Cyberdo

I seem to be starting a lot of posts with a number these days and here I go again. But before, I get into it, let me start with a question.

“Do you have a blog and if not, why not?”

Okay, so some of you are probably shutting off already. “Blogging is so passe”, I hear you thinking. Or maybe “Yeah, right. When am I going to find time to write a blog on top of all the other work I already do?”. Well, excuses aside here are seven good reasons why you should have a blog.

1.) A blog is a great way to provide free content on your website

Building customer trust is one of the most challenging things to do with a website, but also one of the most crucial. Giving away free information or products is a great way to establish trust in you and your company as people find themselves thinking “Wow, if they’re willing to give away this useful info, we’re bound to get value when we actually shell out our hard earned cash with these guys.”

2.) A blog is a great way to develop content that is related to your product or service.

Search engines love content heavy sites and blogs are a great way to develop content that is related to your product or service. If you stay focused in your blog and talk primarily about topics that your customers would be interested in, search engines will pick up on the keywords in your blog and this will help to boost your website’s rankings for search terms that are related to your product or service.

3.) A blog can help to distinguish you as an expert

Are you an expert in your field? Would your customers call you an expert? Maybe you don’t think of yourself as one, but many others would consider you to be an expert. You probably know a heck of a lot more about your product and service than your customers, which is why they pay you to provide it right?!

So use a blog to show people that you know your stuff. Give away information that is useful, timely and relevant and your customers will love you for it and come to trust that you are the person to turn to in your industry when they need your product or service.

4.) A blog can demonstrate a good work ethic

Okay, let’s face it. blogging can be a bit of work. It takes a certain amount of commitment to sit down regularly and write something that is thought provoking and worth sitting down to read. The corollary of putting in the effort is that others can see that you’re not afraid of a bit of work and this inspires confidence in your ability to provide a service that is worth paying for.

5.) Blogs generate traffic.

Okay, so you may think this sounds pretty close to point 1 and it is. But search engines aren’t the only way that people find your website. People who read your blog and benefit from it, will share articles with their friends by email or on social networks and this in turn will drive traffic to your website.

By generating more traffic to your website you have a greater opportunity to a.) convert that traffic into sales and b.) generate revenue from the traffic (through ad sales or affiliate marketing).

6.) Blogs give you a voice and help people to relate to you as a human

Blogs are a fairly personal medium and reading one you start to feel like you’re listening to someone talking to you. Having this personal connection is important to many people and can help to break up an impersonal or otherwise business focused website and help people to relate to the fact that there is actually a human behind the business who they can relate to and talk to if need be.

7.) You never know where your blog will lead you

Okay, so maybe business isn’t doing so well and you’re ready to look for a job again, or maybe you’re just after a change of pace. For many people blogs are the new CV. Your blog may just help you launch a new career.

Okay, so maybe you’re ready to start a blog. Before you get started remember that choosing the right software for your blog is important. You want software that will be search engine friendly and will allow you to leverage the great new content you’re developing. You also want something that is going to be user friendly and easy to update. I recommend and use WordPress myself but there are lots of other options out there as well so do your research, or pay someone like us to do it for you.

There’s been some interesting changes recently in the way that Google lists and organises search results. If you haven’t noticed try doing a quick search for a service in your town or city. (i.e. Brisbane photographer for example). I’ve just performed that search from my desk on the Northside of Brisbane. The first listing I see in the results is a photographer that is located about 10kms away. That’s pretty close to where I’m sitting right now. Google has been able to roughly determine where I’m searching from and provide me a listing that is relevant to me based on my location as well as my search query. The next few listings are all Brisbane based photographers as well, some are further away from me than others, but they all service this area and match my search query.

On the right hand side of the listings there’s a map that shows the place holders for each of the results that Google has given me and they’re all marked by a little red place holder with a letter corresponding to the order in which the results were presented. This allows me to see quite quickly, how close any of the businesses are to me and choose one based, not only on the text and images that I see in the results, but based on their location.

If you look at the results you’ll notice that each includes an address and a telephone number, which makes it very easy for me to pick up the phone and call one if I like what I see. That’s great you say, but where is all this information coming from? Well, it’s coming from the Google Places listing that each of these businesses have set up. And the good news is that you can do this too, for free once you’ve set up a Google account.

“But wait a minute”, I hear you ask, “I’ve already got this information on my website, isn’t that enough?”. Well, not anymore I’m afraid. Google now wants you to have a Google Places listing and they are using this information (matched against the information on your website – if you have one) to verify your business and match your location to the location of people searching for your goods or services.

What does that mean for you. Well, it means that you should definitely have a Google Places listing and you should make sure you invest a bit of time and energy into getting your listing right. By right, I mean, making sure that it’s completely populated with your details, what it is you do, even things like images and videos as well. Why do you need to add images and videos? Well, because Google’s ranking algorithm appears to boost the ranking of those with more complete listings.

Another critical part of finalising your Google Places listing is getting reviews on your listing. You’ll notice that in some searches, businesses will be listed with star ratings (4 out of 5 stars for example). The ratings are given to the business by their customers. Google then displays the rating for others to see and use in the process of making a decision about whether or not to contact you.

At present Google are saying that they’re not going to factor user reviews/ratings into their search algorithm, but you can be fairly certain it will affect the way people make decisions about who to call, when they need a service, so this makes it crucially important that you encourage your customers to provide a review on your Google Places listing.

“Okay, so what if I’m too busy to do it myself?” Well, that’s where we come in. We will happily help you setup your Google Places listing for a flat fee of $195. This includes writing your business description for you, with some input from you of course. Why not contact us today to make sure that you’re not missing out on Google Traffic by not having a complete Google Places listing.

Lots of people and businesses have websites and most people who have a website wish that their site had more traffic. The primary source of most internet traffic is a search engine, Google in particular, thus it follows that if you can improve your search engine ranking you would get more traffic. Assumably if you have a product or service to sell, this means you get your message in front of more sets of eyes (and assuming that it’s a numbers game), this means you sell more product.

Okay, so we understand why we need our site to have better search engine rankings, that’s the easy part. The million dollar question is, how do we get there. Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, improving your search engine rankings is really just a matter of following a few simple steps. So what’s the bad news, I hear you ask and if the steps are so simple, why isn’t everyone doing it.

Well, I think I can answer that best in terms of an analogy. Improving your website’s search engine rankings is a lot like losing weight (or staying fit, if you prefer a more positive analogy). It’s quite simple to do if you follow a few steps. We all know that to maintain a healthy body you need to eat right and burn more fuel than you consume. Pretty straightforward, but not always so easy to do in practice it would seem.

Getting your website to rank well in Google, is similar. Generally a site that ranks well in Google has good quality content that people find useful. So the logical way to get better search engine rankings (Google rankings in particular) is to make sure your site has lots of useful content that people are looking for. The content obviously should be related to your product or service, because you want the visitors to your website to be interested in not only your content, but also whatever it is that you want to provide them with. To put it another way, your content should complement your product or service.

Moving back to the “getting fit” analogy, there are shortcuts to improving your search engine rankings, but these are a lot like dieting fads. They often do work in the short term (i.e. they’ll help you lose weight quickly), but don’t necessarily help you to keep the weight off in the long term. Once you stop the diet, you go back to what you were doing before and you just put the weight back on.

Many quick fix solutions for getting better search engine rankings can be much like that. The quick fix solutions may seem rewarding in the short term and you may get a spike in traffic to your website but ultimately it won’t be as useful as having quality material that people will continue to read and benefit from long after you’ve posted it. Quality content may be harder to produce in the short term and it make take longer to see the changes in your website’s rankings but once you have it, it tends to stick around and produce a long term effect. Yes, it’s a good idea to keep adding to it and making sure that your site is fresh, but once you have a good base of content up, this isn’t hard to do. It’s like going into maintenance mode once you have lost a bunch of weight. It’s nowhere near as hard as it was to lose the weight in the first place and it can actually be enjoyable and rewarding.

Now, just as there is plenty more that you can learn about being fit aside from “eat right and exercise”, there’s definitely more to Search Engine Optimisation than adding quality content to your website. But if there was one thing I’d recommend you start working on to improve your site’s rankings, that would be it.