March 3, 2016: Didit has been bullish on blogging for many years. More than a year ago we wrote the following:
Make no mistake: social media and micro-blogging has its place in the Web marketing mix. Social media gives you a great way to acquire customers, participate in relevant business conversations, amplify your voice, and extend the reach of your online publishing efforts. But don’t make the mistake of building your Web marketing castle on somebody else’s land.
So it was good to see some new data, cited by Tom Pick over at Business2Community.com, supporting the notion that blogs are indispensable tools for gaining influence and search visibility.
Here are three data points from Mr. Pick’s report:
1. Companies with blogs have almost twice as many inbound links as companies that don’t maintain them.
2. Websites (including blogs) remain the most popular (91 percent) method for organizations to market their wares, beating email, social media, and paid search.
3. SEO leads (which typically arise because searchers are attracted to an article posted on a blog) have a 14.6 percent close rate, compared to 1.7 for outbound leads created by paid media.
Fighting Blogger’s Block
GIF from giphy.com
While most would agree that blogs are indispensable tools for gaining real SEO benefits — many businesses — especially SMBs — are unaccustomed to publishing content on a regular basis. Few small businesses have the resources — internally or via an agency — required to become full-fledged publishers. They might even wonder what they could possibly write about that would be interesting enough to sustain the blog over the long-term period necessary to acquire SEO benefits. For these people, we would point out the following:
1. You likely have information internally you can leverage for blog content. Any business that’s had a presence over time — either offline or online — is likely in a good position to serve up content attractive to its niche audience. For example, an accountancy firm likely has a very good idea about the typical questions that people ask in regard to taxes, estate planning, and other issues tackled by a CPA. An HVAC firm has a good idea of the top 10 — or top 100 — questions asked by people seeking to buy, improve, repair, or replace an HVAC system. Organizing these questions into FAQs and using them to populate individual blog posts is an excellent way to repurpose them into content likely to attract the attention of searchers. If this content provides real, authoritative answers to these questions, it has a high likelihood of being included in Google’s Knowledge Vault — an area of organic content very important today, especially since Google has removed ads from its right-rail area but will continue to run Knowledge Vault entries in this space.
2. Content curation — if done well — can result in content that’s as popular as original “built from scratch” content. Creating content on your blog likely to attract attention from searchers doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel for each post. Summarizing what other people are saying – and writing – about issues in your business niche is a respectable, relatively low-effort way to create digests whose value lies in its brevity and summary nature. For example, we’ve been writing a lot in the past two weeks about Google’s recent changes to its Adwords system. We’re also aware that we’re not the only ones out there with strong opinions about the change. So part of our coverage has been to sum up what other people are saying about the issue. Reaching out to other authorities in your space makes it apparent that you keep a close watch on doings in your business niche, an impression that many prospects and buyers will find favorable.
3. You may not have to blog that much to beat your competition. Many SMBs have invested in their web properties and content marketing capabilities, but many have not. For example, when we sampled some local SMBs on Long Island, including lawyers, restaurants, and even larger entities – such as New York-based hospitals — we found that many websites were archaic, not mobile-friendly, and basically invisible in search. It’s quite possible that even with a modest effort on your part – say a blog that posts once a week – you’ll be able to beat your less active competitors in the visibility battle.
Remember: when you build blog content, any link equity it accumulates is permanent. Every endorsement your blog content acquires adds to your overall site credibility. Social media is great and you should have a presence. But the foundation of your strategy needs to be based on your domain, your site, and your blog.
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