How should I look to gain traffic for a blog hosted on our own site?
-
Ok I know what you're going to say.. social media etc right?
The problem is we do that already but we're stuck in an industry that just isn't very sexy!
People reading twitter/facebook don't want to read about toilets in their spare time, or keep it as a hobby.
If you search bathroom blog (uk google), you will see we are about 5th, it gets us no traffic, as I imagine it's not a popular term so I can see you starting to ask why we write a blog in the first place.
We write the blog because at the moment the whole industry is dominated by pile it high sell it cheap online stores and all their blogs are written for google only so finding decent or unbiased advice is rare.
Seriously, these guys are creating fake blogs and paying for links inside other blogs all over the place in order to boost their rankings so we figure if you really want some good advice people can't find it.
If they find our blog they will get some good advice and good content.. and then the hope is that they give us a call and we can see if we can help them.
The problem is these guys are hogging all the keywords.. and it seems the bathroom industry has very few keywords that people search!
Now I know we are in it for the long haul.. so taking time doesn't bother me, but I was wondering if there were any tried and tested places to post a blog that could get us at least seen so that people could see how different our content is?
Or if all else fails, can anyone suggest the right keywords to aim at besides the "bathroom suites" etc that these huge online stores dominate?
-
Have you used Google's keyword tool to find other relevant keywords people are searching for? I've found the tool very helpful for gauging how relevant a keyword is a determining how much effort I should put into ranking for that keyword. (You can see how many people search for that keyword per month) <cite>https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool</cite>
I also read a good post that details a 6 month link-building campaign, which will help raise you domain name in the search results. Check it out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for the prompt reply.
I've tried the whole google alerts thing, but apart from finding some very dodgy pay me £200 and i'll spin your article a 1000 times type stuff anything moderately interesting usually mentions the bathroom as a place of the activity rather than the focal point of a search.
Completely agree on the useful answers bit, I think I will get straight on that one.
-
Hey William
It's an unfortunate fact, that despite Panda and Penguin and all that other jazz there are still loads of over SEO'd sites dominating in certain niches. Maybe the overdue Penguin update will come along and help out but in terms of big keywords, you may find that you are left chasing some of those boys for a while who are playing the link building/buying game.
But, something else you said interested me much more than that:
"finding decent or unbiased advice is rare."
If that is true, then, you have an opportunity to provide that advice and people will find you. Now, you may not win tons of links as unlike Internet Marketing and SEO I doubt there are tons of toilet sites out there but over time, you will be able to build a powerful resource.
Likewise, if you provide lots of relevant information that people are looking for and you are pushed down by three or four spam blogs, aggressive retailers etc then people will keep looking till they find what they want and if you are the first person providing that info, then, you should be on to a winner.
If it was me, then I would work on figuring out the big questions that people have and getting them answered and then, try to find out what people are talking about relative to your niche and provide the answers. Use Google alerts to monitor discussion and start frequenting popular message boards and such to determine what common questions people have and make sure you are answering them.
If you swing into these discussions and provide best of class answers to people then you will soon start to see some solid referral traffic to supplement the people finding you through search.
So... if you are up for the long game, which content marketing really, really is and you are prepared to put the effort in then 12 months down the line, you will see the results.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I have 100+ Landing Pages I use for PPC... Does Google see this as a blog farm?
I am currently using about 50-100 domains for geotargeted landing pages for my PPC campaigns. All these pages basically have the same content, I believe are hosted on a single unique ip address and all have links back to my main url. I am not using these pages for SEO at all, as I know they will never achieve any significant SEO value. They are simply designed to generate a higher conversion rate for my PPC campaigns, because they are state and city domains. My question is, does google see this as a blog/link farm, and if so, what should I do about it? I don't want to lose any potential rankings they may be giving my site, if any at all, but if they are hurting my main urls SEO performance, then I want to know what I should do about it. any advice would be much appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jfishe19881 -
What is the best way to eliminate ghost traffic from Google Analytics?
Hey Mozzers, I just wanted to see how you all deal with eliminating Google ghost traffic sources from Google. I tried setting up a RegEx 'include' list before, but it seemed as though I was blocking potential traffic sources when I did as much (I'm probably missing something here). Anyway, I'm interested to read how you all have dealt with this issue in the past, thanks for reading!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maxcarnage0 -
Malicious links on our site indexed by Google but only visible to bots
We've been suffering from some very nasty black hat seo. In Google's index, our pages show external links to various pharmaceutical websites, but our actual live pages don't show them. It seems as though only certain user-agents see the malicious links. Setting up Screaming Frog SEO crawler using the Googlebot user agent also sees the malicious links. Any idea what could have caused this or how this can be stopped? We scanned all files on our webserver and couldn't find any of malicious links. We've changed our FTP and CMS passwords, is there anything else we can do? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
Do I lose link juice if I have a https site and someone links to me using http instead?
We have recently launched a https site which is getting some organic links some of which are using https and some are using http. Am I losing link juice on the ones linked using http even though I am redirecting or does Google view them the same way? As most people still use http naturally will it look strange to google if I contact anyone who has given us a link and ask them to change to https?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lisa-Devins0 -
Bounce Rate Manipulated with Direct Traffic Spikes - Thoughts?
Hi Mozzers, we're hoping to get some insight from some of the technical folks out there on what seems to be malicious targeting of a client's website. We recently discovered enormous spikes in direct traffic to the website with 90% originating from the USA and the rest coming from dozens of other countries. Nearly 100% of visits are new sessions and each only lasts a few seconds - thereby driving the bounce rate over 95%! There are other possible identifiers worth noting, including: Browser - 99% use Internet Explorer Browser Version - 89% use IE 7.0 Flash Version - 80% use 14.0 r0 Operating System - 99% use Windows See the attached "Screenshot - Traffic Spikes & Inflated Bounce Rate". Whether this is a negative SEO attack or something else, we're really hoping to get the community's input and (hopefully) possible solutions. Thanks! oYKrMu6
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ByteLaunch0 -
International web site - duplicate content?
I am looking at a site offering different language options via a javascript drop down chooser. Will google flag this as duplicate content? Should I recommend the purchase of individual domains for each country? i.e. .uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com1 -
Geotargeting a new domain without impacting traffic to existing domain
I had previously asked this as a 'private question' and couldn't make it a 'public question' automatically-- hence reposting it as a new question: We have an existing site, let's say www.xyz.com --- which attracts traffic from all over the world (including the US), though it's primary audience is the UK/ Europe. Most of this traffic is via organic search results on Google. Now, there is a business case to launch a US-centric website -- www.xyz.us, which will have most of its content from the original site (probably with some localization). Our goal is that on day 1 when the new site xyz.us is launched, we want all traffic originating from the US (and may be some other North American countries) to be directed to the .us domain instead of the .com domain. We don't want to lose any search engine traffic; equally importantly, we want this to be done in a manner that is seen by the search engines as a legitimate technique. What are the best options to do this such that the new .US site automatically inherits all of the traffic from the .com site on day 1, without either of these sites getting penalized in any form. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ontarget-media0 -
Free Mass Traffic Software
How does the community feel about Free Mass Traffic Software? Is this a scam or what?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | noork0