I have seen so many small business owners want to start a blog on their website with stars in their eyes. They think it will be a great way to interact with the throngs of people that are coming to their site to get their firsthand knowledge of all sorts of subjects.
Within 3 months, it will turn into a wasteland full of comments selling Rolex watches and Viagra knockoffs. In a bid to get the spam under control, the website owner will start limiting comments. Once they do that, they realize that no one but the spam bots were reading their blog in the first place.
As a result, they will often shutter their blog down and there won’t be entries for years.
The slightly larger business may even offload this to one of their employees. Those are often filled with industry awards or helpful information and stories that have little to do with the actual business being conducted.
The Big Lie SEO Consultants Tell You About Blogging.
Then some SEO will come along and tell business owners a lie. A dirty, dirty lie. They will say something along the lines of, “Google likes it when you blog. It shows your site is being updated!” I inadvertently used that same lie a long, long time ago when I was selling lies for a bunch of liars.
They will then proceed to include blogging as one of their essential services and why you need to write them a check every month.
They will write all sorts of public service type announcements and about developments in your industry, that look strangely like they are scraping old internet articles. (Because oftentimes they are.)
And lo and behold your rankings don’t move and still no one is reading your blog.
I will let you in on a secret. Those people have no idea what they are doing.
Blogging only to Blog is a Waste of Time
Google does not care about your site’s total word count one iota. Posts about safety or trends within your industry are a complete waste of time.
It doesn’t care about your copy and paste from an industry magazine or your vendor’s website. In that case, you are actually hurting your rankings by duplicating someone else’s content. However, if you are properly attributing it, you are helping their rankings by linking to them. You are so kind and thoughtful.
So Why Bother Blogging?
I was right to mothball that blog. It wasn’t helping at all.
Well, this is an entry on blogging written on a blog, so I will explain to you how it can actually help.
Longtail Keywords
Longtail Keywords satisfy buyer intent
Longtail keywords are subjects that are more specific than your primary keyword, but they usually carry a much higher buyer intent. This is one area where your blog can shine.
For example, if you are a dentist. People may find you as a dentist, but they may not find you as a someone who does the much bigger ticket item “bone grafting for dental implants.” or “single tooth replacement using a mini dental implant”.
If you are a plumber, they may or may not be finding you as a plumber on the first page, but they may find your blog entry titled, “Sewer line replacements are a common issue in Tucson’s Foothills”.
It’s all about finding a profit center being less commonly used. I call it big game hunting or sport fishing.
You can answer a question
Google gets asked a lot of questions. Why not be the one offering to answer it within your field?
For an example, “What all is involved in a transmission rebuild?”
If you can answer that question, there’s a better chance Google will serve your answer to people locally. I am going to assume I am writing to people in the Tucson or somewhere in Arizona area, since you stumbled upon this blog entry that attempts to answer the question of why you should blog.
Because within most questions, there is a buyer intent. If you are the one who answers that question’s intent, there is a better chance Google will serve your site first. And there is a better chance people will contact you, since you are helping them out.
Some tips for getting your content to rank higher.
Make it authoritative.
It it’s less than 300 words, you are more likely to be ignored completely.
If it’s a medium competitive term, I would go with around 600-1000 word count.
It’s it’s really competitive, you may need up to 2500 words.
Make it original
It has to be at least 50% original content. If you don’t think Google knows plagiarism or unoriginal content and who wrote what first, you are in for a surprise. I have seen countless “specialists” in niches of web development and marketing use the same templates over and over again.
Those people are not your friends. Look at the examples of sites they send you and copy some of the wording. Paste it into Google. If you see the same thing over and over again, throw them from your life with a catapult. They are lazy, too cheap to get writers and they are going to make 100% sure your site never ranks.
If you suspect your “SEO” company or employees of copy paste, run Copyscape on it. If they are copying and pasting, they are robbing you.
Use internal linking
Make sure you are linking back within your site and back to the relevant page. In our entry about, “What is involved in a transmission rebuild?” we would make sure there is a link within that text linking back to our page about transmission service.
I will show you an example of this directly. Blogging can be a very important and integral part of your search engine optimization strategy.
I used it naturally within the subject of blogging and why to do it, and linked back to the main page that talks about SEO. Oops, I did it again.
No one is going to read all that!
Google will. I promise you they will and they are going to grade you. The longer, the bigger words you use without repeating yourself, the better chance you have to rank. Plus, you have read this far.
Tucson Blog Writing Service
Tucson SEO Pros will work with you to build a strategy for blogging with the aim of increasing your return on investment and not blogging just to check an item off a to do list. We offer reasonably priced original content written by only American writers.