One thing worth remembering when blogging is that people are always on the lookout for specific information. That's why it's a good idea to write detailed posts with the names of products, companies, businesses and even well known individuals in the titles. It's usually pretty easy to end up on page one for search results for such keywords. And needless to say, if those keywords are specifically related to Australia, then you will draw local visitors.

And being opinionated can also make those posts stand out on the search results pages, making them more likely to be clicked on. I had a very good illustration of this recently.

Being a climate change skeptic I did some Googling on the issue and noticed that a theatrical management company that runs a lot of Perth theatre venues had some pretty full on green policies in place. So I wrote what was quite an abrasive, though humorous post about this on my arts blog. It ranked highly enough in Aussie searches including the company name that a journalist for a local paper who was researching a story on the company saw my post and read it. He thought that the blog itself was unusual and interesting, so ended up doing a story on it alone. It can be found on page 2 of the issue marked 14/5.

I haven't received any direct SEO benefit from this, since the issues seem not to be indexed by Google. However I've definitely had some clicks coming in from people who read the story, since I saw these in my stats. And it has certainly helped raise my profile as a local blogger.

So, remember to be specific with your blog posts, and don't be afraid to be controversial. It can definitely get you noticed by media outlets with a much wider reach.
 


Comments

Andrew link
05/23/2011 16:26

Matt, Sorry this is un related to ur post.
But i have a question. I noticed your site is .com not .au and your target is Australian seo.
Ive noticed alot of my hits come from google.com not google.com.au
its making me think i should stop using .au and focus more on ranking in google.com

Your Opinion would mean alot to me here.
thanx mate, been reading ur blog is full of good advice!
Cheers.
Andrew

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Dean from You Make The Website link
10/18/2011 05:29

Nice stuff, cheers for sharing the insight.

I think as well as lifting your profile, being specific and opinionated also increases the chance of your article going viral (i.e. being shared around by people).

And in response to Andrew's comment, it really depends on who your target audience is. If you are getting a lot of visits from google.com (hence USA visitors) but you are an Aussie based business, then that's not really good traffic, is it?

You can tell Google to geographically target your site in Google Webmaster tools. First, obviously, you have to submit your site via Webmaster tools. Then under Site configuration > Settings you can specify a region. To specify no region select Unlisted. With this setting, it doesn't really matter to Google what your domain is.

This regional setting and having an Australian based web hosting server are a good start to geo-targeting.

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lee watson link
03/05/2012 23:26

yes of course it will lift if your blog is relevant to the subject and to the geographic area.if the content is fresh than it takes lesser time.

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