Question: Can you prove that blogging will improve my organic search placement?
Answer: That is very difficult to quantify for a website and is part of an overall strategy for organic page placement. Google alone has over 150 different factors that it uses to determine page rank so there is no one answer that I could give you that would say “blog and move up 10 positions on Google.”
What I do know is that blogging adds content to your site on a regular basis which keeps search engine spiders coming back, blogging when done on keywords provides ways for visitors to enter your site through blog posts and then into your website, blogging as it adds the the number of pages on a narrow topic for your site over time adds authority to your site which is one of Google’s evaluating site factor for page rank.
Wish there was a magic formula to say yes, we can prove that blogging will help you get to the number one spot, but honestly no one can say that. It is a good practice policy that speaks to many of the elements that improve your page rank on Google and the other search engines, but will it help YOU move up, that depends on many factors, your marketplace, your keywords you are targeting, your current site, your overall strategy, your current content freshness, spiderability of your current web site, your current site’s performance in the organic SERPs.
What we do know from historical data is that traffic does improve from a special case study that we have done and that sites that do blog will have a higher traffic level than sites that do not. We know that blogs add to the stickiness factor of a site, and we know that blogs feed the search engine the content and some of the parameters that they are specifically looking for when they determine page rank.
For you, you may want to consider doing a three month test on your site to evaluate if blogging works for your market and viewers and builds your traffic and site over time. Blogging is considered an organic help and organic placement of a site by its very nature is not a quick fix but a long-term process. You will find that most Search Engine Optimization companies are recommending a blog as part of an overall strategy for improvement.
Your question may be a good one for a white paper, but has one been done that I can point you to – not that I can find on Google. You may want to do further research on blogs on the Web to identify if a blog is right for your needs.
