The SEO trends of customization and customized merchandise and services is growing day by day. each company, particularly if it’s at intervals the technical school trade, is pressured to hitch the race of personalization. Continue reading
Imagine you are a newbie affiliate entering the industry today. Which vertical would you choose? What would be your strategy for success?
Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov: In late 2015 we conducted a comprehensive analysis of 550 top affiliate programs across 6 major U.S. affiliate networks (CJ, Rakuten, ShareASale, AvantLink, Affiliate Window, and LinkConnector). Which revealed that more than 88% of the top-earning programs may be placed into 20 broad categories. Continue reading
The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
I’ve been blogging for longer than ten years.
Ten years! And I haven’t quit.
That’s a long time.
I’m not trying to toot my own horn here. I simply want to make a point.
Why haven’t I stopped blogging? After all, I get tons of traffic from old blog posts that I wrote two, four, and even eight years ago.
Why do I keep at it? Writing is punishing work. It’s tough, and it takes a long time. Don’t I have better stuff to do like binge-watching Netflix or just relaxing?
I’ll let you in on a secret. I actually love what I do. That’s one reason. I blog because I like to do it.
But there’s another reason. It’s a business reason. And it’s built on data.
If you know anything about SEO, you know that Google values fresh content. Fresh content is a significant factor in positively influencing ratings. The logic here is that the more frequently you update your site, the more frequently Googlebot (Google’s crawling bot) visits your site.
In turn, this gives you the opportunity to achieve better rankings.
Although you can update your site in several different ways (not to mention all the different types of content you can create), writing new blog posts tends to be the simplest way to generate fresh content.
So let’s go back to my question: why do I keep blogging? Why are you blogging? Should you quit? Should I quit? Are there better ways to do marketing, gain traffic, and grow conversions?
Is blogging truly all it’s cracked up to be? More specifically, just how big of an impact does it have on SEO?
In this article, I’m going to do away with niceties, guesses, and “best practice” advice. Instead, I’m going to dish up the data so you can get the cold, hard facts on what happens if you decide to stop blogging.
First, here are just a few statistics from Kapost to put blogging in perspective:
These are some legit numbers. They show just how monumental of an impact blogging can have.
But what would happen if you stopped blogging?
You pull the plug. You quit. You’re done. No more publishing.
What would happen?
Would it have any catastrophic consequences, or would it merely be a mild impediment?
Let’s take a look at a study that put this to the test.
WordPress developer/social media manager/SEO expert Robert Ryan conducted a simple yet enlightening experiment.
In 2015, he refrained from posting any new content on his blog for 251 days. That’s eight months and seven days.
Here are some of his key findings:
Blogging affects overall traffic
When Ryan quit blogging, his traffic rapidly fell by 32%.
The image quality is low, but here’s the chart that he posted:
The fact that Ryan’s overall traffic dropped by nearly a third during this time is tangible evidence that there’s a correlation between your blog output and your overall traffic volume.
Quite frankly, I find it a bit alarming to see such a dramatic drop just because of not blogging.
Of course, we should keep in mind that his experiment lasted for over eight months.
If you stopped blogging for only a month or two, the consequences probably wouldn’t be this extreme.
However, it still wouldn’t do you any favors.
This brings up a good point. What if your business runs into trouble, you get sick, or something else happens that prevents you from blogging for a time?
I suggest having a backlog of articles to publish at all times. I like to have several posts scheduled ahead of time. If something unexpected comes up, at least I know my posts will go live according to the schedule.
A 42 percent drop in organic traffic is colossal.
For some businesses, that kind of drop could make the difference between making money and losing money.
An organic traffic loss of that magnitude is similar to receiving an algorithmic penalty.
Most websites earn most of their traffic organically.
If you’re in the “business services” industry, you earn a disproportionate amount of organic traffic.
It comes from content. More specifically, it comes from blogging.
Organic traffic is nothing to wink at. This is the lifeline of your business. This is your audience.
It’s hard to dispute that Google does indeed show preference to sites with consistently fresh content.
As Moz explains,
“Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.”
It’s all theoretical, of course. No one knows exactly how Google’s algorithm works.
But we can’t dispute the fact that quitting a blog leads to an organic traffic nosedive.
By having a dynamic site (publishing content) as opposed to a static one (not publishing new content), you provide Google with new content to crawl and index. In turn, this keeps you on Google’s radar in a positive way.
You also have to consider the fact that each new blog post presents an opportunity to generate more backlinks and rank for additional keywords.
I imagine that you want to see an uptick in traffic like this:
The fact is, you can’t get traffic like that unless you blog like you mean it.
When you stop blogging for an extended period of time, your stream of organic traffic can dry up, which can obviously have some undesirable consequences.
The stat from Kapost, stating that brands with 15 blog posts per month average 1,200 new leads per month, and Ryan’s stat—stating that traffic to his contact page fell by 15 percent—show us just how intertwined blogging and lead generation really are.
This makes sense when you think about it.
No blogging means much less organic and overall traffic. In turn, fewer visitors are landing on your website, which means fewer leads.
Blogging, quite obviously, leads to more leads.
Notice this data from MarketingCharts.com. Their data shows that a higher blogging frequency is positively correlated with higher customer acquisition rates.
The final and perhaps most alarming of Ryan’s findings was the drop in overall site conversions (28 percent).
I can connect the dots to see how this could happen.
Few people blog just for the heck of it. We blog because it makes a significant difference.
We blog because it builds conversions.
But how does this work? How is blogging so inextricably linked to conversions?
From my experience, I’ve found blogging to be an incredibly effective way to build rapport with my audience and get them comfortable with the idea of buying.
For example, before a prospect would want to go ahead and purchase Crazy Egg, there’s a good chance that they would first want to explore “The Daily Egg,” which is the accompanying blog.
In fact, two stats from Abaco found that “60 percent of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on its site.”
It’s about fostering positive feelings, as vague as that sounds.
Furthermore, “78 percent of consumers believe that companies behind content are interested in building good relationships.”
Good relationships are built one blog post at a time.
Basically, blogging builds trust.
If you blog the right way, you can demonstrate transparency.
Transparency, in turn, creates trust.
There’s no secret here. If you want to truly influence purchases (conversions), you should be blogging.
Customers look to content to grow and sustain positivity and goodwill towards the brand.
This positivity and goodwill influence conversions. You’ll earn more conversions because you are blogging. It’s that simple.
I would also make the point that stopping blogging out of the blue can make you look a little flaky in the eyes of customers. Some may even wonder if you’re still in business.
No one wants to do business with a place that seems quiet and untended. You might still be in business, but if your blog isn’t buzzing with new content and activity, users might get the idea that you’re not around to serve them.
This will kill your conversions.
For these reasons, you can see how a lack of blogging can slowly trickle down to hurt conversions and eventually result in a considerable decline in customers.
Jeff Bullas provides an excellent explanation of how blogging builds credibility in this infographic:
These aren’t just random stats. These are concrete data-driven signals that your blog builds your credibility.
And your credibility as a business influences whether or not people will buy from you.
While I can’t say for sure that you would experience the same level of backlash that Ryan did, it’s fair to say that quitting blogging for an extended period of time isn’t going to help you.
Even going a single month without an update could throw a wrench in your SEO.
For this reason, I can’t stress enough just how important it is to be consistent with publishing blogs.
Everyone has their own opinion on what the bare minimum is, but most bloggers would agree that you should strive for at least one per week.
But to determine the ideal frequency, I would suggest checking out this post I wrote about determining how often you need to blog.
A blog such as the Huffington Post (yes, it’s a blog) publishes an article a minute. They can do that because they have a ton of semi-free and syndicated content being pushed out.
If you’re Forbes, you might publish more than 1,000 articles a month.
Obviously, you won’t be able to keep pace with Forbes or Huffpo, especially if you’re blogging for your personal brand.
Instead, you should focus on consistency. As this article shows, when you quit blogging, your traffic, and conversions tank.
If you stay consistent, you’ll win.
Blogging accomplishes much more than simply demonstrating your expertise and building trust.
It plays a major role in SEO, and the frequency of your blogging can determine how much traffic you bring in, how many leads you generate, and ultimately how many conversions you make.
If you want to win at the game of online marketing, you’ve got to be publishing content.
And you can’t stop.
Internet marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. As a ten-year veteran of this sprint, I can attest to the fact that it gets ugly and tiring, and there are times when you want to quit.
But I can also attest to the fact that your hard work pays off.
Sure, at times you might feel like you’re banging your head against a wall, but all that work is doing something. It’s growing your audience, building trust, It’s pushing up conversions bit by bit, day by day, month by month.
Don’t quit.
Have you ever tried a similar experiment, and if so, what were the results?
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Progressive Web Apps. Ah yes, those things that Google would have you believe are a combination of Gandhi and Dumbledore, come to save the world from the terror that is the Painfully Slow WebsiteTM.
But what actually makes a PWA? Should you have one? And if you create one, how will you make sure it ranks? Well, read on to find out.
Given as that Google came up with the term, I thought we’d kick off with their definition:
The really exciting thing about PWAs: they could make app development less necessary. Your mobile website becomes your app.
Speaking to some of my colleagues at Builtvisible, this seemed to be a point of interesting discussion: do brands need an app and a website, or a PWA.
Fleshing this out a little, this means we’d expect things like push notifications, background sync, the site/app working offline. Having a certain look/design to feel like a native application, and being able to be set on the device home screen.
These are things we traditionally haven’t had available to us on the web.
But thanks to new browsers supporting more and more of the HTML5 spec and advances in JavaScript, we can start to create some of this functionality. On the whole, Progressive Web Apps are:
This method of loading content allows for incredibly fast perceived speed.
We are able to get something that looks like our site in front of a user almost instantly, just without any content.
The page will then go and fetch the content and all’s well. Obviously, if we actually did things this way in the real world, we’d run into SEO issues pretty quickly, but we’ll address that later too.
If then, at their core, a Progressive Web App is just a website served in a clever way with extra features for loading stuff, why would we want one?
Let me be clear before I get into this: for most people, a PWA is something you don’t need.
That’s important enough that it bares repeating, so I’ll repeat it:
You probably don’t need a PWA.
The reason for this is that most websites don’t need to be able to behave like an app.
This isn’t to say that there’s no benefit to having the things that PWA functionality can bring. But for many sites, the benefits don’t outweigh the time it takes to implement the functionality at the moment.
When should you look at a PWA then? Well, let’s look at a checklist of things that may indicate that you do need one…
You have:
In short, you have something beyond a normal website, with interactive or time-sensitive components, or rapidly released or updated content.
If you’re running a normal site, with a blog that maybe updates every day or two, or even less frequently, then whilst it might be nice to have a site that acts as a PWA. There’s probably more useful things you can be doing with your time for your business.
So, you have something that would benefit from this sort of functionality, but need to know how these things work. Welcome to the wonder that is the service worker.
Service workers can be thought of as a proxy that sits between your website and the browser.
It calls for intercept of things you ask the browser to do, and hijacking of the responses given back.
That means we can do things like, for example, hold a copy of data requested.Sso when it’s asked for again, we can serve it straight back (this is called caching).
This means we can fetch data once, then replay it a thousand times without having to fetch it again.
Think of it like a musician recording an album. It means they don’t have to play a concert every time you want to listen to their music. Same thing, but with network data.
If you want a more thorough explanation of service workers, check out this moderately technical talk given by Jake Archibald from Google.
Service workers fundamentally exist to deliver extra features, which have not been available to browsers until now. These includes things like:
It’s planned that in the future, they’ll be able to do even more than they currently can. For now, though, these are the sorts of features you’ll be able to make use of. Obviously, these mostly load data via AJAX, once the app is already loaded.
So you’re sold on Progressive Web Apps. But if you create one, how will you make sure it ranks?
As with any new front-end technology, there are always implications for your SEO visibility. But don’t panic; the potential issues you’ll encounter with a PWA have been solved before by SEOs who have worked on JavaScript-heavy websites.
For a primer on that, take a look at this article on JS SEO.
There are a few issues you may encounter if you’re going to have a site that makes use of application shell architecture.
Firstly, it’s pretty much required that you’re going to be using some form of JS framework or view library, like Angular or React. If this is the case, you’re going to want to take a look at some Angular.JS or React SEO advice.
If you’re using something else, the short version is you’ll need to be pre-rendering pages on the server. Then picking up with your application when it’s loaded.
This enables you to have all the good things these tools give you, whilst also serving something Google et al can understand.
Their recent advice that they’re getting good at rendering this sort of application. We still see plenty of examples in the wild of them flailing horribly when they crawl heavy JS stuff.
Assuming you’re in the world of clever JS front-end technologies, to make sure you do things the PWA way. You’ll also need to be delivering the CSS and JS required to make the page work along with the HTML.
Not just including script tags with the <code>src attribute, but the whole file, inline.
Obviously, this means you’re going to increase the size of the page you’re sending down the wire. But it has the upside of meaning that the page will load instantly.
More than that, though, with all the JS (required for pick-up) and CSS (required to make sense of the design) delivered immediately. The browser will be able to render your content and deliver something that looks correct and works straight away.
Again, as we’re going to be using service workers to cache content once it’s arrived, this shouldn’t have too much of an impact.
We can also cache all the CSS and JS external files required separately, and load them from the cache store rather than fetch them every time.
This does make it very slightly more likely that the PWA will fail on the first time that a user tries to request your site. But you can still handle this case gracefully with an error message or default content, and re-try on the next page view.
There are other potential issues people can run into, as well. The Washington Post, for example, built a PWA version of their site, but it only works on a mobile device.
It’s important to respect the P part of the acronym — the website should enable features that a user can make use of, but still, work in a normal manner for those who are using browsers that don’t support them.
It’s about enhancing functionality progressively, not demanding that people upgrade their browser.
The only slightly tricky thing with all of this is that it requires that, for the best experience, you design your application for offline-first experiences.
How that’s done is referenced in Jake’s talk above. The only issue with going down that route: you’re only serving content once someone’s arrived at your site and waited long enough to load everything.
Obviously, in the case of Google, that’s not going to work well. So here’s what I’d suggest…
Rather than just sending your application shell, and then using AJAX to request content on load, and then picking up, use this workflow instead.
Adding in the data required means that, on load, we don’t have to make an AJAX call to get the initial data required.
Instead, we can bundle that in too, so we get something that can render content instantly as well.
As an example of this, let’s think of a weather app. Now, the basic model would be that we send the user all the content to show a basic version of our app, but not the data to say what the weather is.
In this modified version, we also send along what today’s weather is, but for any subsequent data request, we then go to the server with an AJAX call.
This means we still deliver content that Google et al can index, without possible issues from our AJAX calls failing.
From Google and the user’s perspective, we’re just delivering a very high-performance initial load, then registering service workers to give faster experiences for every subsequent page and possibly extra functionality.
In the case of a weather app, that might mean pre-fetching tomorrow’s weather each day at midnight, or notifying the user if it’s going to rain, for example.
If you’re interested in learning more about PWAs, I highly recommend reading this guide to PWAs by Addy Osmani (a Google Chrome engineer), and then putting together a very basic working example, like the train one Jake mentions in his YouTube talk referenced earlier.
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