My Picks: 5 Top Online Marketing Blogs from the UK

Thank you to all who participated in our little poll seeking votes for the best UK Online Marketing Blog last week. That link will take you to the full list as well as the voting results.

The purpose was to create awareness of UK centric blogs that share as much of a passion for Online Marketing topics as we do here at Online Marketing Blog. 35 blogs were listed and many put effort into promoting themselves via blog post, Twitter, email, Facebook and other channels of communication. That combined promotion effort plus our own drove thousands of visits to the post and subsequently back out to the individual UK Online Marketing blogs that were listed.

After reviewing each blog’s poll votes, AdAge Power 150 scores (combination of editorial, links, social & traffic), PageRank of home page, post recency, frequency, topics, comments and design, I’ve made the following picks as my top 5. Let me be clear, picking only 5 sucked.

Econsultancy – This industry news blog covers a variety of online marketing topics with a very high number of posts, great mix of writers and somewhat inconsistent use of images. At first I was not sure what to call this blog since the Title tag says “Online Marketing Blog” and “Internet Marketing Blog” but the on-page title says “Digital Marketing Blog”. Econsultancy was one of the first blogs to incorporate Twitter in the sidebar. Social sharing are presented at top of and after each post. Content is fresh and topical with a moderate amount of commenting activity on each post.

we are social – For an agency blog, posts are information rich, with particular effectiveness at repurposing of content (stats, infographics, YouTube). Multiple offsite social integrations ranging from Twitter to Facebook to Flickr add the social to this blog. Commenting activity is below average for a blog with so much social connectivity. I haven’t seen a mybloglog widget in a very long time. As the name implies, content is focused on social media marketing as well as advertising and applications like Facbeook and Twitter.

Distilled – This search marketing focused agency blog features robust content, few commenters and a modest amount of social sharing and features. Topics of focus include SEO, PPC, reputation management and web design.

David Naylor – This SEO centric blog easily has the best design. Posts are written by Bronco agency staff and Dave Naylor. Social sharing links are included with each post and top level social links are part of the side navigation. Most posts have around 10 comments or more showing great on-site engagement.

Blogstorm – Posts are concise and not all that frequent, however, comments are high. All posts are written by Patrick Altoft, Director of Search at Branded3. Social features are limited to a Retweet button on each post.  This blog has nearly 10k subscribers and a fair amount of ReTweet activity.

Some of these blogs post very frequently with snack sized posts and very few comments. Others offer several posts per week that do a deep dive into advice, inspiring many comments. Others offer a great design and balanced content with social features. Still others offer robust, niche content with very little social sharing or integration features.  The notion of “best blog” really comes down to what you’re looking for and what type of content resonates with you most.  Blogs like SEO Wizz and SEO Gadget are very focused on SEO and if that was your focus of interest, then they will undoubtedly fit the bill.

If you subscribe to all 35 blogs on our initial list and then filter about 10 or 15 out from that, you’d be in great shape. Don’t forget to add Fresh Networks too, because unfortunately we did.  Also be sure to visit the BIGLIST of 400+ SEM blogs.

If you’re a writer or reader of this great collection of blogs and are attending SES London next week, I hope to see you there.  I’ll be giving away our new Content Marketing Guide on Feb 23rd after my 11am presentation “Content Marketing & Optimisation” where we outline 10 steps to incorporating content, SEO and social media to better acquire and engage customers online.