Training corporate bloggers
We’re meeting with many companies who are having a tough time getting their people to write for the corporate blog. The most common challenges: finding ideas to write about, finding a voice and style that is conversational, finding time to write, and overcoming fears about putting your own views and ideas into the public.
One way to add to “bloggers’ block” is to impose all kinds of “keywords-to-use-in-every-post” guidelines. I recently heard a corporate blogging manager talk about his top priority: making sure bloggers use keywords to raise the brand’s search profile. Of course, you want to increase search rankings.
But be careful about starting the blog this way. Instead, help your bloggers get comfortable with finding ideas and writing. Once they get in a good groove — which usually takes several months — then introduce the idea of how to incorporate certain keywords into their titles and posts.
Another thing to keep in mind is that being interesting and providing value to readers is far more valuable than raising search rankings with boring, bland content.
Kudos to Rob Cottingham over at Social Signal for this illustrating the issue so well.
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July 10th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Thanks for sharing the cartoon, Lois – and I couldn’t agree more with your argument here.
The basic problem I’m seeing with a lot of SEO is balance. In a way, it’s like legal advice for a communications crisis.
Lawyers will tend to give you fairly conservative advice, intended to minimize your legal exposure as much as possible. So you’ll find the statements that get approved by legal are often bland, oblique or filled with caution and qualification.
But while those messages may limit your legal exposure, they might well enrage the people you’re trying to talk to. Approach a situation that calls out for compassion by responding with legalese, and you’ll look callous and clueless. And the damage to your brand could well eclipse whatever legal exposure you were trying to avoid.
Similarly, if you just think about keywords and findability when you’re writing a blog post (or drafting blog guidelines), you’ll come up with something that tastes delicious to search robots but somewhere between insipid and revolting to live human beings.
They won’t develop the relationship with you that they might if you were using an authentic voice, and they won’t engage with your blog. So while you’ll be indexed with exactly the keywords you’re looking for, you won’t get either the traffic or the links that can help lift you to the top of the search results for those terms.
You’ll win the battle and lose the war.