Blogging as the Killer SEO Tool for Businesses?

My team and I have been conducting some SEO campaigns for ourselves and a few clients recently and I’ve come to the conclusion that many of the “traditional” off-page SEO techniques (reciprocal linking / directory submissions / article marketing / online PR) are , if not dead, on their death-bed.

Definition: “Off-page SEO” refers to the profile of link from other sites to your website - specifically, how many sites link to you, how important those sites are, and what the links say.

Google in particular places a great deal of importance on “authority links” when ranking websites. “Authority links” are links from sites that Google considers to be important. Problem is, very few proactive link-building activities lend themselves to generating high value authority links [PageRank 4+].

So…enter blogging.

Blogging is one way that businesses can attract “legitimate” incoming links and build a PR5 or 6 website. Building a PR6+ website via other means is very difficult because most “regular” lead gen sites just don’t contain enough “link-bait” content to encourage other websites to link to them.

Why natural SEO?

While high natural SEO rankings are not a prerequisite for success, high rankings for targeted terms can make a huge difference.

This website ranks very well on Google Australia for targeted terms such as “marketing consultants”, “marketing consultant”, “internet marketing consultants” and others.

These results drive more than enough traffic to keep our lead pipeline full at all times. If our natural rankings happen to drop in future, we can turn on other pre-tested traffic generation methods (e.g. Google Adwords) to make up any shortfall…but at a cost.

Google Adwords Not the Killer App It Once Was

Even 3 or 4 years ago, Google Adwords was an absolute no-brainer traffic generation method. Now it’s still good, but average cost per click has probably risen by 400% and there are many more competitors in the market. This trend is bound to continue - we may even see a period of “hyper-bid inflation” in which everyone loses money advertising in a given niche (this is already the case in some markets, but it may become the rule rather than the exception).

So…what then? You either have to pay tonnes to generate traffic via Adwords or have a range of alternative lead generation methods to drive incoming leads. Websites that currently rely on PPC traffic alone are waiting to have the rug pulled out from underneath them.

Where appropriate, I encourage business owners to go after high rankings on search engines as another traffic generation pillar, and one of the most straightforward methods of doing that is via blogging. Sure, blogging involves work and the ROI can take a while to kick in, but once you’re up and running the ongoing benefits are well worth it - and you can bask in the glory of your PR5+ site. Will Swayne Reformed Blogger

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