A new study by TopRank asks over 400 marketers about their marketing plans for the next 6 months. The question was: "What 3 internet marketing tactics will you emphasize most in the next 6 months?"
Number one answer across the board was SEO followed by blogging as a close second (36%&33% respectively)
“Corporate Web Site” received only 7% of the votes.
In uncertain times, why does Corporate Blogging and SEO stand out? Well for one, because they are both two sides of the same coin. Corporate blogging has a primary benefit of Search Engine Optimization. Ask almost any respectable Business Blogger and they will tell you that the majority of their traffic comes from search engines.
If you follow this blog, you know I'm kind of a broken record on this point. Everyone searches before they do anything related to a business, product or solution. Organic results carry a lot more credibility, so therefore it's critical that organizations not only target keywords for PPC but do everything they can to legitimately rank on all of their targeted terms orgnaically.
Enterpirse-wide blogging is the means to this end. Business blogging best practice is blog content organized around keywords or topics as opposed to, or including, having that content be author-centric. Success in targeted SEO requires pages that are titled and populated (frequently) with content specific to the single keyword. This requires lots of pages and lots of content. Employees are a great resource for passionat, honest and human content about your business, your solutions, products and customer experience. Free them. But then rather than have content organized around the authors....organize it around the topics...that's what turns normal business blogging into an effective and non-spammy SEO weapon.
Posted by: robert on Sunday, October 19, 2008
I agree that blogging is the most effective form of advertising, especially keyword targeted blogging. But your service is leaving out what is most critical for any business, and that is the time and resources to actually generate the keyword rich content. From what I see, your business builds the blog, and establishes categories that target specific keyword phrases... But we all know that on the web, content is king, and this seems to be left out of your equation and put on the business to actually generate what is most important in obtaining highly targeted traffic. Am I missing something here? Otherwise, awesome product and I'm happy to see that you recognize the importance of blogging for gaining wide spread exposure on the web.
Posted by: Chris Baggott on Monday, October 20, 2008
You hit the nail on the head Robert. Content is the key driver to a successful Corporate Blog strategy. Using the Compendium Blogware platform, our clients empower their employees to blog. The software UI has a keyword suggestion tool built in, and a workflow/approval process to insure that all content is compliant prior to going live. Richard Edelman says that employees are 5 times more credible than C-level bloggers. Most companies understand that they hire smart people who like their jobs, care about the customers, think they do important work and want both their company and their customers to be successful. By sharing the content load like this, you never have to worry about enough content, and you have the benefit of much more credible voices.