A common question we get here at Ghost Blog Writers is the role of SEO in business blogging.
It’s an important question and there seem to be different takes on the answer depending on who you ask.
We’ve been involved in the SEO world on some level for a few years and have seen things change. I wasn’t around when the big changes came about in the early and mid-2000s, but looking at the SEO world for the last 10 years or so the one thing that is inevitable is that changes will happen.
The issue with the SEO world is that there are always people trying to game the system.
In general, these folks figure out how the Google ranking system works and they manipulate it to get their websites and pages to rank for targeted keywords. It can work in the short-term, but never in the long-term.
Google is always working to fight the spam on its results because they need the results to be credible. People that use Google are the products of the company. Google sells its users to advertising companies.
Image a television network that makes money through advertising. In order to bring in the most money the network needs to have content people want to watch. The network needs the best sitcoms, movies, news, etc. If that lineup slips at all the revenue can disappear.
Google works the same way. They need quality results and it would seem they also need at least some natural results to maintain the credibility of the results, but it’s also possible the results pages for at least some popular keywords could be entire paid at some point. This would be more like a traditional directory, but if Google believes the paid results are the best or at least close to the best they’ll do it.
But it’s likely that SEO will be around for a good while and that means it will be a focus when blogging for business.
Here is our current strategy at Ghost Blog Writers
Specific Keyword Targeting
For our own blog and for our client blogs we target specific keywords. These can be long tail keywords or more popular keywords. The reason we do this is because keywords are still a great way to get into the mind of the target customer. The information Google shares about keywords is a direct link into the actions of people.
When people are asking specific questions on Google it’s important we understand what they want and provide the best answer.
For example, the term “blogging on facebook” has about 200 searches per month globally (exact match). This is according to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This is a pretty long tail term, but we would write a post about the issue of blogging on Facebook vs. blogging on your own website.
Specific Theme Targeting
In addition to keyword targeting we also focus on specific themes. This approach is designed for the extreme long tail of keywords. We use language we feel the target customer is using to find information.
For example, we have written about Mark Cuban quitting Facebook and other related themes on the recent shift away from Facebook to blogging. We go well beyond the keyword from the specific keyword mentioned above.
Conclusion
Every post we write has the goal of getting traffic from a variety of sources. This includes SEO, Social, Email and others. The key to a successful blog is to broaden the sources of traffic. You protect yourself this way because if you lose one source of traffic you aren’t left totally lost. This can happen when you’re getting traffic from SEO and Social Media. You don’t really control what the companies in these spaces are doing.
We really like building email lists. This is a traffic generator you control. It takes longer to build, but it really pays off in the long run.
Do you have questions about blogging and SEO?
Share them in the comments and we might write a future post about it.
Image: Esparta