Search Engine Optimization

I’m going to throw an idea out there that goes against everything I know as a social SEO professional. It may be a cardinal sin of social media, but what if you just closed the comments section on your business blog entirely? I know I’ve written about getting more value from your blog by using it to connect with your target audience, but what if your blog isn’t connecting with them in the comments section?

Now, every blogger loves to feel like their blog is loved. Comments are usually a good sign that you’re producing the “right” content, meaning it is something your audience is interested in. Comments mean you’re content is resonating with your readers and they want to engage in a conversation with you.

However, you can’t judge the success of your blog solely by how many comments you are getting. For every 20 people that read your blog post, maybe only one person bothers to leave a comment (not counting the spam comments your blog automatically filters). That’s why you have to take every comment with a grain of salt. Sometimes the only people who bother to comment are the ones who vehemently disagree with your post. Don’t assume this means that your entire audience feels this way.

It may be because I run an SEO blog, but I’ve found that a lot of the comments going live on my Brick Marketing blog in the last few months have been from other SEO and Internet marketing firms and not potential clients that I was trying to engage. Obviously an SEO firm knows the link building value of getting a link from a trusted industry blog, so it makes sense that they would find my blog and leave comments. But here is the thing; I don’t want to connect with my competitors! I don’t write blogs and articles for the benefit of other SEO companies, I do it for the benefit of my potential clients: marketing professionals, business and website owners, web developers and so forth.

Now, if I were trying to sell ad space on my blog (like most professional bloggers) I wouldn’t really care who was leaving the comments. I just want to be able to show how popular my blog is with a specific audience so I can charge more for banner ads. But I’m not blogging to sell ads; I’m blogging to build my business. I want to grow my online presence, establish my reputation as a trusted white hat SEO professional and educate potential clients on all things SEO.

I decided to run an experiment on the Brick Marketing blog. After each post, instead of having the comments section, I gave readers my lead form to fill out if they were interested in learning more about Brick Marketing and SEO. Guess what happened? My conversion rate nearly tripled! My lead form conversion rate went from 8% to 22%, a staggering jump. I was getting no comments, but more leads—which is exactly what I blog for.

Am I recommending that site owners go out and close their own comments section right now? No. But if you’re blog isn’t getting the comment love from the people you want, maybe you should consider limiting the comments that go live. You have to decide what you end game is and why you blog. Do you want to grow your business? Get new clients? Encourage someone to download your latest whitepaper? Will leaving the comments section open help or hinder those goals?

I’ve written my share of posts explaining why a business blog is valuable, but some site owners still feel like blogging is just another uphill battle for their business to take on. It’s no easy task setting time aside every day to write a new blog post and then commit to promoting it (essential for success!) once they go live. Every site owner struggles to come up with relevant topics, attract loyal readers and build their reputation as an industry authority. Blogging, as part of an inbound marketing campaign, is an incredibly long term process and it’s very easy to lose faith after investing three months of hard work and not seeing the return you were expecting.

The worst thing you could do as a site owner is launch your blog and then let it go stagnant. While I truly believe that just about every business can benefit from having a blog, I’d rather you not launch a blog until you’re ready and know you can commit than create a blog and put it on the back burner for the next six months.

I wrote my first post for the Search Engine Optimization Journal on March 18, 2007 and have been publishing at least post every day (Monday-Friday anyway) since then. My company launched an integrated business blog back in January of this year (again, at least one post a day) and I even create a blog for my SEO consultant site (started as one a day, now down to one a week). Between me and my employees at Brick Marketing we are pumping out as many as 4 or 5 350-500 word blog posts a day across the three blogs. That’s a lot of blogging!

While every industry is different, the world of SEO (and marketing in general) demands that companies and consultants operate at least one blog; it’s pretty much expected. But this means that there are an overabundance of marketing blogs that cater to a wide variety of audiences interested in marketing: small business owners, web developers and site owners, copywriters, consultants and other marketing professionals, to name a few. The Internet is saturated with marketing blogs!

So why do I bother?

At the very least, a business blog helps your company be more transparent. It’s a place to connect with your customers and let your brand’s personality shine through. It’s a forum for your company to share knowledge, promote your own products (although you should keep promotional posts to a minimum) and tell your side of the story.

Secondly, I stay very realistic about my expectations when it comes to blogging. I know that one blog post, no matter how inspired, is not going to generate 100 leads for my company; that’s just not the way it works. There are so many other blogs my target audience could read instead and I know I’m not the biggest player in the SEO world. I blog to find that one diamond in the rough client whose needs I am perfectly suited to meet. My blog posts are how I find and connect with those potential clients.

I believe that content marketing (like blogging) is the foundation for which all of your Internet marketing is built upon. Without content marketing, you will never gain any traction. It may be a competitive field, but you can’t compete at all unless you are willing to try!

Blogging isn’t a necessary evil; it’s just necessary.

In my 12+ years as an SEO professional, I’ve found that just about every business can benefit from publishing a company blog. It doesn’t matter if it’s B2B or B2C, or what industry your business operates in—a good business blog can be invaluable for your SEO and Internet marketing in general. There are probably hundreds of blog posts out there full of great reasons why you should start a company blog. (I have even written a few such posts myself).

But are there any good reasons to NOT launch a company blog?

If you think launching a blog is enough.
“If you build it, they will come,” doesn’t work with business blogging. You can’t throw up a blog and hope that readers are going to magically appear. It take a lot of work and time to get your blog noticed, attract a loyal readership and build your blog to be a reputable source of industry news and advice. Without a strong content promotion campaign, your blog is like a ship that has never left port. It floats, but doesn’t really do much else of value.

If you don’t have anyone to write new posts.
For most businesses, the number one problem with content marketing is actually creating the content. You may not be the best writer on your staff, you may not have the time to write 2-3 blog posts a week (hint: you do), but you have to find someone who has the skills and the time! Launching a business blog and failing to regularly update it means you’re sitting on stale content. It can negatively reflect on your brand and won’t attract any new readers. What good is an outdated blog?

If you are just doing it for SEO.
Content must always be written for the reader, never the search engines! Yes, a business blog is a critical component of any inbound marketing campaign (which includes SEO), but that can’t be the only reason to decide to launch a business blog. If that’s the only value you can see, you’re focus is too narrow and you’ll end up pigeonholing yourself. Don’t lose the forest for the trees with your blog!

If you’re doing it because you are “supposed” to.
If you aren’t excited to write for your business blog, you’re readers are going to notice. The best blogs have personality and useful insights for their readers. They don’t just rehash the same tired information in the same boring way. Yes, you probably should have a business blog, but there has to be some internal motivation to update it with great content. If you don’t believe in it, no one else will.

I am a huge fan of blogging (obviously so, seeing as how I have been writing for this one for the last four years) for numerous reasons. Content marketing is one of the most critical components of any web marketing campaign because it can be leveraged across all mediums. A blog post isn’t limited to existing solely on that blog. It can be shared on social networking sites, submitted to social bookmarking sites, used to develop your company newsletter and more.

Still not convinced? Here are 7 reasons a company blog can be valuable:

1. Establish yourself as an industry authority
Customers want to purchase from/work with the best in the business. Routinely updating a company blog can help you build brand’s reputation as an industry expert and valuable resource.

2. Help educate your consumers
Having an educated target audience can make it much easier for you to promote your products/services. If potential customers have a firm understanding of your industry, it is easier to position your brand as the solution to their problem. You don’t have to explain as much general information in your messaging and can focus on more important topics.

3. Build your online brand presence
Individual blog posts can rank in the search engines like any page on your website. When optimized to include the most appropriate keywords, your blog can help your increase your brand presence in the SERP for the related long-tail keywords searches.

4. Humanize your brand
People like to do business with other people, not faceless corporations. When you attach an actual name to your blog (whether it be your CEO, VP of Marketing, etc), you are giving your company an actual persona. Having content written by a person and not “Company Name” means you can afford to throw a little style and personality into your posts.

5. Promote your products/services
A business blog should mainly be used to inform and educate, but a little self-promoting post every now and again is perfectly acceptable. Your business blog is the perfect place to announce new product launches or let your readers know about an upcoming tradeshow or conference you’ll be appearing at. Someone who reads your blog has already self-identified themselves as your target audience.

6. Respond to a crisis
When bad news breaks, companies don’t have the luxury of hiding out until it blows over or holding a press conference next week. The public expects a response and they expect it now. Silence is almost never the best option. A company blog is a good place to issue public statements and updates as a situation develops. You want to keep the lines of communication open and transparent.

7. Build links
A company blog can become part of your internal linking structure. Not only should you link relevant posts to each other, but you can also link different blog posts to pages of your website and vice-versa. This kind of horizontal linking can help spread link juice and increase the trust factor of some of your internal pages.

Anyone who has been operating a blog for a while is bound to have a few posts they aren’t particularly proud of. Maybe you couldn’t think of anything to write about that day. Maybe you were under deadline. Maybe you had a lot of other projects going on, so you focused more on the word count than what you were actually saying. Somewhere, in the recesses of your blog (whether personal or business) are diamond-in-the-rough posts waiting to be rediscovered.

Breathing new life into your old blog posts can help them re-index in the search engines, potentially driving more traffic to your blog. It also tightens up the overall value of your blog, since low-quality content will be replaced with valuable content. This can remove any red flags/penalties the search engines are using to rank your blog.

Here are a few things you can do to recycle and reinvigorate your old blog posts:

Add content
See if there is any new information that you can add to an old blog post to make it more relevant. Did you make a prediction in that post? Has it come true? Are there any points you can expand further upon that you just left untouched the first time around? Look at your old blog post like a first draft. What is missing? What kind of content needs to be edited/added/changed to make it as good as the rest of your posts? Oftentimes our less successful blogs are shorter and only provide a surface-level amount of information. Really dig into the post and make it worth the effort.

Re-optimize
Maybe the post is well-written, but it didn’t seem to do as well in the search engines as your other posts. Go back and re-optimize that particular post. What different keywords can you incorporate into the title, H1 tags and post content to make it search spider friendly? You might even consider changing the URL of the post if it isn’t doing well. If the post has an image, incorporate an image tag so the search spiders can “see” it and pull it into the search results.

One year later
Right a follow-up post to one of your older posts and link back to the original. Was there a post you wrote a year ago that got a lot of attention? What about that posts was so captivating to your audience? What has happened since then?

Push old posts in new ways
I’d bet the scope of your online networking as grown substantially in the last few years, maybe just in the last few months. Some of your connections may have never even seen your older posts. Push those posts (provided they are still relevant) through your social networking channels and engage new connections with older content. Just because you wrote it 6 months ago, that doesn’t mean everyone knows it exists.