How Much Do You Care About SEO?
by Matt on Apr 21, 2010 in Blogging
A question for my fellow hyperlocal bloggers:
How much do you care about SEO in relation to your hyperlocal blog?
By that, I mean:
- Have you done any basic blog SEO?
- Do you have any SEO-related plugins (if you use WordPress) or other SEO tools?
- Do you use them regularly?
- Do you write headlines or article text with SEO/keywords in mind?
- Do you track where your blog traffic comes from, specifically how much comes from search engines?
One reason I ask is that I’m thinking about doing an SEO for hyperlocal bloggers post/series. I’ve been an SEO much, much longer than I’ve been a hyperlocal blogger, so content like that would be right up my alley.
The second reason I’m asking is this interesting post at the Online Journalism Review by Robert Niles:
Student journalists need to learn SEO more than they need AP style
Needless to say, considering my background in SEO, I agree with that idea 100%. This part, especially, I think is good advice about where SEO fits in with journalism/hyperlocal blogging:
“…most SEO techniques reduce to providing clear, concise writing that stays on topic – that frequently references the key words and phrases that an article’s supposed to be about. That’s good advice for any writer looking to attract readers in a competitive environment. Unfortunately, in print journalism, with readers too long delivered through local monopoly, too many reporters and headline writers became more focused on being clever than clear.”
So, I’ll ask again: How much do you care about SEO in relation to your hyperlocal blog? Comments are open!
(via MediaGazer)
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14 Responses to “How Much Do You Care About SEO?”
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I vote “yes” on the SEO Series.
I second that!
It’d be great.
All I know about SEO is repeating the same words over and over. Which seems foolish and wrong.
I’d love to read a series on SEO. As someone with a background in reporting, I was very interested in the Robert Niles link you posted “Student journalists need to learn SEO more than they need AP style.”
As everything continues to move online, that statement will likely become more and more correct. So bring it on!
I think about SEO alot. I don’t use Scribe (yet) but I certainly do use a number of the free SEOMoz tools.
I do think about SEO when writing headlines, because I think I get more long tail traffic from headlines over the long term than I do from writing “great copywritten” headlines. When the headlines turn into URLS, they obviously are important.
I do watch what % of blog traffic is from searches and it always has been significant for me. (50% or more).
If you need a guinea pig or want to use someone as an example of what NOT to do, feel free to pick on me.
I went to J-school and worked as a journo for years before turning to hyperlocal blogging. You’re right – there’s a total phobia to learning/teaching/practicing SEO in the newsroom. And when I first launched the site, I carried that phobia with me. About a year into running my site, I moved to WordPress and did some basic SEO tweaks and installed plugins like All-in-One. My search rankings shot up. Since then, I take keywords into consideration when writing headlines, ledes, subheads and photo captions – but always balanced with my responsibility to deliver clear, concise information. I especially focus on it for stories that I think have long term value.
The result? My audience exploded from around 5k at the one year relaunch to nearly 10x that now. The percentage of traffic from search engines? About 45%
SEO is important, folks.
Since day one I have always considered SEO. To me it has always been a part of blogging.
One notable thing for me when it comes to SEO on my hyper local site is how well it drive traffic. For example I was out of town for 3 weeks and didn’t have any new content going up but thanks to SEO I didn’t notice much traffic decline.
I always use keywords and write out proper headlines and descriptions.
Thx for the great comments, folks. Glad to see some of you are keeping SEO in mind when blogging. And sounds like there’s enough interest in me doing some kind of series on the subject. Guess I have some planning and writing to do.
I don’t dislike SEO, but honestly, it doesn’t matter much to me for hyperlocal. I know I’m probably an exception, but here’s my reasoning:
Traffic is great, but traffic from Google searches for my hyperlocal site doesn’t mean much to potential advertisers. I like being able to walk into a business and tell them, “Look, I’ve intentionally kept this site’s traffic local. I don’t talk about anything outside of our town. I don’t try to do link exchanges with other bloggers in nearby communities. So when I show you I have 500 uniques a day, you can know those 500 uniques are almost exclusively from our town of 1,500 people.”
Having said all that, someone can feel free to tell my how stupid that is. I haven’t thought it through, so there may be glaring holes in my logic!
@David – you may just mean you don’t highlight the Google searches – but do keep in mind, Google is how many people navigate. Even though they ARE local and they DO know your URL and check the site every day, some people, in our case, would just rather type west seattle blog into google than westseattleblog.com into their browser navigation! A sizable percentage of our regular do that. Or, they rely on us posting links to selected articles to our FB page. But they are VERY local and VERY valuable.
TR,
You’re right. I do get people finding my website from simple Google searches of “Republic TIger Sports.” I don’t think much about that consciously, because it happened without a lot of effort on my part, I guess.
The vast majority of my visitors actually come from Facebook, which is probably a whole different discussion. My Facebook page has been amazing in terms of building a community.
The most important SEO I learned was the importance of NOT doing cutesy headlines if they don’t also include searchable phrases. I specialized in cutesy headline-writing in my long-ago newspaper jobs and went on to cutesy pun-riffic tease captions in TV newscast bumpers. This was HARD, to realize that for example it’s important for headlines to include “West Seattle” even though “for goodness sake, it’s a West Seattle website, we KNOW it’s about West Seattle …” well, sir, you may know that, but Google doesn’t. Also, honoring conversational language. There’s a Qwest/Dex TV commercial out here that points it out – a woman wants to find a “drug store” and while the Dex guy points her to it, the “directory” stodgy guy says “Do you mean ‘pharmacy,’ ma’am? ‘Retail establishment’?” Ha!
I think this is an excellent idea for a series. SEO is just as important for hyperlocal as it is for mutli-national, maybe even more so. There are so many opportunities for SEO on hyperlocal ‘sites due to the intense relevance of long-tail keywords and terms.
Trying to get good SERPs positions on a term like “Organic Coffee Shop” would be a lot harder than “Organic Coffee Shop on Nob Hill San Francisco”
I know I search for things in my own neighborhood all the time.
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