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Mounting a PR Case for Blogging ROI from an SEO Perspective

Charlene Li posted a magnificent and easily digestible blog post titled Calculating the ROI of blogging. In it she talks about the costs, benefits and risks of Blog ROI measurement. My favorite part is the simple chart of the blogging “Benefit” and “Appropriate  measurement”.

“Greater visibility in search results” is high on her list of benefits, but I wonder if the SEO benefits from corporate blogging is being given enough play in the broader blogging ROI discussion.

Here’s some advice if you’re a PR or communications person trying to sell blogging internally, find out how much Marketing is spending on Paid Search advertising and SEO. We’ve researched 140 clients of a local PR firm and found that 28% of them are spending an average of $21k per month on paid search(for more on this research, see A case for the ROI of Blogging).

Working with a annual budget of $252,000 ($21k x 12) leads me to believe that a case can be made for the blogging ROI strictly from an SEO (organic search engine optimization) benefit point of view. Start with making the SEO case and then add on all the other noted benefits (consumer education, pr, thought leadership, crisis, management, reach enthusiasts) as gravy.

Blogging is a long term strategy to achieve organic rankings on the most sought after keywords because…

1. Blogs are search engine friendly.
   
2. Good blogs produce an archive of fresh relevant content, 
3. Good blogs produce quality incoming links.

These are always the biggest challenges in producing SEO results for clients, but they are fundamental in blogging.

So what happens after one year of corporate blogging publishing at a frequency of about 3 posts per week. At the end of the year your company has substantially increased your fresh relevant content footprint by 150 interlinked keyword focused posts/ aka. optimized web pages. We’re doing this for one Spherion now and their blog has already garnered "41 links from 20 blogs" in their target blogging community. At this rate they will have 492 quality links by the end of the year. The fresh content and links will add up to a much better rankings for the blog and the Spherion corporate site since the blog is a subdirectory of the corporate website. Is Spherion achieving other benifits from blogging? Sure, but this post is strictly about the SEO benefits.

What is the investment/company dependencies for this? It’s going to cost a company about 20 – 40 hours in the setup phase and then 5 – 20 hours per week to write and publish 3 – 5 blog posts and deal with 6 – 10 comments. Add another 5 – 10 hours per week onto this equation for blog monitoring. Some companies may choose to augment some of this work and retain the assistance of blogging consultant, and that could range anywhere between $2k - $10k per month depending on scope and scale of the support.

Here’s one way to calculate… If you’re advertising in Google or Yahoo, or paying an SEO firm, figure out what a 1st to 3rd position on keyword X is already costing your company on a monthly Cost Per Click basis. A successful blogging strategy could generate free traffic on that keyword in 2 - 12 months. The less competitive the term the quicker you will see results. Duplicate that strategy/formula on 10 to 20 of your company’s most important keywords and then double the totals(because Google is only about half the search market).

I found this article via Steve Rubel’s post titled: A Model for Measuring Blogging ROI

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Filed under: Blogging ROI, Blogging Tips, PR Tips, Search Engine Optimization

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