Ask our clients or anyone who has spent any time with the Blink;Tech staff and they will tell you: We go on endlessly about the importance of carefully crafted blog content. Really, we won’t shut up about it. We sound like a broken record. Yes, it can be annoying at times. But there is a good reason for it.
Good blog content is the best way to bring potential customers to your website, especially if you are a small business serving a local customer base.
The last part of the statement above is important — the part about small business. More often than not, it is the small business owner who is reluctant to invest in a blog for his or her website, but is more interested in search engine optimization (SEO) and/or social media marketing. This is precisely when we start sounding like a broken record. Why, you ask? Two reasons:
- Social media is driven by blog content. Think about the links you see on posts on Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, etc. When you click them, most every time you end up on a blog. In fact, social media platforms including Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram are considered “microblogs.” Regardless of which social media platform you prefer, the name of the game in social media marketing is creating and sharing great content to bring more visitors to your website.
- SEO relies on good website content. SEO has always been primarily a writers’ game. In the past however, there was much more focus on the coding/web design part of the equation, simply because there was less standardization on the web and more room for coding “tricks” to leverage your way to the top of the search results. These days, those tricks are a sure-fire way to get you banned from Google. On the other hand, having a blog on your website is the best way to put more search engine optimized content on your website.
Looking at this from the perspective of time, great blog content serves both long and short-term Internet marketing goals better than any other web marketing approach. Plus, it can be highly targeted to a specific area — meaning your local customer base.
Above you can see the effect one single blog can make to a website’s traffic. The two “bumps” are from a blog for a local Realtor we wrote and shared via social media about some exciting changes happening in downtown Sarasota, FL. On its peak day, the blog brought close to 2,000 new visitors to the website. Because the blog was only of interest to people who live, work, or are considering a move to Sarasota, it was an incredibly powerful marketing tool for this local Realtor. How powerful? Take a look below:
Both the graph and the table above cover a one-month period from January 12 to February 15, 2015. The Realtor has achieved his greatest success from very expensive pay-per-click ads (shown here as “Paid Search”) which put his website at the top of Google search results for certain search terms. Ideally, organic search would be number one on this list, and our job is to make that happen. And we do this through carefully crafted blog content that inspires shares on social media and, in turn, drives click-throughs to the website. So in the above table, “Social” traffic defines the users who saw a post on Facebook about the blog and clicked through to read it.
Now, you may bring up the very valid point that probably very few of those reading the article are shopping for a new home. This is where the SEO element of this strategy kicks in. When a blog is shared and generates traffic to a website, Google’s algorithms give it more authority to that website for the topic of the blog — in this case, “downtown Sarasota.” Because of this, the site will now be indexed higher and those Organic Search numbers will go up as people hunt for homes in — you guessed it — “downtown Sarasota.”
From the example above, you can see how one single blog can have tremendous positive effect on both the long and short game of Internet marketing to a small, local population. Is your business leveraging the power of good blog content? If not, give us a call. We’d love to talk to you about it!
