Does a blog still help SEO?

Most product and service pages answer one question: what do you sell? The people you want to reach are asking many others first. A blog is where those answers live.

What a blog adds

• Pages for questions your product pages cannot answer. "How do I…" and "X vs Y" searches rarely land on a pricing page.
• Reasons for other sites to link to you. Nobody links to a features list. People link to a useful guide.
• A record that the site is alive. Regular, dated posts show a site that is maintained.

What does not help

Publishing for the sake of it. Ten thin posts on the same topic compete with each other and teach search engines that the site is repetitive. One thorough post beats five short ones.

A simple plan

1. List twenty questions customers ask before they buy.
2. Write one post per question, answering it in the first paragraph.
3. Link each post to the product page it relates to, and back.
4. Update the best ones every few months instead of writing new ones on the same subject.

Give it months, not weeks. Search traffic from a blog compounds slowly, and then all at once.