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November 2017 (Updated December 2020) · 5 Min Read
Type in any question to your favourite search engine. Skip past the ads. What kind of responses come up on the first page?
Without knowing your question, we can almost guarantee that you will see a mixture of videos and blogs. This isn’t a magic trick; it’s just the way that search engines are programmed.
In this article, we’ll give you 5 reasons to stop flogging and start blogging.
Traffic is a horrible thing. Everybody hates being stuck in it. Strangely though, we all need web traffic. If we get it we love it and we just want more. Nobody likes being wedged into the 5th or 6th page of Google where there is almost no web traffic and therefore nobody visiting your website or buying from your business. This is especially true since 81% of users find their desired destination through a search engine. *
Everybody has heard of Google (if you haven’t, you can look it up on Google) but what most people don’t know is how Google’s search engine works. For years, it was the case that all you had to do in order to achieve a high Google ranking was find a clever technical type to write a few keywords in the background of your website. If only life was so easy now.
All search engines use something called an algorithm in order to check websites and decide which ones deserve to be noticed. You may disagree with their decisions but they have the power. Google is constantly making small alterations to what it deems to be worthy of a high ranking but occasionally it makes a huge change to its algorithm that has a more drastic effect.
Google launched “Hummingbird” in 2013. There are many layers to Hummingbird but the important part for us to consider is what it looks for when a search is made.
If you typed in “How to search for the best flights” before Hummingbird existed, Google would have looked for keywords such as “search” and “flights” and based the results around them. The results would have likely been British Airways sales or a search comparison site.
Since Hummingbird’s introduction, Google has started looking for the likely meaning of a search. It takes every word into consideration, uses synonyms and then displays a result with a representative answer to the whole question. Therefore typing “How to search for the best flights” would be likely to show a blog explaining the best way to search for flights, or another blog explaining how to book the cheapest flights.
With this in mind, Google is constantly looking for answers to questions, questions which your business can answer. If Google finds one of your blogs that is relevant to a user’s search, you could achieve a higher ranking. If Google finds many blogs that answer many questions within your website on a particular topic, your whole site could rank higher.
Of course, paying Google can also make you rank higher and there are benefits to this but to get truly worth-while results using PPC (pay per click) costs a lot of money. With 94.95% of web traffic coming from organic results and just 5.05% for paid results, you can decide for yourself, which option looks better.**
Take yourself away from being The Business for a second and go back to being The Consumer. How would you react if somebody you had never met or even heard of came up to you and told you that they had the best prices in the world and that the quality of their product is second to none? You’d probably think they were lying but more importantly, you’d have no interest in finding out if they were telling the truth. Every day, somebody new is flogging us the same thing and they can’t all be right.
This is the same in business. Clients won’t trust your brand just because you tell them it’s great. You have to build up a relationship over time to prove your worth. There are many ways of doing this but one of the most effective is by writing a blog that connects with them directly.
Let’s type “how to choose the best car” into Google and see what comes up… In our search, the top result was from Car Buyer UK.
They have written a blog about how to choose the best car. At no point do they tell you that they are the best car supermarket in the world or that they will give you the best price you’ve ever seen on a VW Golf.
They appear to be solely interested in giving you advice. Within the guide are links to other guides written by them, which will help you to continue building up that brand relationship without realising it. They are there to help, not to sell and therefore, most consumers will feel like they can trust them. Once a client has all of the knowledge they think they need, why would they then choose anyone else to search for that car?
It’s happened, we’ve officially entered the digital world and everything is done through the prism of social media. Whether you like it or not, your business now depends on it to survive. (even more relevant in 2020 / 2021)
The problem is, finding enough material to fill your Facebook page, Twitter feed or LinkedIn can be extremely difficult. Of course, you can post blogs from other people related to your industry and you probably should as that helps you to build trust but it doesn’t send people directly to your website. If you post your own blogs that are hosted on your own website, your readers will have a lot fewer hurdles to jump through to reach the pages that you really want them to see. You can also post them (or a version of them) on almost every platform, saving you a lot of time.
Many businesses are starting to use live chat on their website to communicate. It can be a great tool if managed well but clients need a reason to get in contact in the first place. That is the same for the “old fashioned” methods of communication too such as email or telephone calls. If you have a blog that sparks a conversation about your industry, a customer may want to call to clarify some points or to see what it is that you as a company do to help that industry. This is where your well trained sales people have a chance to come into their own! Best of all, these are inbound leads so the chances of converting an enquiry into a sale are so much higher.
If you post regular blogs, customers will know that you are alive. If we don’t see something new from a company for a long time, we forget about them. We’re not likely to go back and crawl through their website or social media pages just for fun when their competitor has been sending us information about industry trends for the past six months are we? A customer is not always ready to buy but if we have a continuous presence (i.e. regular blogs), we’ll be at the top of their list of suppliers when the time is right.
So… what are you waiting for? Start blogging today!
If you’d rather leave it to the experts, [email protected]
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