blogging for business
TRANSCRIPT
Blogging for Business
The British Library12th February 2015
About Me
@[email protected]/EmilyHill1
• Set up Write My Site in 2006:www.writemysite.co.uk
• Innovating for Growth participant in 2013
Contents
• The power of being an expert• The best blogging platform• The length of the perfect blog post• Google and blogs• Finding inspiration• Social media and blogging• Q&A
THE POWER OF BEING AN EXPERT
“But I’m not an expert!”
Showing vs. telling
THE BEST BLOGGING PLATFORM
What’s great about WordPress?
WordPress is:• SEO-friendly• Responsive • Great for plugins• Easy to customise• Flexible• Free!
LENGTH OF THE PERFECT BLOG POST
Why does length matter?• There is no difference in the amount of search traffic
generated by longer or shorter posts. (Tomasz Tunguz)
• Blog posts with more than 1,800 words receive the most links from other websites (Moz)
• The ideal blog piece takes 7 minutes to read – that’s between 1,000 and 1,600 words long, depending on use of imagery (Buffer)
• If a blog post is greater than 1,500 words, on average it receives 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes (Quick Sprout)
GOOGLE AND BLOGS
Why Google loves blogs• Strong preference to give the best positions
within search results to websites that continually add new content
• Shows that your website is fresh, current and up-to-date.
• Google wants to rank sites that provide good information – a helpful blog meets this requirement.
Websites with blogs …
Receive 55% more traffic than static websites.
They also get:
• 97% more inbound links • 434% more indexed pages
(Stats from Hubspot)
Also …
• Adding between 21 and 51 blog posts to your site boosts traffic by up to 30%
• Adding at least 52 blog posts boosts traffic by 77%.
(Stats from TrafficGenerationCafe)
A brief history of search
PageRank
Google's rise to success was in large part due to a patented algorithm called PageRank that helps rank web pages that match a given search string. When Google was a Stanford research project, it
was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a
site's importance.
Enter SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid search results.
But wait! Google and SEO were enemies!
But why?
Because for many years, the Google algorithm was easy to cheat – any rubbish website could position itself at the top of the search listings (a.k.a. “SERPs”) with cheap tricks, known as Black Hat SEO..
Black hat SEO: Easy as 1,2,3
1. Create lots of content
2. Stuff it full of keywords
3. Buy thousands of links
Pretty soon, the Internet was a mess
Operation clean-up
Panda: 2011
• Targeted sites with low quality and/or duplicate content
• Up to 12% of search queries affected
Penguin: 2012
• Targeted sites engaging in link spam
• Around 2.3% of search queries affected
• Designed to build upon the work done by Panda, and list more high quality sites at the top of the SERPs
Hummingbird: 2013
• Heralded the age of semantic search
• Analysed search queries as a collective whole rather than a string of individual words with the aim of understanding user intent
The dawn of semantic search
• Semantics: the study of meaning.• Google is trying to become more
sophisticated. It wants to go beyond the words and phrases people use, to figure out what they mean.
• We’ve got to do more than pepper our blog content with keywords.
Changing user habits
• 20% of all searches in 2012 were new (Wired)
• Between November 2012-13, traffic to websites from an ‘organic search’ decreased by 5%, whilst traffic from ‘social referrals’ significantly increased by 111% (Shareaholic)
• Today, 96% of consumers’ time onlineis spent on content sites (Wired)
Keywords: not dead yet
“Here’s the deal. Google can’t function without keywords … they’re simply the words people type in when they use search engines. It’s the language real people use when looking for stuff.” Brian Clark, Founder of Copyblogger
Clothing for old people?
FINDING INSPIRATION
Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam, Google
“Make sure you make a great site, that users love, that they’ll want to tell their friends about,
bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again; all the things that make a site compelling. If that’s
your goal, we’re aligned with that goal, and therefore as long as you’re working hard for users
we’re working hard to show your high quality content to users as well.”
“Nice long articles that solve people’s problems”
Predictive search
Predictive search
New ways of searching # 2:Voice Search
Writing error #1: It’s all about me!“I’m an entrepreneur:
I’ll blog about my business!”
Writing error #2: Too boring for a blog!
Writing error #3: No variety in subject matter
Mix of contentTips and advice Interviews/ reviewsExciting updates Case studiesOpinion pieces Multimedia clips
Rehashing: A Warning
Have a voice and an angle!
Tip: Go large
SOCIAL MEDIA AND BLOGGING
• Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube all offer opportunities for businesses with blogs.
• Use your blog to tie them all together.
After this presentation …
Paid social promotion
Tip: Say nice things!
FREE CONSULTATIONTo book, email [email protected]
FREE 15 minute phone consultation with me – I’ll review your blog, or make suggestions about how to start one.
You’re under absolutely NO OBLIGATION of any kind!