not only that, having regular fresh content on your site is itself a ranking factor considered by Google. So its not that you have lots of content, but that you are constantly adding to how much content you have.
There are so many more pieces of blogging advice out there. You could literally read non-stop for months on the topic and continuously find new angles. But I think the above 3 general categories of blogging advice are the most common and most likely effective.
I have been blogging, with various levels of drive and intensity, for a few years now. And I have wanted the whole time for my blog to start to rank well and to receive regular traffic. So far that has not ever really been the case, but I have had times of better and worse results. I have reached relative highs in terms of rankings and traffic.
It has gone in cycles. I get extremely motivated to do whatever it takes to make my blog work. So I start to write and post more. But that is pretty intensive work, and blogging is a slow, long-term game. But I get impatient and want results faster than that. So I try to speed things up by generating backlinks. Usually I do this by searching for other blogs and leaving relevant blog comments with a link back to my own blog. At the same time, I figure that as effortless as it is to post a link to my blog posts on Twitter, I might as well do that too.
Before long I am mixing and matching these methods. And when results do start to come in the form of better rankings, increased number of keywords getting impressions (as shown in Google Search Console), and more traffic, I am unable to determine which of these actions were most responsible. I want to know what is the most effective activity, so I can really focus on that, but when I muddle the strategies, I can't pull them apart later.
I have come to think that posting to social media is probably near worthless. Unless you have a large following, or are able to get re-posted by accounts with lots of followers, posting on social media is just shouting into a void. It genuinely seems like a waste of time. And just thinking about how I use social media personally, I usually do not click through links to read other people's blogs. I would guess most people operate like that, and so even if my posts do get seen by someone, they won't result in blog traffic.
I sometimes believe that building blog comment backlinks is fairly effective in achieving my blogging goals, and sometimes think it is something like a 2/10 effectiveness - not totally worthless, but surely there are better things I could do with my scarce time.
I sincerely believe that writing more and publishing more is one of the most impactful activities I can do. Bloggers are constantly talking about how consistent publishing was key to their success. And whenever I find blogs that get lots of traffic, when I look up how many blog posts they have (either through URL: search queries on Google, or in their sitemaps), they have several hundred or even over 1000.
I believe deep down that just publishing a lot on my blog is enough to improve rankings and traffic. And I want to believe that it can be that simple and straightforward as far as Google is concerned. That they aren't requiring people to do anything more than publish to their site. Unfortunately, I have always corrupted any attempt at testing that, because of my impatience and dabbling with other tactics.
But I am hoping this time is going to be different.
I hadn't done anything at all to this blog in 8 months. Well, almost nothing. I posted one blog post in that 8 months. But I didn't do any blog commenting for backlinks or social media posting. And my site has suffered for it. My graph of impressions in Google Search Console has plummeted. And my site traffic is near zero.
But I have again become motivated to grow this blog. I have published 4 blog posts this month (August 2023). This post you are reading now will be post number 5. And this time I am hoping I can ignore all the other stuff and just stick to publishing content consistently. I won't do blog comments, and I won't do social media. I am just going to write and publish. I would like to publish every single day, but that isn't going to happen, so I'm thinking 1 post per week is a good minimum, but will shoot for twice a week. And if all I am doing is publishing, then this time I can see if it truly is enough on its own to improve my blog's results.
I have only been back at it for a couple weeks, but I have already seen the tiny beginnings of results. My blog had completely fallen out of Google search results, even when I typed in my blog name, but now I am showing up again for a couple things. Also, my impressions graph in Google Search Console has gone up ever so slightly. Hopefully this is the beginning of an upward trend.
I want to shout out a blog post I read recently that got me motivated again. It is by Paige Brunton about how she blogged consistently for a year and got great results. I'm going to give that a shot and hope it works for me too.
So I guess I'm not really providing a solid answer to the question in the title of this blog post. But I am laying out a plan to hopefully find out. And I will hopefully either write a follow up article or just come back and add to this blog post to share the findings.
Do you think all you need to do to have success with you blog is post consistently? Do you think any other factor is more important than publishing (maybe backlinks?)? What are some of your favorite blogging strategies? If you run a blog that has significant traffic, what was a turning point you reached where everything improved by leaps and bounds? Let me know in the comments!
Other Articles to Read
Comments
Post a Comment