I picked up my deadtree version of AdAge, and found to my surprise, a great case study on the use of blogs by J.C. Penney. The key was aggregating content around a community of blogs (in this case, mommy blogs), and reaping the search engine rewards without investing heavily in their own SEO.
The site aggregated content from blogs such as Heather Armstrong's Dooce, The Mommy Blog and Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. JC Penney didn't have rights to review or influence content. The site launched mid-September; a few of the contributing bloggers mentioned it on their blogs, some did not. But traffic started to grow. Federated execs started to notice traffic coming from places such as StumbleUpon, a social-bookmarking site, and RSS readers, which meant people were beginning to subscribe to the content. "Once people start engaging in that, they feel part of the experience. And when they feel part of the experience, they share it with friends and upload it to social-bookmark sites," said Chas Edwards, publisher and chief revenue officer at Federated Media. "And then Google starts to take notice of this. ... A month after the campaign, this site was showing up." Today, it shows up as No. 5 of 13 million results for the search term "fall shopping" and second out of more than 4 million results for "fall shopping guide."We make it clear to all of our clients that the single best SEO option the can pursue is to get involved in an active blog community and take advantage of the SEO benefits of links, relevant content, and built-in audiences. It's very difficult to build a community, but it's relatively easy to join one. This was the tactic pursued by J.C.Penney and Federated Media, and in a short time, they appear in the search results for a highly sought after search term. I spend time with clients who spend thousands per month on SEO, and more thousands on PPC, but none of them have blog strategies, or at least none of them have coherent blog strategies. Blogging takes time and effort, but its miniscule in comparison to the giant ad budgets that are accepted media buys. For a price starting around $10,000, you can join the communities most relevant to your company, and for less than $50,000, you can replicate the success of J.C.Penney and also bring that expertise in house. What are you waiting for?
