For many marketers and website owners, our daily to-do list is already taking up the majority of our day. However, all you need is 15 minutes each day (I like to do it first thing in the morning or while eating lunch) to read a few other industry blogs. Why waste your time reading other peoples’ blogs? Well, aside from using their experiences and expertise to further your own knowledge and keep up with industry trends, reading other blogs can actually end up helping your own SEO.

Here are a few ways reading other blogs can help your SEO:

1. Inspiration for your own content marketing.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from my SEO clients is that they don’t know what to write about for their content marketing; they feel like they have nothing good to say. Well no one says you can’t take your own spin on a great topic someone else wrote about! You could write a response blog (just make sure you link to the other post), which is great for getting a dialogue going, or you could take one or two nuggets of information from another blog post and expand upon it for your own blog or article marketing. By reading other industry and competitor blogs, you also get a good idea of what people ARE NOT writing about. What niche can you fill that no one else has a claim to yet? This is a great way to help differentiate your brand.
2. Blog comments = inbound links.

Blog commenting is a great source of links. Every time one website links to another that first website is passing along some of its link juice to the second site, which helps that second site perform better in the search engines. Just remember that more links is not always better. You don’t want to rely solely on blog comments for your link building, as the search engines like to see a diversified link portfolio. You also don’t want to give a blog owner the impression that you are spamming their blog with a dozen comments each day just so you can get more links from their site.
3. Get an idea of what keywords your competitors are targeting.

Great content should always be written for human readers first, search engines second. But when you’re reading a blog post that has been optimized for SEO you can usually get a pretty good idea of what keyword that post is going after. Knowing what keywords your competition is targeting can help with your own keyword research. You’ll have a better idea of how competitive certain keywords are, which keywords your target audience is using and what long tail keywords are/aren’t being used.
4. Find great guest blogging opportunities.

Every now and again, one of the industry blogs you read each day might put out a call for guest writers (they may already have an open invitation out there!). Guest blogging is a great way to get valuable inbound links, build your online brand presence and reputation, connect with your online audience and more. By becoming a loyal reader of a few industry blogs, should the call for guest writers ever come you’ll have a good idea of the kind of content they regularly publish. This will help you write a guest blog post that is more likely to appeal to the blogger/editor.

Source: searchengineoptimizationjournal.