The other day, I presented some historical data showing why it's bad to have an offsite blog instead of a blog on your website.
I'm going to continue this on-site/off-site discussion today with a presentation of measured results for when you do have a blog on your site.
The data I'm presenting today is part of the same data set measured on the same website I used in the previous post from last week.
As a quick recap of last week's Nugget, ABC Jewelers (that's not really their name) hired a blogging service in early 2012 to write several blog posts and create links to their website. The goal of that activity was to increase traffic to the website and hopefully increase sales.
Unfortunately, after two and a half years the 36 blog posts have only attracted 9 people to the website.
As part of a renewed, more efficient strategy, ABC Jewelers started adding blogs and educational articles to their own website in September 2013. This time they saw organic traffic results immediately.
Using the same reporting period of Feb1, 2012 to Aug 4, 2014 as I did last week, I generated this first report from Google Analtyics showing the blogging results:
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This is a Landing Page report showing the number of people who arrived on the website through one of the blog pages. Most of the time, they are are clicking on the blog link from Google search results, but they also arrived from referral links to the blog, and social media shares. In total, there were 79 people who found the website because of the blogging content building strategy.
Since September 2013, ABC Jewelers has also been adding educational content to their site. Typically these are articles about different types of jewelry and gemstones.
Using the same reporting period again, I generated this report showing all the landing page traffic to their educational articles:
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As you can see, the educational content seems to be attracting a more consistent number of people: 125 of them since they started this content strategy.
What you see here is just the beginning of a very large snowball effect. Every new article and blog will attract more people while all the previous content continues to attract customers every month.
To illustrate how things are building, I've put together this report from Google Webmaster Tools. The report only shows the last 30 days. I've hidden enough information on this report to protect their identity, but left enough so you could get a sense of the type of content they are publishing.
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The report shows a total of 11 clicks from search results, that's more than the paltry 9 clicks they receive from the entire offsite blogging project.
More importantly, take a look at the "impressions" column. This reports the number of times each of the blog and article entries appeared in the SERPs during the last 30 days. These numbers usually grow every month as you continue to add more content to your site, and this is where you can find the magic that's associate with content building on your website.
I hope this Nugget helps illustrate the importance of content building, aka blogging directly on your site rather than off-site. Every person that finds your on-site blog could potentially browse around the rest of your site, and your product catalog.
