Blogging for Search Engines

If you’re like most companies and nonprofits, you want to be found. Whether it’s potential clients, customers, donors, or volunteers, you want them to be able to find you. And since we’re in the 21st century, more and more of those people are using Google and other search engines to look for you.

So how can you ensure they’ll be able to find you?

Even if you have a website that was set up properly, often it won’t automatically appear in the first page of the search engine’s results. If you’re not in the first page of results for a particular page, the number of people that will find your site drops off drastically.

A study by Search Engine Watch reveals just how many people click on the different positions in the search engine results.

53 percent go to the top result. The second sees 15 percent of the action, the third 9 percent, the fourth 6 percent, dwindling all the way down to 4 percent to round out the top 5.

Obviously, it’s much more likely people will find you if you’re in the top five results. 87% of the people stop after the first five, according to the study.

So how do you get into the top five?

Blogging

Having a well-written blog on your business website can be hugely beneficial, especially when it comes to increasing your ranking on the search engines. In our industry, we call that blogging for SEO.

The only catch is that it needs to be done on a regular basis. And that’s where so many people and businesses fail.

Back in 2005, I helped a missionary couple put together a website. They wanted to make sure the members at the churches who sponsored them would be able to find them easily online.

I told them to blog regularly to stay visible on the search engines. So from 2005 until 2009, they blogged several times a month.

After several months of blogging regularly, they started seeing results. And since they continued to blog, those results only got better and better.

In fact, even they came back to the United States in 2009, their website continued to be ranked number one in Google for many relevant phrases for several years.

Maximizing Your Effort

If you do take the time to blog on a regular basis, you’ll want to take a few steps to maximize that effort.

How do you do that? By pushing your blog out onto other platforms.

You’ll want to set up a page on Facebook, LinkedIn, and an account on Twitter. After those are ready to go, I recommend using twitterfeed.com for automatically pushing your blog out to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

When you set up your organization on those social media websites and start updating them regularly, you can actually take up more than one spot on the search engine results.

Write For People

Even when you’re blogging for search engines, don’t forget that your ultimate target is actual people. Even if you want to rank higher in search engines, that’s just a means to an end.

Your ultimate goal is to get people to know, like, trust, and value you. That way, they’ll want to buy whatever it is you have to sell.