We had a really big spike on our site last Thursday that I wanted to discuss this week. I published a blog post about how auDA tried to take away our domain name. It was the first time since these rules were enacted that someone had to go and apply to the Registrants Review Panel. So, victimisation or stupidity? I’m not sure, maybe both, you be the judge.
Anyway, after I published the blog post, it got picked up by SmartCompany after I shared it on LinkedIn, and we had a 400% increase in our normal traffic. After that, all our brand-related phrase traffic doubled. All the organic traffic from Google doubled. So, people were reading the blog post wherever, then going to Google and searching for my name or my brand to find out more about it. Then we started to rank for things we shouldn’t have, like marketing speaker and digital marketing speaker. All sorts of phrases we weren’t even focused on.
We weren’t spending any time doing SEO for these phrases, just basically talking about them in the media. And we’re finding that getting our brand out in a big way on one topic has helped build traffic for a host of other search terms.
A lot of people talk about content marketing, but it’s all marketing. Find where your buyers are hanging out and engage them. Get the word out about your brand any way you can. And make sure, with voice searches, they’re searching for your brand name, not some generic niche you happen to be in. But get them talking about you, no matter what. That’s the most important thing.
Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.
