07 Jul 2009

More than 70% of small businesses say they don’t have time to keep their blogs up to date. A survey of 125 small business owners published today by SEO copywriting company Write My Site shows that 62% of respondents set up a blog in the hope that it would increase traffic to their websites.

Nevertheless, only 29% are managing to populate them between one and three times each month, with the remaining 71% admitting that their blogs have fallen by the wayside.

Emily Hill, Write My Site’s MD, says: “Our blog customers call us for two reasons. One: they don’t know what to write. Two: they don’t have time to write anything. More often than not it’s the latter, so we take it off their hands and keep their blogs updated with regular, keyword-threaded content. When a blog hasn’t been updated for several weeks or months it looks unprofessional – people tend to be relieved to learn they can offload the time-consuming task of keeping their blogs up-to-date.”

If blogs are such a hassle to maintain, why bother having them at all? In a word: traffic. Google and the other search engines pay great attention to sites that regularly add original – and relevant - content. Digital marketing industry body Econsultancy has used its own blog to urge small businesses to take advantage of this simple SEO strategy: “We are big believers in quality content. Original content. Google loves it too. And so do many SEO experts – the general advice these days is to create subject-specific content on your website, and to categorise and label that content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy. Blogs are good for this.”

Hill supports this view: “We have seen for ourselves the benefits of a well-written blog: our own traffic has increased by more than 200% since we bolted a blog onto our website,” she says. “Better still, the traffic is completely targeted: all of our increased hits and enquiries are from people who have found Write My Site by running searches on our keywords.”

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