Small Business Blog from Atlantic Canada

I am "CA" Atreya (PMP, MBA), the author of this blog. I help businesses in Atlantic Canada achieve their BHAG successfully. You may subscribe to this blog using a feed reader (RSS).

Are you a small business with little web presence? Do you find it hard to get yourself listed within the top 20 results in Google? You can easily reach this goal - with a little patience and some smart work. Let me tell you my story. This domain was born in December 2006. There was little or no content until Feb 2007. It was only in March, that I decided to blog. Before that, the site had six pages of static content. I had six visits from Google in Feb and that was me searching to ensure my pages were indexed in Google.

Stats

Once I got Wordpress going and wrote a few articles, 25% of my traffic came from Google in March. This time it wasn’t me. The search terms were generic - from strategy implementation to positioning statement. I was amazed at this jump in traffic from Google. April saw Google sending me 35 % of my traffic via 270 keywords; while May saw Google sending 40% of my traffic via 323 keywords. This is just part of the story.

Content update is the key

I looked at the pages that kept appearing in the search results. Not one static page was found in the top 20 search results; it was all from the blog. I did not see the rationale of continuing to keep the static home page and other brochure pages. I embarked on making some major changes late in May. I got rid of the old static pages and incorporated service offerings, about and client testimonials into the blog pages. The last 14 days in June has seen Google sending me 40% of my traffic via 130 keywords. I expect the traffic from Google to hit 50% this month.

The home page is dead - long live the home page.

Within four months, Google is driving 40% of my traffic - and all this is unpaid. Not a dime was spent on keyword purchases or any other promotion. Just plain good old search engine optimization helped me achieve this.

It can help you too! Get rid of that static home page or landing page and start blogging. Remember to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO). Results are guaranteed. Driving traffic to your website is the first step. Retaining them is second; getting them to open their wallets is third. But that’s for another post for another day.

[Update 15 June]: I came across this article by Jason Preston at Blog Business Summit about increasing traffic for your blog. Even though their results may not be statistically significant, it is worth a read if you are planning to ditch your home page for a blog.

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