A Blog Is Not The Be All and End All of A Search Engine Marketing Strategy
I was out for drinks the other night at some fancy cocktail do up town; you know the deal, swanky hotel, designer suits and egos working at full capacity. It wasn’t really my scene but I was invited by another seo consultancy firm I know so I obliged and dusted off my whistle and flute (suit).
The night was going fairly well, and I wasn’t planning on doing any seo consultancy, until some guy approaches me saying he had heard I ran professional seo firm, his exact words to follow were, “What exactly is professional about seo, its all blogging and keywords is it not?” Not one to be rude, I explained a little about on-page, off-page, strategy, indexing, algorithms and briefly mentioned search engine marketing, but that was where my seo consultancy stopped, because this guy was just plain ignorant and didn’t want to listen.
He then explained that he wouldn’t bother with all that because he had been advised that a blog on a site producing regular posts with targeted keywords is sufficient to secure adequate search engine positioning. I let him babble on and no doubt he will be referred to a professional seo firm when his blog fails to secure the traffic he requires to make his site successful. But this little episode got me thinking. The popularity of blogs and seo targeted articles is actually making people believe that a blog or articles section will provide a comprehensive organic search engine marketing strategy. I think this attitude is driven by laziness and misleading information. We naturally like to take a shortcut where possible, and if one person says ‘just get a blog and do this’, many will follow like sheep.
Blogs are effective, but only a mere aspect of the overall search engine marketing strategy. Not to mention that your blog post will probably be titled as such in the SE listings along with a blog post like description, this alone puts some people off clicking because a blog is associated with amateur writing and the user is more than likely searching for a professional service. So think long and hard about hiring a professional seo firm to optimise your site and build your external campaign, the blog is a mere extension to assist search engine positioning, not the main crux of the strategy.
