We’ve done a little experiment to prove to our clients that blogging – done frequently and well – can greatly increase the number of visitors and page views to your website.
For much of March and April, we used the Visual People blog to communicate something about our business or industry to our readers and website visitors 3 to 4 days every week.
The feedback was excellent. We posted links to our blog posts on our Facebook page and our Twitter feed, and really focused on promoting the information we were sharing. We got comments online and in the real world from people interested in what we were saying.
Then, we stopped. For most of May and June, we didn’t blog at all. We wanted to see what change that created in our website statistics.
The effect was amazing. We compared April (with 18 blog posts) to June (with no blog posts) and here’s what we found:
- Our visits in June were down compared to April more than 45 percent.
- Our page views in June were almost 40 percent fewer. That means when people did find our site, they didn’t look at as many pages.
However, with more content on the site to review – even though no new content was being added – we found that people looked at more pages each time they visited and spent about the same amount of time on our site. So the content creation, even though it was “stale,” was still benefiting us.
Here’s another interesting thing: Google sent us 23 percent less traffic in June than in April. That means that while we had fresh, relevant content on a regular basis, Google liked us more and ranked us higher. (Or, it could mean that people just aren’t searching for web design, internet marketing and social media information as much in June as they did in April, but we tend to doubt that.)
We noticed that our Facebook fans spent a lot more time on our site when we regularly suggested they go to our blog, too. Referrals from Facebook dropped nearly 80 percent in June, even though we continued to post weekly about projects we were working on (we just didn’t give people a reason to visit VisualPeople.com). That’s a big drop! Other social media sites, like Twitter and LinkedIn, also stopped sending us much traffic when we didn’t reference our blog posts, even though we still had information about our site and a link on both.
Finally, while this is not scientific by any means, we saw an increase in queries from local, potential clients in the month or so after our regular blogging experiment. This translated into more new clients. While we can’t definitely prove that the increase was due to blogging, it did take place in a time (late May – June) when our business tends to be a touch slower. So there is some circumstantial evidence that the blogging helped make us more visible to our audience.
So what’s our takeaway? Well, we plan to get back in the blogging saddle, so to speak, and hope that our regular readers will like having us back. And, we have some concrete information to share with our clients who ask, “What, exactly, will spending the time to regularly create blog content get me?”
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Now is a great time to add a blog to your site if you don’t have one. Got a blog that you never find time to update? Contact us for help with a blog plan or blog writing. We have reasonable rates for creating regular blog posts that can help your bottom line.