Don’t have a blog for SEO

A blog is an inverted chronological log. The last published article is the first thing you see. For certain businesses, it has many advantages to have a website (or a section) of this type.

A corporate blog will offer users many articles about the products or services that the company provides. In theory, that will help to increase organic traffic, and thus, sales.

How many times have you heard that you NEED to have a blog to get traffic from Google? That Google and Bing WANT fresh, frequently updated content because THAT is what users LOVE.

(My idea of “fresh content” may differ from yours)

Come on, can we stop saying that? That isn't true.

There is no indication whatsoever in Google/Bing Webmaster guidelines that having a blog is mandatory for SEO purposes.

I've seen hundreds of corporate blogs going from almost none to painfully zero traffic. Nobody reads them; they don't get any relevant click, they don't add anything to the bottom line. For its mere existence (that does have a cost in time/maintenance/content creation) and their negligible impact on SEO efforts can be considered a negative loss: the more you do, the worse for the company.

Does some business have a blog? Yes, and some of them with excellent results.

Do all of the corporate blogs have good SEO results? No. Most of them are entirely irrelevant.

Then why are so many SEOs creating/suggesting blogs for organic traffic acquisition purposes?

Survivor Bias: After analyzing some very successful corporate blogs, we believe that it is possible to imitate the tactic for having similar success without seeing the reality: we are looking at the few success cases and not the thousands of losers.

Hive Mentality/Fear of Missing Out: If all people are creating blogs for their websites, we should have one blog, too, right?

Overestimate the company's relevance: Some big companies can have many eyeballs looking at everything they do: journalists, analysts, stakeholders, even hackers. Everything that, let's say, Amazon or Microsoft publish is worthy of the public's attention. So you think that your business can grab some attention too. It fills my heart with pain to be me who has to tell you this, but 9.5/10 times nobody gives a fuck about your company.

Underestimate the costs of blogging: Most companies, regardless of their size, face problems keeping up the publishing pace. They don't have much material/ideas for writing as they expected initially; the time allocated to writing is not enough. They rely on freelancers or external agencies to create content, but they are super-generalist writers, so they can't create anything profound or exciting enough to make a difference.

Believing in the lie of the "naturally-organically" acquired links: "Create good content, get links, increase your authority, get more traffic and sales, repeat." If your website isn't getting links already, your chances of receiving any just because you have a blog (without extra outreach/link-building efforts) are pretty low.

One (blog) to rule them all: the idea that every type of content can (and should) be part of the blog, including job offers, How to’s, Interviews, Infographics, Knowledge Bases. Everything can be published as a blog post, so why don’t do it?

"Let's make a blog" is the laziest, most tedious, and technically worst answer for an SEO consultant to have. It's one of the silver bullets of inexperienced SEOs.

So, before jumping into create a blog as a core pillar of your organic traffic acquisition strategy, try to figure out if there are any other content that you can create without a blog. Especially product pages, which tends to be closer to conversion.