Why Blogging Still Matters For SEO

Meredith's Husband 0:33

All right, I'm going to talk today about hiring a blogger to help with your duh your blog, but in doing that to help you with your SEO because blogging sucks. I know blogging is a pain in the ass. None of us really look forward to blogging. It doesn't have to be a pain in the ass, a little more on that later, but for the most part, it's just something we don't want to do. And yet we really do have to do it if we want our SEO to be good. If we want clients to find us, blogging is one of those things that we're going to kind of have to do. But you can hire someone to help you do this. However, there are a few things that you really do and don't want to do when you are looking to hire that person. Because remember, our goal is we're blogging for SEO. And like a lot of SEO, a lot of things in the SEO world, if you don't do something right, you might be doing something that you think, oh, this is how you do this for SEO. If you're not doing it right, it can not only not help you, but it can actually harm you. And this is related to something I talked about a couple episodes again, and I recently covered in more depth in a newsletter about hiring somebody to help you with your technical SEO. Those are the two points where people tend to really look for somebody to uh help them with SEO, the technical stuff and blogging. And so in that episode and in that newsletter, I went into more detail about the technical person and how to find that technical person and qualify them before hiring them. But today I want to talk about the other person who you are likely to hire at some point to help you do this, and that's blogging. And there are three things I would say that you want to look out for when you're hiring someone, three kind of mistakes to avoid.

Mistake One Duplicate Content Traps

Meredith's Husband 2:11

Number one, you got to make sure that you're getting unique work. And what I mean by unique work is like you're getting a blog from your blogger that they didn't also offer to some of your competitors. A lot of times when you hire a blogger, you're gonna hire somebody that focuses on your industry. And that's totally fine. That's a good, that's a great idea. But the problem, and I've seen this happen a lot both with photographers and with and with bigger companies, is you hire somebody who blogs in your industry. And what that blogger may do is they create a blog and they give it to several of their clients who may or may not be competing. It might be, I've seen this several times. You hire a blogger and they uh blog for you. They also blog for some photographers in other cities, so they're not competitors. So they figure, well, I can write similar content for each of these. They're not competing. And I get that. If I were a blogger, that's probably what I would think of doing first, just to like be able to make money and not, you know, write write a completely new blog every time. So I have seen the exact same blog article duplicated across many different blogs that way. I've seen the same article that's just tweaked a little bit and then spread across, you know, different blogs that way. And the problem is that from Google's perspective, you are not creating original content. You are duplicating somebody else's content. And that is not, not only is it not good for SEO, it's really bad for SEO. And I don't blame you know bloggers for doing this. It makes sense. It's like I said, what I would do, but it's not SEO best practice. So, number one, you got to find a way to make sure you are getting original work from a blogger. And that is something, by the way, we cover in the mentoring program. We go over how to make sure you're getting original work. Also, how to find a way so that blogging isn't so painful. And that means like, what do you blog about? Choosing topics. How do you blog? What is the method of blogging? It does not, and probably should not, always be you sitting down and or a blogger sitting down and typing out paragraph text. I know that's what we tend to think about when we think about blogs, but most blogs are not created that way anymore. And so the mentoring program, we go through and figure out what you should be blogging about? How can you blog so that it's not painful? And then once you get that down and understand that process yourself, then how do you hire someone to continue and maintain and take that blog into the future? Okay, so anyway, that's

Mistake Two Blog Topics That Backfire

Meredith's Husband 4:36

number one. Number two, topics. Most bloggers, when you hire them, are gonna ask you things like, what is what are your keywords? And you might say, Well, children's photography, Brooklyn. And the blogger will say, Great, I'll blog about children's photography in Brooklyn in Brooklyn, in Brooklyn, and that is exactly what you do not want to do. Your blog is not where you talk about children's photography in Brooklyn. That's for your main site. Your blog is for creating a resource, and what that means is figuring out the people who are looking for a children's photographer in Brooklyn. What else do they need? And providing a resource to help them do that. Okay, that's what your blog should be doing. And yet when you just blog about your keywords, you're gonna get keyword cannibalization, which I've talked about before. It's really bad for SEO and it's hard to undo. Once you have gone down that path, it's very tricky. You got to like take two steps backwards before you can take one step forward. And notice I didn't say one step backward before two steps forward, because literally you're gonna have to back up and you're gonna lose some progress before you can start to regain that progress. So that's number two is finding topics. Again, that's something we cover, spent pretty much a full week on that in the mentoring program. It's something that does not need to be painful.

Mistake Three Misusing AI For Blogs

Meredith's Husband 5:53

And then the third point a lot of times when you're hiring somebody to do something like blogging, you're thinking, well, I'm hiring a blogger because I don't want AI to do my blog. You've probably hopefully heard me say you don't want AI to do your blog for you. That does not necessarily mean that a blogger is not going to use AI. It just means that they're not going to use AI to write the blogs for them. If you hire a blogger, they really, I would hope they are going to be using AI in some way. If they're not, they're going to be more expensive because it's just they're going to be spending a lot more time doing the same thing that AI can help them do compared to other bloggers. So they're going to be more expensive. So you need to ask whatever blogger you are thinking about hiring, how they use AI exactly. And if they say, I don't use any AI, that's a red flag. But also at the other end of the spectrum, if they say, oh, I use AI to create and refine the draft and do the whole thing so it's super fast, that's also obviously a red flag. What you are looking for is something in between, like, oh, I use AI to help me research topics and create an outline. And then after I write the rough draft, it helps me revise. Something along those lines. Okay, so that's in a nutshell what you want from a blogger. Those are the three most important things. We go into a lot more detail in the mentoring program. And what we do is you do this the first time yourself. You kind of get the idea, or at least listen to me talk about it. So you understand it. So then when you hire a blogger, you understand what they should be doing. If you're just hiring a blogger right away because you don't want to blog

Your Role As The SEO Strategist

Meredith's Husband 7:28

and you are relying on their XP XBO, SEO experience or expertise, I've never seen that work out well. Again, nothing against bloggers. Bloggers are great, but their job is not SEO. And like so many people, the information that about best practices that makes it out into mainstream is usually wrong. It's usually outdated or based on some sort of misinformation, misconceptions, et cetera. So it's not the blogger's fault. It's your job as the business owner to provide them with the strategy. What are they supposed to be doing? And then their job to help you get it done. Okay. I hope this helps.