Are Blog Comments Important To Your Business?
A blog is good for business. The blog becomes a natural outlet for news and announcements that don’t belong on the main page of the site. That the blog format is loved by Google is obvious, and it would be silly to debate the blog as an important SEO tool for a company looking to be recognized as an authority online. However, something that can be discussed is whether it is important or not to allow for comments on the blog.
When people can comment on your blog they can start a discussion and that would seem to be good for your site and business. Depending on your niche or area of business, it could be nice to have this option but as many website owners have discovered, blog comments are mostly used for SEO for the visitor to promote their own business within the same field!
The purpose of Blog Comments
If you ask someone who works with SEO what blog comments are for, chances are great that he will answer backlinks! It is well known that backlinks from relevant blogs with a good page rank are of high value, but why should you let people use your hard work for free link juice? Some website owners reason as such that the blog comments with commercial links should be excluded while regular comments can stay. This might be a smart strategy for keeping relevant and interesting comments but it is not that easy to screen all comments that come in.
If someone leaves a very thoughtful and helpful comment it might even be fair to let them leave a link to their site. This is something that each website owner must think about. Valuable blog comments can certainly be good for the site but if sorting them out will take too much time it might be better to cut the comments from the blog.
One thing is for sure, the purpose of the comments that go something like “Nice post, thanks J” are all about backlinks and they are most likely placed on your blog by the help of software for automatic blog commenting. Even if you use software to screen these and send them straight to the trash, you could be duped by more advanced lines that seem to actually relate to what you wrote about in your post.
Closing the Blog Comments
Some businesses saw that their blog comments came mainly from other businesses in the same area. The only purpose of these comments was to ride on the page rank and authority of the blog. While it can be seen as somewhat noble to recognize your competition and wish them well, it is a far cry from actually giving them the platform for getting ahead of you in the search results. If you want to use blog comments as a way to generate more business you need to make sure that you really get comments and debates by potential clients. If you only see a bunch of links to your competition you are smarter to just close the blog comments.
Just think about it for a moment. If a true potential client reads your post and has further questions, what would you prefer – a blog comment or a direct email? With this in mind you can start building on smarter ways to get in touch with your visitors through your blog.
How to Create Rapport with potential Clients
Instead of a form for comments at the bottom of your blog, you can simply place an opt-in email list. If someone has a question or comment they can type it in and give their email address. This will let you build a valuable email list and also get in touch directly with your potential client. Your competition will not bother with your blog anymore so you might see an incline in traffic, but the idea here is to reach the right target. When you can have a direct conversation with a potential client by email or even phone you are in a better position to actually make your blog convert into money.
If you use blog comments as part of your SEO strategy you should keep this in mind. Going to your competition to place comments is fine, and especially when they encourage comments. Just make sure to place real comments of value to the post. This is done by actually reading the post and also by adding something new. If you do this you will build on your reputation as a knowledgeable source and also gain the valuable link for SEO purposes.
Get. Known. Now.
