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Brafton recently turned 13. Thank you for the cards and birthday punches.
In that span of time, a lot has changed about Brafton, about content marketing and about consumer search behavior. And we’ve redesigned our website many times over to accommodate these evolutions.
Our blog in particular recently made it to year 13 – it launched April 1, 2010. Similar to our site redesigns, our blog has undergone its fair share of changes in terms of strategy, word count requirements, structural formatting and UX.
2010: Blog No. 1 Is Super Short, Newsy and CTA-less
Brafton’s inaugural blog post, titled “SEO ninjas infiltrate company website, actually make it more visible” was a brief four-paragraph rehash of a news story.
The only conceivable audience for this piece would be search bots, as the phrase “search engine optimization (SEO)” was used three times in ways that seemed a tad forced. Additionally, there are no outbound links, images, calls-to-action or analysis: just a few hundred words and a little bit of light humor.
Yep, that’s the entire article.
In this era, we were publishing a new blog article about three to five times a day. That’s what SEO required at the time: volume, speed and high-level keyword matching.
A bit later in the year, we moved into more clickbaity style, cultural touchstones, writing about TV, social media and tech giants – through the lens of marketing. Here’s a sample:
Outbound links and stock photography soon made their way into our blog.
2011: Expanding Our Topical Reach
In due time, our blog writing ventured into more relevant topics for our human readers, not just search engines. They also represented a shift in how we interacted with prospects and the market at large.
Trends articles, industry-specific studies and Google algorithm updates trickled into our blog rotation:
We were still writing and publishing in bulk, but articles were now in the 300-word range, including…
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