Blogs Don’t Work!

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Blogs Don’t Work! – I hear this all the time. Always from someone who is not blogging, or has never tried it. Well, I conducted a basic experiment the other day with a client and I wanted to show you the results as it speaks to why blogging is so powerful.

steve churchI was in Bellingham Washington last week doing some presentations and meeting with a few clients. I had an opportunity to sit down with Steve Church at the Muljat Group and discuss his website and blogging efforts. Steve is an excellent client of ours, very supportive, loves technology, always trying new things and open to new ideas. We were talking about his website (www.stevechurch.com) and how blogging can help him target terms in the search engines that he wants to go after.

I preach to our clients that your website can only be found in the search engines if your website contains text about the subject that you want to be found under.

Steve Church and I ran a little experiment.

I did some quick research and found a term that had been searched in Google 6 times in the last 24 hours, but zero websites targeting that term. The term was – muljat groupbellingham (with the words, “group” and “bellingham” together)

I logged into Steve’s website and wrote a short blog post about the Muljat Group and Bellingham Real Estate. Nothing special, just wanted to show how this could work.

Now, keep in mind, when you searched “muljat groupbellingham” in Google, Yahoo or MSN nothing came up. But my researched showed that at least 6 people were searching that misspelled term.

Not even 1 week later, if you search “muljat groupbellingham” in Google, Yahoo or MSN, Steve Church’s website comes up.

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Now, I know this is an easy term to target as there was no one targeting the term. But keep in mind, no one, not even Steve Church was coming up when that term was searched in the search engines. Now that Steve has added the simple blog post, he is coming up under that term. It proves, that content is king and you can be found under the terms that you want. The more competition you have going for a specific keyword term will make it harder – but it can be done.

Blogging is a very effective way to gain exposure within the search engines. KEEP IN MIND, that blogging is not meant to be a bunch of posts targeting keywords in the search engines. Write for your readers first, then do a quick review for the search engines. If you write about who you are, the areas you operate in, the market conditions, etc you will be found in the search engines for those types of terms.

5 Answers

  1. ron pruett
    11/14/2006 at 2:00 pm

    Good post and we’ve replicated many of the same SEO benefits on Offertrax which connects buyers and sellers via RSS. I’d be curious to get your thoughts.
    Thanks.

  2. Athol Kay
    11/14/2006 at 2:32 pm

    I hear you. Honestly as a Coldwell Banker agent every time I hear “Coldwell Banker spends [insert 8 figure amount] dollars on search engines” I have to contain my laughter. All it says to me is “Our website has no content”. I have a cookie cutter agent page with z e r o hits and a 4 week old blog averaging 76 unique visitors a day. There is of course a place for a faceless corporate website, but if you’re an agent wanting to be picked out of the herd, a blog is great. Harder work than it appears on the surface, but still great.

    Nice little proof too.

  3. Andrey Polston
    11/14/2006 at 8:58 pm

    You better believe it! Just don’t forget to keep writing about your topic consistently. I was #1 for a search term for a few days out of 213,000 possibilities and now have been dropped. Keep it fresh and constant and the search engines will love you! Blogging is one of the best ways to market your business. If it wasn’t, Fortune wouldn’t have named it the #1 Tech Trend to watch back in their January ’05 issue “Top 10 Tech Trends to Watch”. Great Post! Keep up the good work.

  4. Victor
    11/16/2006 at 7:01 am

    Blogging is a powerful tool to SEOs.

    I have one personal blog (Victor de la Fuente in spanish) and I noticed the same that the previous commenter (maybe not the same in quantity).

    Anyway, many times we see in a short term the results of blogging but i think that it’s more interesting the social character and the communication side with our customers about blogging, not only just the seo.

    Bye,
    Victor
    http://www.fotocasa.es

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