So, back to the blog posts after a long absence, and as I sit in my Lafayette Regus co-working office in Manhattan I wonder to myself "is anyone out there actually reading our blog entries on certified translations?" I mean, come on, it's not exactly the most thrilling of topics, right? Anyhow, I'm sitting here writing one as part of our SEO tactics in an attempt to improve our Google ratings. And you know what? It seems to work. We see slow but steady rises in our results after posting blog entries which I'm pretty sure no one reads. So, I'm throwing down the gauntlet, if you're out there reading this and you need a certified translation, just put the word "gauntlet" in an email you send to us requesting a translation, and you'll win a prize. I'm not sure what that is yet, but I promise, it will be a fine prize! Don't all come running at once now! As ever, thanks for reading, or not, as the case may very well be...
**Update - 22 March 2019** I'm looking back at this post 18 months later. New York is way behind me, unfortunately, but I can't complain, I guess it's cold this time of year and I now find myself in sunny Puerto Escondido in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, looking out over the Pacific Ocean as I write this.
As expected, no one has taken us up on the above offer. That's right, in 18 months I've received zero emails with the word "gauntlet" in an email. Which means I didn't have to think of a prize. I think it would have been a certified translation, since that's what people who email us are usually in need of. It also happens to be what we are good at. Anyhow, the offer still stands, but you'll have to be reading through our old blog posts, which I suppose is even less likely than someone reading a brand new one! Well, I do know that at least a few people have been reading our posts. I think perhaps they enjoy the ones that deviate away from the theme of certified translation services, since to be honest, it's not such an interesting topic. Luckily for them, we also write about travel, language, history, politics and culture, so it gives us a few more options to engage with our audience. We do have a Google review from one Luke Blackburn saying that he is a fan of reading the blog, and another customer mentioned in an email that he had read all of them! A big thanks to those two readers, who make this task not completely pointless.
There are, of course, other reasons for writing blog posts, as I mentioned back in New York. That reason is, as you well know, dear reader, is Google rankings. The holy grail of online businesses is appearing at the top of page 1 of a Google search. This would bring you non-stop business and fabulous riches, and is what all small business owners dream of. We're not there yet, but we’re slowly getting there, often with one step forward, two steps back, but generally speaking, we’re headed in the right direction. A relatively new feature which has helped us immensely has been the local results map on Google, where our certified translation group appears for the search terms “certified translation UK” and sometimes for “certified translation”. It’s an added bonus for us that this result also shows our Google review results, which beat the opposition (i.e. the two other results that appear on the map) with our 157 (and counting) 5-star reviews. At 100% full marks we’re very proud of that achievement. You can take a look (and add one!) by clicking HERE.
It’s not all good news though, unfortunately. A Google algorithm update did seem to do us some harm back in October 2018, when we disappeared from the first page to about 600th place. After working hard on the website since then, making it more user-friendly, more informative regarding certified translations, and adding regular and hopefully interesting blog posts, we’re back at about 12th place. That does of course mean page 2, not page 1, but we have a few tricks up our sleeve, so watch this space. And remember the glove thing 😉