Keep Blogging or Lose SEO Rankings? | James Dooley

James Dooley: The question is how important is blogging for SEO? I would produce you five blogs a month, really? Did I right? Huh? Yeah, sorry, that's an old school content. But don't just write content for the sake of writing content. People are writing too much content. You need to make sure you've got the most relevant internal. Like said, it's a very old school SEO agency type myth just to get paid. I think that he's going to come back and say you need more links. So here's one of the questions that we've been asked and it's quite an important one way for. So how important is it to keep up the blogging for SEO? Now this is quite an old concept of way back in the day used just knock out blogs. You'd always speak to business owners and you say oh how many blogs you doing? And often even SEO agencies these days are still or will produce you five blogs a month. Sorry, that's an old school concept. So what we prefer to do is look at the site as in its whole and the niche in its whole and kind of work out, you know, a contextual map and what are you ticking all of the boxes within that map? If you're not, guess what? You've got some work to do. You need to not necessarily write blogs, but it could be creation of power pages, things like this to focus on those specific niche topics. Um, and then obviously expanding that and then you'll get to a point where it becomes just editing, editing, improving, always progressively optimizing. Not sure if you, yeah, I mean on that, where people are asking how many blogs do I need to do a day? How many blogs do I need to do a week? It's not, that's not the way it works. That's a very like you said, it's a very old school SEO agency type myth just to get paid. I'm going to do one blog on one backlink a week. You might already have enough backlinks. You might already have enough blogs. It might be about if anything it could be about actually pruning some of the blogs that you do have, which is something that we do a lot of. Yeah, I mean, I proactively go out looking for sites that done 3,000 pages on the site and I'm like, all your competition have got 250 pages. Why have you got 3,000? Oh, I got told I need to do two blogs every day and I've got two full-time writers and I'm just like, you're just blogging for the sake of blogging. And actually, there's a big concept that's called the cost of information retrieval. And just actually writing content for writing it sake that doesn't get traffic, that doesn't get impressions and clicks that's coming through, that's feeding the knowledge vault of Google, actually is harming your site. And that's what people need to understand this. I'm absolutely obsessed with making certain that you cover the topic in its entirety, that you do a proper topical map. But don't just write content for the sake of writing content. It has to be getting some sort of clicks or impressions and then it needs to be make it so it's feeding information. You're covering those entities and covering that topic that you be coming to be seen to be an expert. I'm not saying that every single blog needs traffic because some might just get impressions and some might be there for social media with like lots of images or case studies or you might have won some awards and stuff like that, so some might be trust signals. But generally speaking, people are writing too much content, and especially now with AI, it's made it so much easier. Now what people need to do is it's not the quantity, it's quality over quantity and they need to sit down, do a proper topical map, understand that actually instead of writing two new articles for the next two days, going back in and optimizing two old articles that might have once had traffic that's not been updated for a while, that might still be evergreen article that's important. Go and improve those articles. Go into Google Search Console. See what questions might be showing up that you might be missing. Searching for it and seeing what your competition have and they might have certain questions or entities or hyponyms or synonyms and stuff like that need to go on that page. The more you start writing the content, the more you start understanding semantic triples are important. So when you start understanding and improving the content that you write, and you can keep going into, but I can guarantee if you write something, you keep improve it, you look, even myself I go and look back and I look at something I wrote six months ago and twelve months ago and I go, did I write that? Did I really write that? That is shocking. And you can go back into it and improve upon it, remove the fluff, make it more concise, get the semantic triples. So you're actually trying to rank for the featured snippets, trying to make certain your headings are in the correct kind of manner. Normally question to answer kind of base heading structure. Making certain that even the positioning of the headings. So make it certain that if you've got one and it's really like I always say high salience, which means like really on top, it the central entity of what the page search intent should be about, and positioning those H2s in order of the highest relevance at the top to the least relevant at the bottom. Called the macro and the micro content. Getting that bit set up, what I've seen insane results by moving exactly the same content but moving the heading further up and then or moving one further down should be higher up the page in the macro content. And it's like, what, same content, but it's so like Surfer is still score exactly the same. It's exactly the same content, but the positioning of the content can also matter as well. I think one of the concepts you mentioned there as well just for people obviously tuning in and might not understand, so cost of retrieval. What we're talking about here is it's the cost to the search engine to retrieve that content. Now obviously if you're publishing more and more and more new pages, there's a big cost there to the search engine to index that page, to crawl the page, to index the page and then to keep it in its archive. So what you're essentially trying to do is you're trying to make your website as lean as possible with the best, most valuable information available. Yeah, and I think another big one on that is that people don't, I mean link sculpting is an old term that's used, right? But it still works. Like when you start looking at page rank distribution and link juice distribution, if you've got a thousand pages on your website and you're going through from the homepage to a category and that category has got two hundred pages on there, right? As opposed to fifty pages on there, you're diluting that internal link juice from your internal links buy two hundred instead of buy fifty. If a hundred and fifty of those articles are serving you no purpose, no impressions and no clicks, get rid of them. So it kind of I've reversed it around from when the question is, how important is blogging for SEO? Yes, it's very important is the answer. Yes, it's very important to get topical authority and you can't just write one page about mortgages and think you're going to rank number one for mortgage broker. You need to do a collection of pages about it. But don't go too wide. Try and make certain that all pages are getting um clicks and impressions. Go and set up server logs. Get the server logs. It like set up, load it into something like Jetoctopus and see where Google bot's crawling on your site. And if Google bot's not crawling part of your site, it's because they don't like the content and there's not enough, potentially enough links as well. So be cleaning those up is especially certain ones where a page isn't indexed and it's been up for three, four months and it's, if it's been crawled and not been indexed, that's Google telling you I'm not indexing this, it's not good. So blogging is important, but just blogging for the sake of blogging needs to be stopped and needs to be stopped now because you're wasting money and you're wasting Google's resources. I'd say another thing that James just hit on there as well is very important. If you load up in SEO frog analyser or Jetoctopus and you see a certain page is being visited a lot more than the rest of them, that page is a very important page that you need to make sure you've got the most relevant internal links on, yeah? Because it's going to get picked up a lot quicker and then it should increase the crawl rate of the other pages that you're internally linking to. M times we've looked into server logs and a page gets visited once, maybe every three months, and then you see this page has been visited every other day for the last two months and it's got no internal links and you're like, wow, big opportunity. Yeah, let's tweak this to see where I can integrate into the other pages of the site. What's related? And all of a sudden, everything starts moving up. Yeah, for sure. I mean, some people become obsessed with thinking that oh, I'm going to speak to Kson, the founder of Search, and think that he's going to come back and say you need more links. But actually you need to get all your ducks lined up before you even, before the links are even going to give you the power that it deserves through to your site. And like you just touched upon there with internal links, if you're getting some decent quality links and technically your site is built out well and then you add those internal links, you're leveraging the power from your links. And it's not just about the links, it's about getting everything set up from technical, good quality content, topical authority, internal links, and then the icing on the cake is the backlinks that coming to kind of run up on it. You wouldn't believe the amount of times we've actually had even customers, a searcher come and say, oh, these links aren't working. And then I spend twenty minutes just quickly go through the website and say, why not? Let's try and fix this area. And sometimes some can actually be the site's being hacked, yeah, and the runaway. Yeah, I'm like, why don't we fix this? And all of a sudden, bam. And it's like, so the links do work. It's just your technical wasn't quite there. There's other, there's a huge, it's like a huge organic aspect. It's not just link building. That's one area, and it's to be fair, I would say it's an important area now with the age of AI. However, technical is still probably fundamental. Yeah, for sure. I think all pillars of SEO are importance. Technical, content, topical authority, internal links, backlinks, get all of them right and then try to get traffic diversity as well and stuff like that. But blogging for the sake of blogging is such an old school method. Try to make certain that if anything you're doing less but higher quality. That's trying to get that social media engagement, trying to get the traffic diversity coming into those blogs. Try to get a couple of links through to each article, internal linking through to most relevant pages. And then from there, then your whole site will start to lift up. If you have been hit with anything like helpful content update, normally, normally, and don't, don't, this is not like a one-size fix all, but normally you've gone too wide and too off topic. If anything, you need to bring it back into what your core focus of what your site is and try to streamline it and actually do less content but higher quality. And what's really important with that as well is don't expect it to then be like you start doing that today, next week is going to show improvements. It'll probably be the next Core algorithm update. And that's what a lot of people get wrong. You have to wait till the next Core algorithm update because it's almost classified the website. Yeah, so obviously we hope you've answered, we've we've answered the question of how important is blogging for SEO. To kind of streamline it, yes, it's very important. Yes, you need topical authority, don't go too wide, go quality over quantity. And if you've got any questions or anything, leave it in the comment section and anything specifically to do with blogging for SEO, we'll come back to you and answer so.