At GOOP digital we are forever spruiking the values of well-written blogs, and effective blog writing training is inclusive for all our website clients.
“Why should I write a blog? No-one is going to read it!”
That’s a statement we hear often from GOOP Digital and its frequency demonstrates a widespread fundamental lack of understanding about why small to medium businesses need to blog on a regular basis.
You’re probably right. Maybe no-one will read your blog. In fact I highly doubt if anyone would go to a small business website with the intention of reading the blogs that have been written.
But the attention of blog readers is not the attention small and medium business blogs are trying to capture. Rather, business blogging is primarily to capture the attention of Google, giving the search engine more reasons to push a business website further up the rankings for searches of what the business does, where it does it.
Whilst you might consider your website amazing and full of useful information, the majority of internet searchers don’t actually care about your website or your blog. They care only about themselves and what they want, and when they’re searching online for products or services what they want is either the answer to a problem or to satiate a desire.
Searchers ask Google for help finding what they want, and when Google offers up websites for consideration users quickly assess the offerings and then either call the business or contact it online.
Blogging helps ensure your website is one of the sites Google offers up as having the answer to the searcher’s query. It’s that simple.
Buckby Electrical Case Study
Sam Buckby runs Buckby Electrical in Geelong, specialising in smart home automation. In 2014 Sam had the pleasure of being one of the supplying tradies to TV hit show “The Block Glasshouse” and in 2015 Sam launched his debut book, Smarter Buildings.
In the 2016 series of “The Block” (the soap factory), one week was dedicated to a challenge apartment. This largely centred around the Telstra Smart Home sponsorship. Sam, in his wisdom, wrote a blog about the smart home and titled his blog “THE BLOCK – TELSTRA SMART HOME AUTOMATION”. He had this blog live before the episode went live on TV.
Google Rankings and Google Analytics
So now if anyone does a search under the topic “The Block Telstra Smart Home Automation”, Sam’s website comes up number one. Yes, ahead of Telstra!
It’s great that Sam is ahead of Telstra in the Google rankings but has this impacted his business? The blog was written on October 23, 2016, and the past month’s Google Analytics statistics would say the answer to that question is an overwhelming “yes”.
Audience overview or top-line figures from Google Analytics for the last 30 days
Sessions: 748
Users: 666
Page views: 1271
These are great statistics for an electrician in Geelong but when you drill down further into these statistics you will see the impact the blog has had.
Google Analytics – Behaviour>Site Content>Landing pages
A total 481 users have gone directly to this blog. That means they have landed on this page when visiting Buckby Electrical. This is 64.30% of his total sessions for the month. The home page has had only 16.71% of this traffic.
The power of blogging
Sam’s blog outranks Telstra for its own brand name search. Buckby Electrical ranked number one in Google for the search term “the Block Telstra smart home automation” on November 23, 2016, when performing an incognito search in the Google Chrome browser.
This blog resulted in increased visibility on Google and drove 461 visitors to the Buckby Electrical website.
Did this result in business for Sam at Buckby Electrical? You will have to ring Sam to find out.