We’ve written a lot about the importance of blogging and a good question we’ve been asked is when should I use a blog vs just adding a new page to my website. Please see below the benefits of each of the options to be able to choose what is best for your site.
Benefits of a blog
The main benefit of a blog is that the posts have a date on each of them and in the blog home page, you see a feed of posts from most recent to least recent. By having recent posts that are dated clearly, it tells visitors that your business is alive and well. If you've been posting for some time and have built up a history of posts, visitors can see that you're quite established.
The blog provides a nice way of keeping your content nicely arranged and you can apply tags to posts which help your visitors discover more information on a specific topic as well as searching all blog posts.
The other benefit of writing in a blog is that the layout is fixed as a single column view, so if you’re posting content more regularly, it’s faster to add content without having to consider the layout of your page.
What content goes best in a blog
- Time-bound content - such as news updates
- Educational content - especially when part of a series of topics
- Content that you’ll be sharing regularly or want people to subscribe to - the Rocketspark blog has social sharing and RSS feeds built-in.
- Content that may not be easily found by usual navigation methods - the Rocketspark blog has a search feature built-in.
Impact of posts vs pages on search results
The impact on search results depends more on how you do the essentials of SEO rather than whether you are using the blog or pages. Here’s an explanation of how SEO elements are treated in blog posts and pages.
Blog
- Title tag and URL is generated automatically from the blog post title
- The blog post title is also the H1 heading on your post
- H2 and H3 headings are created in the text block title
- The meta description is automatically generated from the first paragraph of your blog post
Pages
- Title tag and meta description are created in the Get found online area in your Dashboard
- The page URL is automatically created from the page name
- The headings are created with the Big Heading and Text Block titles
See our SEO guide to understand the terms mentioned above if they are not familiar to you.
From a Google ranking point of view, there's not really a big difference between putting that information on regular pages as opposed to blog posts. However, where it does make a difference is whether you put all of that information on one single long page that covers a wide range of topics and having lots of separate pages that are more specific to certain topics. If a page is about one specific topic, and all of the content is relevant to that topic, Google is more likely to rank that page for relevant searches than if the page is covering a wide range of topics. This idea is called long-tail SEO and we recommend checking out our own blog series on long-tail SEO:
- Long-tail SEO - Part 1: What Amazon can teach you about search rankings
- Long-tail SEO - Part 2: How to find and write to your keywords
One final thing to remember, if you have specific pages/posts on specific topics, those pages might get indexed for those searches in Google. So for some people, those pages will be the first page of your website that they visit. However, you can also showcase this content to your other website visitors by making sure the navigation path from the home page to this content is clear using buttons.