(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)
There are people in this world who would take food from your mouth if they thought they could make a penny from it.
Seriously. This is true.
I’m doing some basic research on technical recruiters, trying to find websites by doing a search on the company name.
Often, I get pages of results from business aggregators (manta, merchant circle, etc., I won’t link). These aggregators have some basic information about the company (address, location, etc.), but never, ever offer the company website.
Instead, the page is loaded with ads directing you anywhere – everywhere – else.
Think about it this way: someone puts up a billboard for your company, but the telephone number on the billboard rings their company instead.
That’s exactly what’s happening here.
How do you, as a business, get around this problem?
I suspect doing some content marketing wouldn’t hurt. Most of these recruiting company sites have very little real content, much less a blog. There isn’t much there for a search engine to index.
If this describes your site, you don’t need a blog to do better in search. Just put up some web pages explaining whatever it is that you really do. We all know you’re 1. dynamic, 2. forward-thinking, 3. fast-moving and 4. focus on results. That’s what all companies do.
Instead, a few thousand words spread over a dozen web pages explaining how your thing benefits your reader would be a good start. Something – anything – that search engines can index.
If you don’t, I suspect in the long run you’re going to be buried under aggregator results in the search engines. These aggregators make it their business to rank high in search engines; it’s the foundation of their business model. If that’s taking food from your mouth, well, that’s not their problem.
In fact, you don’t even need to be in business for them to make money.
Once these aggregators can rank for search terms people are using to attempt to find you, they have won.
And here’s another thing: I’m finding some of these companies by searching LinkedIn on the point-of-contact’s name. Your people really are your greatest asset. You take care of them, they will promote you as a side effect of what they do for themselves.
Again, you don’t need a blog, and you don’t need something like WordPress. But it helps. After all, Google loves WordPress because it does so well with SEO.
It should go without saying (I’m gonna say it anyway) that if you do need a blog and you want to use WordPress (and you should), Website In A Weekend is exactly where you need to be.
