A friend of mine emailed this morning asking why the blog I told her to set-up for her company isn’t doing very well. She is frustrated because she is writing good posts but her Page Rank score is still stuck on 0.
I post my advice here for her and for others….
PR is complicated, sure time is a factor, but so are a number of other things. You’re best off looking at analytics and looking at individual hits for the time being (next 6 months).
You need to start looking at the traffic in more detail, did you ever install any analytics? Like we suggested…
To make you feel better: PickupPal.com has a page rank of 5 (very high) and that took 8 months and a lot of hard work and budget. Skyrocket has a lower PR, but we still get a considerable amount of traffic.
There is a lot more you can do; should be doing; and paying us to help you do. The following is listed in order of priority:
- Install and use analytics (Wordpress Stats, Google Analytics or NetInsight)
- Be more open with your company’s content (you haven’t really done this yet…)
- Add something to the Blogosphere that isn’t already out their
- Give something valuable away for free
- Write posts every single day
- Your Wordpress account could do with being tuned and a number of plugins need to be installed that will help the user experience and your SEO ranking (we can help with this)
- Design a Wordpress theme that is in tune with your companies brand (we can help with that)
- There are many styles of post that can be more attractive to readers. A classic one is the list post, or “10 best ways to get a job”. Something about a numbered bullet list of advice stuff seems to work. You’ve probably seen similar posts on other blogs: “10 best Firefox plugins”, “100 best Wordpress themes”. These types of posts do perform better than the average.
Does that help, Emma?
Related posts:
- Socialise your blog
- Want to measure all of this?
- Google Analytics Blog: Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent
- Percent Mobile – Mobile Analytics
- Post and Read via Twitter API — Blog — WordPress.com
Sponsored links:
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks JC, yes this is v helpful.
It’s difficult at the moment as we aren’t officially launched and company doesn’t want us to go mad promoting it, we just want to start helping our search ranking.
We’ve got Google analytics on it, only 89 unique visitors, but not promoting it obviously means this isn’t suprising.
We’ve not been uploading that many blogs, mainly due to time issues, but we will try and do them more frequently then.
‘Tuned’ and ‘plugins’ sound fancy, lets chat about these.
Great idea about the design of page. Plus style of post is interesting, will get Sue to write something more bulleted.
Cheers a lot!
I respect the need for company privacy, but it would be worth finding some little morcel to share with your readers. There’s no need to reveal the whole show, just a teaser perhaps, like a Movie.
Can you create a Google Analytics login for me and email it over? Your numbers are small, but there are still a few metrics worth looking at on a daily basis, such as repeat rate and page views per visit. These 2 are good indicators of the stickiness of your site and you should track them and see if you can improve them.
‘Tuned’ and ‘plugins’ is a little fancy, but please note it’s number 6 on the list, so it won’t be as effective as the other items above it. Nevertheless, it’s always worth doing. We can take care of this for you, or we could list the plugins we use on this blog and you could perhaps do it yourself.
Yes, I think the design could be really important for you, not just from a traffic point of view, but it could also raise the level of importance of the blog and allow you to dedicate more resources to it. We do a lot of design for Wordpress blogs and we can turn round a design and theme build in a few days.
You should also consider writing a few posts yourself. I think blogs are much stronger with multiple authors. And company blogs can get really interesting when people in different roles contribute.
Keeping up with hot new Wordpress plugins is tough, two people I tend to follow on this subject are Andy Beal and Rae Hoffman.
Hey thanks, a really interesting and helpful article! I will put some of the advice to good use. Watch this space! Marianne