Should Your Business Be Blogging?

The number of blogs worldwide is now estimated to have risen to somewhere around 275 million. Most are personal soundings, but there is a growing trend for businesses to have their own blogs. Should you join the throng? Nilhan Jayasinghe, Head of Search at Spannerworks, thinks you should consider it.

Blogs (or web-logs) as they were originally known, provide an opportunity for an individual to publish his or her thoughts on the Internet and enable others to comment on them. But blogs also offer significant advantages for search. In July 2005, Converseon's study of the top 20 search engine listings for Business Week's top 100 brands in the US, found that no less than 39% of the results were derived from consumer-generated media such as blogs.

The conclusion that a blog will get you a top 20 listing is taking things too far, but from a search point of view, blogs offer three compelling benefits to a business website, particularly if your business website doesn't allow the easy addition of fresh current content. 

• Fresh content will attract greater attention from search engine crawlers, and enable you to address those searches interested in the latest buzz around your industry. A blog will provide a vehicle for you to update content easily, which can be particularly useful, if content on the regular parts of your site is restricted by legislation.
• Regularly updated content can be syndicated via RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication). RSS enables people interested in your industry to monitor what you have to say on the latest issues via RSS Readers installed on their desktop and through online RSS monitoring facilities like Bloglines and Google's personalized home page. Feeds can also be submitted to syndication databases, so other people can publish a short summary of your content with links back to your full article/post.
• One of the biggest reasons for the prominence of Blogs in search, was the natural linking mechanism inherent in the process of Blogging. The TrackBack feature which allows a blogger to identify the source of a link to their post, creates a linking system which enables a linking community to propagate around the latest buzz. And as search engine algorithms rely heavily on link analysis, Blogs find their way to the top of many search engines with little effort.

How easy is it to find something to say in a blog?

Many business people, while recognising the benefits outlined above, will simply feel there isn't enough content around their company, product or service to launch a blog. This simply isn't true. Your business is a player in an industry, which affects many people's lives. You need to find a fresh perspective. Insight and opinion on any relevant or buzz topics significant to your industry is ideal content. As a brand leader, your opinion is always welcome by your customers and journalists. Funny stories like unusual claims for car insurance or customer travel experiences make great content and can also be picked up by journalists on slow news days. Global thinking about the implications of products or services on climate change; how your industry might be affected by political decisions or budget rulings; opinions on how you or your channel partners see the industry developing over the next few months/years/decades; technical innovations and the likely benefits in a general sense - are all relevant.

Think of a blog as a powerful new opportunity to have an online chat with your customers, partners and stakeholders, sharing your thoughts and opinions. But just like a real chat, beware of boring them. It is not acceptable to simply push the company line in marketing speak. If you go down that route, people will see it for what it is, and it is more likely to damage your brand. For example, talking about the implications of carbon fibre technology on tennis racket design and manufacture, mentioning your specific product, with a link, would be fine. Bombarding blog readers with all the benefits of your racket, as you might in a press release, is not fine and should be avoided at all cost.

A quick bit of blogging research will show you what's already happening in your business area. Take a look at Blogpulse.com for example and you will find tools (http://www.blogpulse.com/tools.html) that will enable you to identify 'the buzz' what everyone is discussing right now in your chosen subject area. It's good fun and could be invaluable in helping you to position your own blog.

High reward

In conclusion, the potential rewards for blogging are significant. Get it right and you can open an invaluable dialogue with your customers or clients, improve your brand positioning with added value opinion-leading content, increase brand loyalty with existing customers, generate a community around your brand, grow online sales, improve link equity and ultimately, improve the search visibility of your website. Why wouldn't you choose to blog?

Article by Nilhan Jayasinghe, Head of Search at Spannerworks. If you have any further comments or queries please contact Nilhan on 01273 828124

Blogging for Search - Should you include blogging as part of your search engine optimisation strategy? (May 2006)
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