“We’re just not seeing any results,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “No one is coming to our office because of our blog.”
It was a phone message from a small business client who said they were going to stop their blogging, because they weren’t getting any clients. Despite the fact that they had been blogging for close to six months, and they were in the downtown area of a large city, no one was coming to their office because of their blog.
Their expectation? If we blog about what we do, we’ll “win search,” and they’ll come to us!
At the risk of beating the “‘if you build it, they will come’ does not work” cliché to death, I have to point out — yet again — ‘if you build it, they will come’ does not work.
As bloggers, we hear all the pros and cons for blogging:
- You’ll win searches for your keywords.
- You’ll establish yourself as an authority on your subject.
- You’ll show you’re smarter than your competitiors.
- It’s an easy way to update your website.
- Bloggers are the new rock stars. (Okay, I made that one up.)
Here’s the problem: you could win every single search in the world for a chosen topic, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing if no one is searching for the topic to begin with.
Last year, I wrote a humor column about how New Zealand had just found a possible solution to the world’s animal methane problem. (Step 1 of an SEO strategy is to backlink to your blog post, like I just did there.) They basically did it by isolating the gene
I pulled out all the SEO stops. I did the backlinking thing on other sites, I used all the proper keywords in the headline, in the anchor text, and in the sub-heads. It was great. Within three days, I owned the number one ranking for animal methane problem, out of 625,000 Google results.
Big deal.
Do you know how many people search for the term “animal methane problem?” According to Google’s Keyword Tools, there is “not enough data” to know.
Today, I’m ranked #7 out of 628,000 results for animal methane problem (although with the little backlink four paragraphs ago, I’m guessing I can bump it back up).
But despite my previous crowning achievement of a #1 Google ranking, the number of people who have ever found my page because they’re searching for animal methane problem? Four. The number of people who found my site for the phrase “hoosiers are a hardy, resilient bunch?” Seven. Plus, there are 42 results for that page, and they’re all mine, from one of the newspapers where my column is published.
In other words, I have had more people find me for a phrase that apparently no one has ever used, versus a phrase that 625,000 people put in writing.
What does that mean for the bloggers who are striving for SEO gold? You can get a few lessons from this story:
- #1 rankings don’t mean a thing if no one is searching for that to begin with.
- Blogging is not a be all, end all strategy.
- Search is not the only tool in the toolbox.
- [Insert your own clever-sounding platitude here.]
- If you’re blogging but you’re ignoring social media, you do so at your own peril.
In short, if you’re blogging, you need to tell them you’re blogging. Don’t wait for them to find you on Google. We’ll discuss how you can do that at a future date.
About Erik Deckers