Conducting Interviews to Draw Search Engine Traffic
If you have a blog that is either stand alone or attached to a website and you want to draw local Australian visitors to it then conducting interviews with knowledgeable people who are prominent in your niche (and perhaps in your state, city or town as well) is great way to do this.
Firstly, as long as you ask that person good, thoughtful questions then it's a great way of generating content without having to write it yourself! And if he knows his stuff, then this will be quality, unique and niche-specific as well. So that will help your on-page SEO in the long run.
Also, if the person is quite well known, then people will be searching for his name. If you put this in the title of your blog post, then chances are that you'll rank pretty highly for searches for it. (This won't be the case if the person is hugely famous, of course. That's why you should pick people who are prominent but not household names.)
If someone is associated with a particular city or region, then including an interview with him will help tell Google about your location. Just one interview with one person wouldn't do much in this regard. But if you were to interview several local identities over a period of several months it could help quite a bit.
That's why it's important to give some thought to how your potential interview subject might be perceived by the search engines. Say you had a political blog about Western Australia and you wanted to get traffic mostly from that region. You'd get more of a geo-targeting effect if you managed to score some interviews with people prominent in state politics as opposed to West Australians in the Federal Government or Opposition. This is because those in the first group are virtually unknown nationally, though well known within the state. With the second group they are well known within the state, but not strongly associated with it, since they work in Canberra and are covered by the national media.
Of course there are various methods of conducting an interview. If you know the person already then you might be able to sit down and have a chat, taking notes or recording their thoughts. However you'd then have to type it all later. And if you don't quote them verbatim they might be a little miffed.
That's why I think doing it via e-mail is the better option. It's much more straightforward and less time consuming. You can send a request first, then a set of questions after acceptance. They can fire off a response when they have time. Then you can just publish it all verbatim.
Considering that people are ego driven to a large degree (and "heavy hitters" more than most) your subject will usually be flattered to have been asked to do the interview. And if he has a website or blog, as so many prominent people do now, then there's a good chance he'll link to it. He may even want to publish it in its entirety. Because of this possibility, it's a good idea to make sure the interview is indexed on your blog first. If Google thought that the interviewee's blog was the original, then you'd be penalized for it.
Firstly, as long as you ask that person good, thoughtful questions then it's a great way of generating content without having to write it yourself! And if he knows his stuff, then this will be quality, unique and niche-specific as well. So that will help your on-page SEO in the long run.
Also, if the person is quite well known, then people will be searching for his name. If you put this in the title of your blog post, then chances are that you'll rank pretty highly for searches for it. (This won't be the case if the person is hugely famous, of course. That's why you should pick people who are prominent but not household names.)
If someone is associated with a particular city or region, then including an interview with him will help tell Google about your location. Just one interview with one person wouldn't do much in this regard. But if you were to interview several local identities over a period of several months it could help quite a bit.
That's why it's important to give some thought to how your potential interview subject might be perceived by the search engines. Say you had a political blog about Western Australia and you wanted to get traffic mostly from that region. You'd get more of a geo-targeting effect if you managed to score some interviews with people prominent in state politics as opposed to West Australians in the Federal Government or Opposition. This is because those in the first group are virtually unknown nationally, though well known within the state. With the second group they are well known within the state, but not strongly associated with it, since they work in Canberra and are covered by the national media.
Of course there are various methods of conducting an interview. If you know the person already then you might be able to sit down and have a chat, taking notes or recording their thoughts. However you'd then have to type it all later. And if you don't quote them verbatim they might be a little miffed.
That's why I think doing it via e-mail is the better option. It's much more straightforward and less time consuming. You can send a request first, then a set of questions after acceptance. They can fire off a response when they have time. Then you can just publish it all verbatim.
Considering that people are ego driven to a large degree (and "heavy hitters" more than most) your subject will usually be flattered to have been asked to do the interview. And if he has a website or blog, as so many prominent people do now, then there's a good chance he'll link to it. He may even want to publish it in its entirety. Because of this possibility, it's a good idea to make sure the interview is indexed on your blog first. If Google thought that the interviewee's blog was the original, then you'd be penalized for it.