One of the blog strategies we recommend and coach our clients on is to share their knowledge about the product or service that they are selling in order to facilitate a perception of expertise. This strategy ties in with the consumer behaviour concept of source credibility. The idea behind this theory is that the more consumers perceive a source as being credible, the more likely they are to respond favourably to an advertising message. Perceived expertise is one of the factors that affect perceived source credibility.

Source credibility has been studied frequently within traditional advertising circles, but admittedly, I’m not certain about blogs. Intuitively though, it would make sense that a blog that is perceived as being written by a credible source would be more effective than one that was not.

One of the problems we ran into was with a client that is a personal trainer here in Vancouver. In order to increase his perceived expertise, he writes about topics related to health, nutrition, etc. Once we encouraged him to really commit himself to blogging and he started doing it consistently, we noticed a nice spike in traffic to his website. This is what he wanted after all, so everything’s good right?

Using Google Analytics we identified that the majority of his new blog visitors were not from his geographical area – in fact, most of them were from the U.S. Sure it’s great to have traffic, but the ultimate purpose of the blog is to encourage readers to engage with the personal trainer and no one from the U.S. is going to do that with a personal trainer located in Vancouver, Canada (at least with the intent of using his services).

So the challenge is to generate qualified traffic to his blog. Our solution is actually fairly easy – use keywords and topics related to Vancouver as much as possible in the post. Basically, it’s like finding an excuse to use specific keywords (which isn’t always that easy). This way, people searching for information related to health, nutrition, and personal trainers in the Vancouver area will be likely to find his blog posts. At least his efforts won’t be wasted only on people that will never purchase his services.

So that’s what we did. Anyone else have any thoughts on how to do this? By the way, notice how many times I used Vancouver?

Clay