I'm lucky. I get a whole bunch of comments on my wordpress blog. These are REAL customers with REAL questions (not people writing for points). These are people seeking my advice and decorating opinions. It's quite amazing.
I try to remember to go in and check the comments on my blog every so often. I used to do it each weekend, but lately I've been getting more and I've been doing more blogging, so I'm in there more often just replying. Often 2-3 at a time. I haven't been paying attention.
I know that comments on my articles are good for SEO. It shows interaction and engagement, which is good. It also enables the post to get updated on a regular basis and more key word variations (including the commenter's mispellings LOL). And, it feels good as I'm helping people. (And, of course some have left some really sweet comments, so that's extra nice). And, several even come back to thank you for the responses.
Anyway, at the end of December, I finally wrote an article on one of my favorite products called Coretec Plus. It's newer product and I had been meaning to write something about it a year or two before, but just never got around to it. Well the product really started to take off last year, so I figured I had to write about it. A few others already had, so I was a bit bummed out about that. But, I decided to write a comprehensive review on it...in an epic format and I guess it worked. It now fluctuates between my #2 and #3 article each month with around 6,900 clicks per month.
While I personally think that the article is great, I have a hunch that one of the keys to success and why it surpassed some of the other articles is because of all the comments.
One of the things I did early on was try to build a few quick backlinks to the article. I googled to see what came up, and I saw some pages on Houzz come up. These weren't real articles, but rather forum questions. Because this product is new, lots of people were asking lots of opinions. And, lots of people were answering them...and some of them were not so qualified to answer. And, of course a few contractors were trying to sell product on there and then there were some long threads. I read through a bunch of them.
But, what it told me is that lots of people have lots of questions. I ended up putting in a few objective answers and linked to my article (which I thought was balanced). And, voila, later that day, I think I had 5 comments/questions on my article. I of course answered them. And, since then, I keep getting more questions. You see right away, people liked my article and average time on page was over 5 minutes. So, then I started to get more google traffic and then it I got more comments and then it became more of a virtuous cycle. I got up to spot #2 (for the long tail search with review in the title), and then I got to #1 (maybe 2 months later?).
I think it's the comments that helped the most. And, now I have people commenting that they are amazed that I'm answering all the comments and praising the way I answer them. And, a lot of sweet comments. (And a few of them went in and bought me a coffee...gosh that feels nice).
So this evening when I went to answer the lastest one, I noticed that I now have 159 comments! Holy Cow! How did that happen? (Bear in mind, I answer them in my comment section on WP, so it's not like I'm scrolling down to the end of the post so I don't notice these things).
So, I went to the post to take a look at it. Holy cow! Now, I know the formatting is different in this section with the comments being indented, but it looks like the comment section is 3 times as long as the blog post itself! Wow. And, a whole bunch of them have commented that they've read through most of the comments. Wow, wow, wow.
I just hit me how big an impact my blog really has.
Now, I just have to find some other powerful topics like this. (Let me know if you have any ideas for me. I think I'm too close to this.)
Comments(7)