SEO. It’s a daunting term.
As a bail bondsman, you commonly deal with complex, legal terms like “Indemnitor,” “forfeiture,” and “aiding and abetting.” SEO and all its complex terminology just isn’t something you are familiar with or have time for. And, that’s ok. While SEO can seem confusing, it is a concept that is much simpler than you think. Don’t believe me? Today, we’ll take a look at why blogging is essential for your digital marketing and online marketing strategy.
Why in the World is Blogging Important?
“Blogging.” In this digital age, it seems everyone and their dog is blogging. If everyone is doing it, why is it important? First, you must understand how search engines work. Google and the other big players such as Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL have algorithms that work behind-the-scenes to rank your site. There are thousands of ranking signals that determine how your website is placed in the search engine results. In fact, there are so many factors in the Google algorithm, no one really knows how many there are.
Search Engine Ranking Factors
Google’s ranking factors almost mythical – a mysterious group of signals that SEO’s around the world study relentlessly. Finding and labeling each factor would be similar to the momentous discovery of the Holy Grail – it would lead to unimaginable power and fame.
Ok, maybe that’s a stretch – but it would make SEO and marketing much simpler. You can find many articles across the internet that claim to name each of the ranking factors – a first glance seems to allege there are 200 of them. This is simply a legend, however. Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts confirmed there were more than 200 ranking signals, but each of them had up to 50 variations. The moral of this story is that we simply don’t know how many things signal to Google how a site should be ranked. And, because we don’t know how many there are, we especially don’t know what they are. Much can be learned through trial and error, experience, and common sense, however. Over time, we’ve been able to find certain things that help sites rank well, even though we don’t know the exact effect each one infers.
How Blogging Helps You Rank
There are many reasons that blogging regularly helps you rank well in search engines. None of these can be confirmed, but they have been tested by SEOs for years and have been proven to boost rankings.
Keywords
Keywords are an essential part of the search engine optimization process. Every business has a set of keywords that people search for in order to find the business or service they want. When you blog regularly, you have a chance to incorporate your keywords so that you are more likely to appear in search engine results. This is especially true when it comes to “long tail” searches. These are long searches that have much less search competition than shorter, more common search queries.
Freshness
In 2011, Google did an update that took “freshness” into account. This new algorithm determined how new and fresh a piece of content was, and in some cases, gives it a boost in rankings. Google’s purpose is to provide relevant search results to their customers – thus, they want to make sure the sites that are ranking have fresh content. When you blog regularly, it signals search engines that you care about providing new content to your potential clients.
Link Building
Another essential part of SEO is link building. One of the ways Google and other search engines determine if a site is legitimate or not is by how many other trustworthy, reputable sites link to them. One way to think about links is as if they are “votes” for your site. When you write quality blog posts on your site that other people find useful, they are likely to link to you (as we have with many of the sources in this article). When there’s more to link to on your site, you are much more likely to receive links.
Social Media
While social media isn’t a confirmed ranking factor, it does create trust and authority for potential customers. Many people have the belief that bail bondsmen are a bit shady. One way to dissipate this cloud of lies is to have a robust social media strategy that illustrates what you stand for. Sharing your blog posts is an excellent way to get your content out on the web, and build trust and authority with potential customers.
Build Trust
When a website is constantly updated and cared-for, it creates trust with potential customers. There’s nothing worse than going to a website and finding it hasn’t been updated for 5 years. When a company cares enough to update and maintain their website by posting relevant, useful content, it sends a signal of trust and respect to both search engines and customers looking for a way to get their loved ones out of jail quickly.
Who Better to Blog than an Expert?
You may be wondering who is qualified for blogging for your bail bond site. Our advice is this: The best people to blog for an industry is a business owner or someone who is familiar with the questions people commonly ask, and the problems and issues their customers face. When you update your site with relevant, useful content that is full of good information solving the questions and answers to common problems, the search engine benefits just can’t be measured.
Need Help?
Are you worried you don’t know enough about blogging to be successful? Don’t worry – we are here to help you every step of the way. In the next blog posts in this series, we’re going to talk about how to find topics for your bail bond company, and how to format you blog post for optimum search engine ranking. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us!