Blogging to Improve Search Engine Ranking

I would like to start by 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. Although I appreciated his attempt to make me feel better, I thought it was more important to understand why I failed him so 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 also provides a better understanding to the value of blogging to improve search engine ranking results.

My client’s journey began with a powerful desire for a life change. He turned a major corner by embracing good eating and exercise and got amazing results quickly. He learned that he could sculpt a new healthy reality by:

• setting a clear goal and knowing exactly what you want to achieve
• studying the problem and learning about available solutions
• changing what you do
• committing to a schedule
• measuring everything
• staying focused
• adjusting according to the results
• pushing 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 trying new things, such as landing pages for new visitors and studying on page actions to understand what visitors were looking for and what they 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, but that solutions to their immediate problems were more important.

He wanted more and so he attended a seminar in his area hosted by a local SEO company, who he eventually hired. 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 alarm bells—that “Aha!” moment I mentioned earlier about 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 search engines index these pages—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?