Blog posts tagged customers

Why you need to blog for your readers first and search engines second

Blogging has many benefits. It will help you build relationships with your clients and prospective clients. It enables you to demonstrate your expertise and helps you gain immediate feedback on an idea. And done correctly, you’ll also gain targeted leads. Oh, and the traffic you receive from your fabulous content will also help you in the search rankings.

There’s a reason I added SEO (search engine optimisation) as an afterthought – it’s because it should be when it comes to blogging. SEO is a nice outcome from a good blog – not the reason for its being.

At a recent blogging workshop I ran, a large chunk of our audience was motivated to blog because of the perceived SEO benefits. They felt that if they could manipulate their blog to bring them in thousands of visitors, that would have a positive impact on their website. I’m delighted to report that by the end of the day they all felt different.

Your blog will receive thousands of visitors if the content is great, if it looks good and you post regularly. You’ll build up a following of loyal readers who will recommend your blog to their friends and where it features in the search engines will be but a distant memory. You’ll be generating enough business from the blog that it won’t matter.

Recently, I stumbled upon a blog that had clearly been contrived to provide search traffic for the writer’s business. It was an imagery-based website and the images were gorgeous. Sadly, I felt a little “used” because the writer clearly wasn’t writing for my benefit, she was writing for the search engines. She’d clearly handpicked a couple of search terms (and no, I won’t tell you what they are). Every blog title was pumped full of these keywords. And scrolling down the list I could see this wasn’t a one off, this was a search engine optimisation onslaught.

Imagine this blog, full of lovely images but pumped full of keywords that mean very little in relation to the post they’re describing. How would you feel as you were reading it? Like a valued reader who just had to return to see what said company had been up to or a little used and worthless that the point of the blog was simply to scramble the website up the search rankings?

There’s an art to using your blog to gain traffic and pumping your titles and posts full of “clever” keywords. I’m not suggesting that it won’t work from an SEO point of view – I’m sure it does. But my point is that this isn’t a blog.

A blog is your chance to journal what’s going on in your world. It enables you to showcase your expertise, build relationships and generate profitable business. Make the most of the opportunity: if you don’t, your competitors certainly will.

Fiona Humberstone, Flourish design & marketing