As of January 2017, according to statisticbrain there was an estimated 898 billion Web pages indexed on Google. For businesses looking to leverage the Internet to find customers, that number can be intimidating, especially given how many changes are occurring in the digital space as Google looks at Voice Search, AI, Machine Learning and more.

Digital marketing, especially for longer sales cycles, revolves around building engagement and Google has vasts algorithms (well over 220) that go into your ranking presence. As strategic experts in the digital space, our goal is to develop a relationship with your page visitors, so they come to view you as the industry authority and trust what you have to say. Search engines watch for this type of engagement and Google’s fundamental pillars are built off Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT).

Many business owners struggle to see that the true purpose of a blog is NOT to advertise or self-serve, but rather an excellent content and search intent tactic that allows their website to build their brand, traffic, and reputation around garnering engagement and blogs can help leverage that. When Fasturtle writes your blogs, we regularly update them monthly, and there is a lot of research and science that goes into how we determine a blog which may include the following:

Here is why the blog is so critical to a content strategy and why Fasturtle is choosing topics and posting to your website.

People use Google to find answers.  In short, we write our blogs for your business to give them those answers.  Search engines also want us to provide the optimal user experience for those typing queries into the search bars. To this end, they seek fresh, up-to-date content and websites. In algorithmic terms this is known as Query Deserves Freshness or QDF, where more weight is given to recent content on trending or spiking topics. Generally, the search engines interpret recent updates to mean that the page has more relevance and currency than a website that has not been updated in months or longer and would be a better user experience for its customers.

Keywords were the base commodity of search engines, but a lot has evolved.  So rather than just writing a blog about some bland topic simply to get your website “ranking” Google has algorithms that can actually prevent that from happening.  As the millennial generation comes up and is overtaking the population ratio, they are looking to technology like Google Home, Google assists, Siri, Alexa, several; Voice Search related or (assisted technologies) to get immediate answers.  Having keywords injected into the blog is important, but we at Fasturtle do so in a conversational and natural way which has changed.

In a secure search and “not provided” era, blogs provide your business with the ideal platform to target various keywords, but more importantly rank for user intention (people seeking answers) and we at Fasturtle build the appropriate content and context around them. Having Blogs will also allow us to potentially create additional pages dedicated to particular services that bridge keywords and this allows you to develop a page reporting strategy. Traffic from search engines to that page are likely using queries related to the keyword, engagement, click-through-rate, and user intent, around which the blog post was written. In that way, you can start to understand the queries and keywords even when they are not provided.

We could go on and on about how the good ‘ole days of “content is king” was everything, and to this day it still is but “engagement is queen” and both need crowns.  The evolution, however, it is not about the size of the content, but the relevancy, the engagement, and substance.  People are not spending hours and hours reading a 3,000-word blog.  They are turning to Google, searching a query, and looking for fast answers.  So our blog strategy will and has evolved with this.

It is important as a business owner you understand these pillars of success and in the partnership with Fasturtle, there is trust.  We will continue to be agile and align ourselves with these new evolutions and best practices.  This will help us shape our tactics and strategies which include choosing what topics to post for your blog, continuing to provide the best content for that and measuring success back in the monthly report.

We appreciate you as our partner and look forward to continued success moving forward. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to our Director of Client Success, Bryan O’Connor.