Blogging for business
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How to establish and populate a WordPress blog that improves your Google ranking, establishes you as an expert, and opens up PR and social media opportunities. Presentation delivered at The British Library on 12th February 2015.
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Blogging for business
- 1. Blogging for Business The British Library 12th February 2015
- 2. About Me @emilyhill1982 emily.hill@writemysite.co.uk slideshare.net/EmilyHill1 • Set up Write My Site in 2006: www.writemysite.co.uk • Innovating for Growth participant in 2013
- 3. 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
- 4. THE POWER OF BEING AN EXPERT
- 5. “But I’m not an expert!”
- 7. THE BEST BLOGGING PLATFORM
- 8. What’s great about WordPress? WordPress is: • SEO-friendly • Responsive • Great for plugins • Easy to customise • Flexible • Free!
- 9. LENGTH OF THE PERFECT BLOG POST
- 10. 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)
- 11. GOOGLE AND BLOGS
- 12. 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.
- 13. Websites with blogs … Receive 55% more traffic than static websites. They also get: • 97% more inbound links • 434% more indexed pages (Stats from Hubspot)
- 14. 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)
- 15. A brief history of search
- 16. 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.
- 17. 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.
- 18. But wait! Google and SEO were enemies!
- 19. 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. .
- 20. Black hat SEO: Easy as 1,2,3 1. Create lots of content 2. Stuff it full of keywords 3. Buy thousands of links
- 21. Pretty soon, the Internet was a mess
- 23. Panda: 2011 • Targeted sites with low quality and/or duplicate content • Up to 12% of search queries affected
- 24. 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
- 25. 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
- 26. 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.
- 27. 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 online is spent on content sites (Wired)
- 28. 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
- 29. Clothing for old people?
- 31. 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.”
- 32. “Nice long articles that solve people’s problems”
- 36. New ways of searching # 2: Voice Search
- 37. Writing error #1: It’s all about me! “I’m an entrepreneur: I’ll blog about my business!”
- 38. Writing error #2: Too boring for a blog!
- 42. Writing error #3: No variety in subject matter Mix of content Tips and advice Interviews/ reviews Exciting updates Case studies Opinion pieces Multimedia clips
- 44. Have a voice and an angle!
- 45. Tip: Go large
- 46. SOCIAL MEDIA AND BLOGGING • Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube all offer opportunities for businesses with blogs. • Use your blog to tie them all together.
- 47. After this presentation …
- 49. Tip: Say nice things!
- 50. Emily Hill, CEO, Write My Site Thanks for listening – any questions? @emilyhill1982 emily.hill@writemysite.co.uk slideshare.net/EmilyHill1
- 51. FREE CONSULTATION To book, email emily.hill@writemysite.co.uk 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!
Editor's Notes
- Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University. Google initially used Stanford’s domain name (google.stanford.edu) before registering google.com as a domain name in September 1998. It indexed 60 million sites in its first year.
- Clearly, Google was huge. A whole new industry sprang up to meet the demands of organisations who wanted to position their website over and above their competitors’ sites in the search listings. That industry was called SEO: Search Engine Optimisation.
- However – as much as companies loved SEO, Google despised it.
- Last of these caused absolute chaos as the number of websites indexed by Google grew from millions to billions and beyond. Countless link farms, article ‘spinning’ services and sites sprang up to help people cheat the algorithm, which for a long time counted only the quantity of links and not the quality.
- By the end of the ‘naughties’, Google decided to do something about the problem: 3 dramatic algorithm updates, all intended to wipe out manipulative SEO and clean up the Internet
- Something interesting had started to happen – as the user experience changed, so too did user behaviour. People no longer
- Keywords still exist, and probably always will, because Google can’t function without them. The underlying principle of a search engine is to collect the words people use when they search, and then deliver the information it thinks they’re looking for. Got to get away from this idea of identical matching of keywords and content. You can still build content around a core set of keywords, but it’s about using natural language. Write for the reader and the search engines will reward you.
- Biggest fear is often that by not undertaking rigorous keyword research, the search engines won’t know to return your site for a relevant query. The point is that if you have a clear and consistent approach to your content strategy that is centred around the user, your keywords will appear naturally. Old-style keyword research was about pulling up a list of keywords relevant to your type of business; modern keyword research is about learning the language of your customers and positioning all of your content towards them.
- Going to conclude by showing you an example of a small business doing content really well. In fact, I became a customer of Tony’s Textiles as a direct result of their content strategy. Bought a house, winter drawing in, so needed net curtains. Never bought them before and needed them made to measure. Expected to buy from Homebase. B&Q, but ended up buying from these guys because …
- They took the trouble to create simple, relevant content that helped me to understand the product properly. Went straight for their ‘How to’ guides …