Kate at Cater For You has recently been producing some great new content for our blog fully utilising her background in chefing / cooking. However, she bluntly asked me ‘Does anyone actually read them?” A quick look at our Google Analytics shows that our blog posts are read, but actually, I wanted the blog to be about quality content that could be shared and move up the rankings and improve our web site’s authority.
Following my last trip to the Brighton SEO conference in September, I decided to kick start my content writing / marketing and extract information from my brain in a semi coherent way onto screen in a way that might interest people. I used to have many people that followed my personal blog until something called Facebook arrived and use it as a conversation piece – this has started happening again.
I also wanted to look at Page and Domain authority to see whether there would be any improvements – I think that it is too early to tell on this front, though they have all gone up but this is via other work i’ve been doing. I’m currently also planning a relaunch of chalfontstpeter.com into a more personal blogging platform by me and invited local people and confident that this will increase in authority.
I was listening to an interesting podcast whilst walking my dog the other day by Target Marketing (episode 205) questioning whether content marketing converts for product marketeers generating the content. They interestingly also talked about page and domain authority through social sharing of the web site and deep linking over the longer term. The podcast is a fascinating listen to some serious hard research work at testing the conversion for product marketeers.
My thought processes also turned to the aforementioned Facebook and to some extent Twitter. These didn’t kill off past methods of publishing content, but did certainly subdue them. However, my feelings on Facebook that for individual users wanting to keep in touch it isn’t as relevant any more. I’m finding I spend less time using it and invariably the social content being delivered to me isn’t from my friends, but groups or businesses that I follow. These are of interest to me or I wouldn’t sign up, but the ratio of friends posts to these is tiny now – and this was the main reason for moving away from blogging for the rise of Facebook. In addition, if people visit my blog, they must be interested in my content, whereas on Facebook you don’t have a choice in viewing what is delivered. I often hear people complaining about people that post particular things on Facebook, even if they don’t actually post themselves to contribute to the eco system.
Another ‘back to the future’ content delivery channel is the podcast. Again BrightonSEO prompted me to follow a few speakers I had seen at the conference and explore further. When the iPhone first burst onto the scene it was common to listen to podcasts, but they seemed to drop off the radar for a while. However, they now seem to be well and truly back in vogue, not least with some big names teaming up to unexpected success eg Peter Crouch.
I would love to start doing these for Cater For You, but I would probably have to find a full time marketing person if this was ever going to happen. Somehow, Darren at Trading Depot is finding the time and i’m watching with fascination to see how he gets on with a series of industry podcasts, amusingly, I believe i’m the first one – the pilot to test everything worked. I will probably do a follow up post as I chat with him to see how it went. If you are interested, he’s created a dedicated site at https://inthehouse.co.uk which I believe is launching in the new year.
On a more basic level of content marketing, creating good copy for your product sections and individual products is essential. I have proven time again that when I go back and revamp a section of a web site with more information including general content, photos, videos, specifications, I see a rise in the rankings within 4-6 weeks if not more quickly. The blogs support this activity.
If you would like to know more or have an informal chat about your web site or social media activities, please contact us.
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