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Blogging For Better Search Engine Ranking Results
September 19th, 2011 by Mardy Sitzer
I would like to start this post off acknowledging a failure. You see for years I’ve been sharing how important it is to blog. I emphasize this in every workshop I conduct and with every one of our clients. For years I have been getting that nod, smile and “not now honey” look. Lately I’ve been getting “I know it is important but not now honey” so I guess that is progress.
Recently one of my clients had an Aha! moment and so he directed his staff to start blogging. In fact he keeps joking that now that they are in the swing of things they want to blog like Seth Godin – every single day. So what made him pull the trigger?
He told me it was from my encouraging him for the past several years – a nice way of saying my nagging helped plant the seed. But the truth is my encouragement and nagging never got him to pull the trigger. Where I failed, and although I appreciated his attempt to make me feel better, I thought it was more important to understand why now for him so that I could share that with you.
He finally relented and shared with me how he ultimately built up the motivation to blog. The following is not just a short summation of his journey, but it is also provides a better understanding to the value of blogging for improved search engine ranking results.
My client’s journey began with a powerful desire for a life change and he turned a major corner embracing good eating and exercise and got amazing results quickly. He learned that he could sculpt a new healthy reality by:
• set a clear goal and know exactly what you want to achieve
• study the problem and learn about available solutions
• change what you do
• commit to a schedule
• measure everything
• stay focused
• adjust according to the results
• push harder
He began implementing that same process in his business and in his marketing.
He then tackled his website’s analytics and began to understand the impact of the numbers and committed to improving the results. We began supporting various marketing efforts and began to try new things. Landing pages for new visitors, studying on page actions to understand what visitors were looking for and valued rather than what he had been assuming they wanted.
As a B2B company in a competitive industry, he was surprised to discover that price wasn’t always the top priority for a large portion of visitors to his site as much as solutions to their immediate problems were.
He wanted more and so attended a seminar in his area hosted by a local SEO company to learn more and eventually hired that firm. He began to dive more deeply into understanding keywords and long tail keywords, search and ranking and began to thirst for better and better results. We then implemented a few more engagement tools on his website to learn more about his visitors and some clarity for his marketing began to emerge.
Now my client was investing time and money into internet marketing and wanted to learn more and more. I sent him an article that offered a deeper understanding of SEO so that he could better engage his vendor and make sound decisions.
That article had some information that set off bells – that Aha! moment for him regarding blogging. What he realized was:
• Blogging delivers fresh content to his website on a regular basis that is topic specific and filled with long tail keywords. Search engines love that.
• Blogging creates a new page with each entry and these pages are indexed by search engines – and they love that also.
• His competitors aren’t blogging and so with each one of his new posts, he begins to own these long tail keywords leaving his competitors to slip in their rankings while his site rises to the top of the search results page.
• Blog entries offer relevant internal linking opportunities, which search engines acknowledge. As each post centers on one topic and a service in his offering might be discussed or inferred, an inbound link to that service page is created.
• Blog article promotion provides a great opportunity to stay connected with customers and prospects and increases traffic back to the site, which in turn further peaks the interest of search engines.
• Good articles that are read keep visitors on your website page for a period of time and that signals the search engines that there is relevant content there. Search engines DO look at time on site statistics.
• Marketing your blog to directories, social sharing sites and social networking sites creates high value back links to your website and search engines value these back links.
My client is on a blogging roll now. How about you – are you getting closer to your Aha! moment? And if so, what are you doing about it?
one of the other key factors was this fact that sent me over the edge–There are over 694,000 searches conducted every second on google alone. my immediate response is to everything i can to tap into this opportunity
Great post here.
I have only recently begun to understand the importance of blogging on a regular basis, which is which I changed our website entirely to have more of a focus on blogging and social media – namely having a Twitter feed that appears on every page. It would appear that Google’s spiders also pick up the keywords that we Tweet about along with all the lovely fresh content in the blog posts.
The long tail keywords thing is something that I am still learning about to be honest, but your post has given me loads of ideas on what to blog about to keep the competitors on their toes!
I also didn’t realise about internal linking, which is something I am going to start doing now too so thank you so much for that little piece of valuable information.
I’m still not sure how to approach directories as yet, as they all seem very “samey” and I can’t see the value in them if I am honest, so perhaps a blog post from you (sorry for asking!) explaining that in more detail and how to do it would be very beneficial for me!
Cheers
Thank you for your input – it is always great to hear that I’ve been helpful in some way. Okay, now I feel obligated so stay tuned, I’ll get a post together on directories.
Brilliant! I look forward to it Mardy