How should I look to gain traffic for a blog hosted on our own site?

[willryles]

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?

[Impinj]

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

[willryles]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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