Should I Use Blogger for My Business Website? Realistic Pros vs Cons over Wordpress.

How Using Blogger Might Save Your Small Business Hundreds of Dollars Every Year

This article is not actually meant to be a "Blogger vs. Wordpress" checklist, it is meant to explain why Blogger is a effective and easy system to consider for most small business owners, and its potential for saving a lot of money and time when getting a company website up and running by lowering setup and maintenance costs.

META: A screenshot me me updating my Blogger with this article. 

Ok, so you're a small business owner and you're already familiar with the fact that a web presence is a very important factor in a modern company, and you've probably already heard of Wordpress and gotten an estimated quote of between 3-6 thousand dollars for a site by an established firm or freelancer, and rates pertaining to site maintenance and marketing. Now, let me try to present the Blogger solution for small business that I specialize in and provide some cognitive dissonance.

First off, what is Blogger?

Blogger is a CMS (Content Management System) like Wordpress, currently owned by Google, and was originally designed to be a blog-specific CMS. This meant that there were no static pages (about us, location, etc pages), few design options, and a Blogger Navbar over the pages - all terrible for business sites. However, Google got their stuff together, and overhauled the system to fix these main issues, and now it's a different beast altogether, but retains its focus on the most important thing for marketing on search engines: CONTENT.

Blogger can, although it arguably requires more work, be used as a competent web design tool (since it does have raw HTML and CSS editing with the ability to add jquery/javascript tools), but now, with the addition of static pages and significantly increased flexibility with design, Blogger has become a powerful but overlooked platform to build a site upon.

Of the major names to compare to, the easiest way of looking at it on a scale is:

<---More Standardized |||| More Flexibility--->

<---Ease of Use |||| More Work Required --->

Blogger ---- Wordpress ---- Drupal

In short, Blogger is a platform that has been reduced in terms of potential use to make it easier for the end user to modify and update, but can be hacked into increased functionality.

To summarize for the business owner:
If the website you need is informational in nature (brochure site), need a basic 5-10 page site with a contact form, Google Maps embedded, and a mobile-version ready to go, Blogger might be the option you've been looking for. (...and it's cheaper to setup than a Wordpress site!)

The Blogger template uses a lot of jquery tools to create a traditional website feel, though there are still some Blogger-touches noticeable to the trained eye. The disadvantage is that using Blogger in this way is limited in features and/or tricky to accomplish things that are easy to do with WordPress widgets and plugins.

On the other hand, the main advantages to using Blogger as a website platform are...

1. Free hosting (Google hosted)
2. Unlimited bandwidth
3. Rock solid server security
4. Automatically backed up
5. Simple UI for clients to edit posts and replace photos
6. Multiple users can be given author/admin privileges
7. Great for SEO purposes
8. Easy to integrate with other Google Apps for Business products
9. Mobile-Site ready - most templates can be easily modified to add a mobile version

When we set up a business client with a Blogger website, the most important part is to train them in using the Blogger UI, and expanding on point 5, the content system is incredibly easy to learn, and updating the site with new content is streamlined, and provides real search engine results after 2-3 months/20-30 posts of investment even in competitive markets.


Well, hope this has been informational, and check out our clients list at the bottom of the web design page for examples of happy customers using the Blogger platform for their businesses and groups.

Simple Blogger SEO Tip for Post Titles

A Simple SEO Boost for Individual Blogger/Blogspot Posts & Pages

The Title of any page on Google's SERP (search engine results pages) is limited to 70 characters, but by default, any result for your Blogger page will come up with your Blog's title first, regardless of page or post. However, this is not ideal to get your individual pages ranked, as they might have a different keyword focus from one another.

This little tip will have the individual page/post's title supersede the site's title, allowing for better rankings for different keyword searches.

No need to worry about the technical details - It's a simple replacement of the <head> tag with a short bit of javascript:

1. From Blog, go to Template

IMPORTANT!
CLICK THE BACKUP/RESTORE BUTTON ON TOP RIGHT TO SAVE CURRENT TEMPLATE JUST IN CASE!!!

2. From Template, go to Edit HTML

3. Find the <head> tag near the top of the page
4. Under the <head> tag, find <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

5. Replace <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> 

with:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'><title><data:blog.title/></title><b:else/><title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title></b:if>

So, in English, if the page in question is the home page, title is blog title, else, title is page/post title followed by "|" then the blog title.

Leave a comment if you have any questions.