Last month I was talking to a client about ways they could get better search engine results and more traffic to their website. (They recently published a new website and saw their rankings and traffic drop, as happens quite often with major changes.)
Anyway, after taking care of necessary 301 redirects, fixing some of the basic SEO elements on the site, and setting up their Google Plus local business listing (here’s a video and cheat sheet if you want to do this too), my next recommendation was that they should get back to publishing blog posts.
For this business, their blog was not updated along with the rest of their site. Their blog is a separate site with a unique domain relative to their main corporate site. But what I noticed was that it had been nearly a year since their last blog post.
The Blogging Doldrums
This is a typical problem. Many businesses start a blog, either on their main site or somewhere else, they assign someone to work on it so it gets good attention for a while. But then normal work pressures creep back in, while the person working on the blog starts to lose interest in the upkeep.
Blog posts become less frequent and eventually stop. Once the habit is lost, there’s almost no going back. The interest dies and the site goes stagnant. With no new content appearing, it falls down, and potentially out of, the search results. Generating less traffic it’s not helping as many people find the business.
And yet, that blog sitting there isn’t completely lost. It still shows up in some searches, and it still gets some traffic. That was true for this client.
The Benefits of Taking Action
So I recommended that they start publishing blog posts again. They followed my advice and put up a new post on June 23. Look at the graph below (generated from Google Webmaster Tools) which shows the number of impressions and clicks each day.
On June 23 (vertical green line), when the new post was published, the number of impressions (as represented by the blue line) in the search results nearly doubled. There were 145 impressions on June 22 and 279 on June 23. Not quite as visible in the graph, but still significant, was the increase in the number of clicks, as shown on the red line. There were 6 clicks on June 22 and 14 on June 23.
Since that new blog post, impressions and clicks have varied, as they usually do, but the level has stayed nicely above the previous level.
The Moral of the Story
The moral of the story is this… If you have a business blog, and you have been ignoring it, it’s time to give it some new attention.
The simple act of publishing a new post is likely to boost visibility to your site. And that can bring in more traffic, more potential leads and sales, for your business.
Need blog post ideas? Here’s a recent article.
