Blogging has many benefits. It’ll help you build relationships with your clients and prospective clients. It enables you to demonstrate your expertise.  It helps you gain immediate feedback on an idea. And done correctly you’ll also gain targeted leads for your company which should turn into profitable business. Oh, and the traffic you receive from your fabulous content will also help you in the search rankings.

There’s a reason that I added SEO as an afterthought. It’s because it should be when it comes to blogging. SEO is a nice outcome from a good blog – it’s not the reason for its being.

At the recent Blogging workshop I ran a couple of weeks back with Tom Evans a large chunk of our audience were motivated to blog because of the perceived SEO benefits a blog brings. They felt that if they could just manipulate their blog to bring them in thousands of visitors, then that would have a positive impact on their website. I’m delighted to report that by the end of the day they all felt somewhat different!

Your blog will receive thousands of visitors if the content is great, if it looks good, and if you post regularly. You’ll build up a following of loyal readers who will recommend your blog to their friends and where it features in the search engines will be but a distant memory. You’ll be generating enough business from the blog it won’t matter.

Recently I stumbled upon a blog that had clearly been contrived to provide search traffic for the company. It was an imagery-based website and the images were gorgeous. Sadly I felt a little “used” because the writer clearly wasn’t writing for my benefit. She was writing for the search engines. She’d clearly handpicked a couple of search terms (and no, I won’t tell you what they are) – let’s just say they were lifestyle artist hampshire for arguments sake. Every single blog title was pumped full of these keywords. And scrolling down the list I could see this wasn’t a one off, this was a Search Engine Optimisation onslaught.

Imagine this blog, full of lovely images but pumped full of keywords that mean very little in relation to the post they’re describing. How would you feel as you were reading it? Like a valued reader who just had to return to see what said company had been up to? Or a little used and worthless that the point of the blog was simply to scramble the website up the search rankings.

There’s an art to using your blog to gain traffic and pumping your titles and posts full of “clever” keywords isn’t it. I’m not suggesting that it won’t work from an SEO point of view – I’m sure it does. But my point is that this isn’t a blog.

A blog is your chance to journal what’s going on in your world. It enables you to showcase your expertise, build relationships and generate profitable business. Make the most of the opportunity: if you don’t, your competitors certainly will.

I’ve begun to wonder whether small businesses are getting too het up on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) at the expense of the rest of their marketing strategy.

Don’t get me wrong, getting found on Google is important. But is it important enough to pin all your hopes, dreams and marketing budget on? I mean, are people actually going to Google for your product or service? And when they do, will it revolutionise your business?

A close friend of mine runs a retail company. She invested several thousand pounds last year in an SEO company who promised to get her to page one of Google since he’d done the same thing for two of her competitors. Given that she sells product online it seemed like a sensible thing to do. She has a nice looking website and although there are many improvements that could be made, the site looks good and is converting visitors at the moment.

A year later (and several weeks of nailbiting disappointment whilst she was blacklisted as he’d left the server open and some Chinese casino hackers had put dodgy code in her site) she is finally on page one of Google. And she told me that she used to think that this was the holy grail. That once she was on page one of Google her business would skyrocket. Well she’s getting an extra six hits a week. In what she does that’s not translating into significant sales to make the process worthwhile.

My feeling is that she should be using social media: blogging, twitter and facebook, to drive more traffic to the site. All of these things are free, but time consuming. There are also plenty of things that we could do to her site to make it more sticky and process visitors through it more effectively.

My experience is that small businesses regularly invest huge chunks of money in getting their sites optimised, without looking at the fundamentals.

I was talking to one business owner who was number one on Google in his particular niche… but he had an 80% bounce rate! He was loathe to have anyone touch the site because he didn’t want to fall off the bottom of the search engines. But the design of his website was putting people off, and that’s before he’s thought about the sales structure on there.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t optimise your site; but I do think that before you start paying for people to visit it you should make sure that every last element of your site will do everything it can to convert visitors. And I think that’s the missing link for many small businesses.

If you sell a product that people can buy online, then yes, optimise away. But only once you’ve got the rest of your house in order.

Start with the design. Is it engaging, arresting and attractive to your potential clients? Does it do you justice? Then take a look at the copy: objectively as a human being (not as a search engine). Writing for search engines is all very well, but it’s boring to read. And what you must remember is that once people get to your site they’ll need to be interested in what you have to say.

How about the way your website guides potential visitors to take action? Is that clear? For example, if you want people to buy a particular lawnmower this month, have you asked them to? Have you signposted them around the site?

What’s your imagery like? Naff stock photos or something that’s inspiring and represents your business well? Do you have an easy way of capturing peoples data, via a contact form or newsletter sign up box? Are you doing all you can on social media to bring traffic to your site?

I’d be looking at all of these elements well prior to search engine optimisation. What do you think though? I sense this might be a little controversial!

I’ve been blogging now for 2 1/2 years and have been on a journey that’s taken me from writing passionately to no-one to having a regular daily audience who (thank you, lovely readers) interact and respond to me. I’m often asked by clients how they can get the best out of their blogs, and so here are my top tips on how your blog can win you more business. I hope you’ll see that it’s not rocket science. It’s just about persistence, passion and authenticity.

Embrace the design. We’re visual creatures. Give us a lovely looking blog and we’ll want to stay and chat. Expect us to read something unattractive and it doesn’t matter how compelling your words, we’ll struggle. One of my all time favourite blogs is Decor8. Some of you may find the style OTT, that’s fine. You can’t win em all. Personally I love it! It’s beautiful!

Use twitter and other social networking tools to tell people about what you’re blogging! Driving traffic to your blog is one of the main points about this – don’t post day after day and not tell people what you’re doing! Install a Plugin to push links to your posts (not spam) into your twitter/ facebook/ linkedin accounts.

Make it easy for others to retweet your post if they find it useful. TweetMeMe does this well.

Add an inspiring (non-cheesy) image to every post. And I find the bigger the better, so mine take up the full width of my post window. Reject cheesy stock photo images and find some that really inspire your readers.

Post regularly. 2-3 times a week is good, every day is better. We always used to get frustrated with my mum when she first got her mobile phone because she’d never have it on her when we tried to call her. “But no one ever calls me on it” she’d say. “Well why do you think that is?” we’d retort! Eventually she started taking her phone out with her and we started calling her on it. It’s the same with blogging. You have to persevere. You might be writing to no one to start with, but if you write with passion and conviction then your audience will find you! And you don’t have to sit down and write every day – most blogging platforms enable you to schedule posts, so you can be writing while you’re away!

Give plenty of advice. That’s what people come for. But beware of lecturing or patronising. They won’t thank you for that.

Use your comments and retweet mechanisms for direct feedback on what your readers want. I learned that people want to see what we’ve been up to, which is why I regularly run my “In the studio this week…” feature.

So I think those are my top tips, but how about yours? What else can you add to this list?

Over the past couple of months we've been working with the very fabulous Bernay Laity at in:colour. in:colour is the UK's leading colour consultancy and helps individuals and companies communicate more effectively through colour. I have to say, it's been absolutely fascinating stuff, and we shall be signing up to Bernay's next Colour in:communication course!

"I am so excited at the potential that the fresh new and engaging copy combined with the new designs will offer which will open I believe, many new doors for the business. And I want to thank you and all the team involved so much for all your hard work! It’s brilliant!"

Bernay Laity, in:colour

Is your website an integral part of your business? Or is it just something you know you need to have and you try not to think about too often? I was talking to a client yesterday who had seen a significant increase in his turnover simply by moving nowhere on Google to the second page. Understandably he’s excited about the potential of moving higher up the search engine rankings as this is likely to have an incredibly positive effect on his business.

Optimising your website is just one way of making sure that your business benefits from your online presence, but it is by no means the only way. An effective website is about more than just where you rank on Google. Try thinking about the following:
Does the design fit with your brand? It’s not uncommon to see a beautifully designed website which bears no relation to the printed material of a business. Or worse still, a horribly dated website which just looks out of sync with the new branding. Prioritise getting everything working together, it really will make a difference.
Is the design appealing to your target audience? Does it tell them what they want to know? Or what you’d like them to know?
What is the goal of your website? What would you like people to know, think and do when they visit your site? How obvious is that?
How does your sales process work? And where does your website fit within that sales process? Do you expect people to be Googling for one of your products, visit your site and buy on line? Or do you offer a service where people are more likely to meet you at an event and then ‘check you out’ before calling/ emailing for a meeting. Of course it may be a combination between the two, but if you can be realistic about how your website fits into your sales process you’ve got a better chance of making it really effective.
What is the purpose of your website? For some it may be a reference site (for example a firm of chartered Surveyors) for others it may be your only source of income (if you’re selling car seats online for example).
How easy is it for your visitors to navigate their way around your site? Is the menu bar easy to follow? Are there pages hidden within pages? Is it easy to find what you’re looking for?
Is there a call to action on every page?
Does every page have a different purpose? Ideally (and especially for optimisation purposes) you’ll have one page for each product or service that you offer.

If you’d like to talk to us about your website why not contact us for a website consultation? You can call us on 01483 401 818 or email guildford@printing.com.

When you create links in your website, do you think hard about how they’ll help you get your website found? Or do you just ask people to click here?

Which do you think people are more likely to click on? The former probably since it entices your readers with a benefit: for example see the impact design has had on other businesses just like yours. Rather than more>>, which doesn’t stand out in the same way or entice.

But there’s more. If your hyperlinks can reinforce your keywords (the words that your target audience are searching for) then you’re not only going to entice your readers to click through, you’ll also be helping your search engine rankings.

I have to say, until very recently my homepage was stuffed full of “more >>”, but I’ve since seen the light and refined the way I build my links. And Google seems to like it too!