I blogged recently about the impact that blogging has had on the Google rankings for our website, www.Vision Quest Virtual Tours.com.  Over a 60 day period, we watched our daily website hits grow from an average of 10 per day to an average of 30 - 50 per day.  The only thing that we did differently during that time was to blog consistently about our business.

We went from the place where a great month was 350 hits to the point where we were consistently at 1,250 hits for the month.  About that time, life got in the way and I stopped blogging for a few weeks.  We were out of town visiting family, we were packing to move, we were really busy photographing tours...there are plenty of “good excuses”.  But the fact is that Google is a fickle friend!

I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of Google rankings and analytics but I do know that Google loves blogs or should I say, Google loves fresh blogs.  We blog on our own website as well as over 40 other blog sites and once I write a blog, I get an instant jump in visits to our website.  I get some residual readers over time but it's a trickle compared to what I get when I put in a new blog.  But during the time when I was too busy to blog, I saw a very profound drop in our website hits.  Our hits still maintained some of our momentum but we very quickly dropped from a consistent montly number above 1,250 down to 1,000.  Having worked so hard to get up to 1,000, I got busy with my blogging to make sure it didn't drop again.

The problem with being a small business owner is that you can’t rest on your laurels or past achievements for very long.  My part of the business is sales and marketing and that entails a long to-do list that must be maintained every day or else we will lose momentum in our virtual tour business.  I have now realized that near the top of that to-do list is to keep my blog current and fresh.  The value of Google Analytics is that I can track the results of my efforts.  I can see whether the cold calls I am making and blogs I am writing are driving traffic to the sight.  I've always said that you can't expect what you don't inspect and Google Analytics allows me to inspect my results.

Since Google’s constant question seems to be “What have you done for me lately?” and I’m going to be pretty busy for the next two weeks, I am writing several blogs over the next few days so I have them ready to post over the next few weeks.  After all, Google doesn't make exceptions for you when you're too busy!