In our opinion, the history behind a brand and a business is always interesting, yet they leave this information out. Content around brands is often so badly put together by internal content and marketing teams that people have no option but to go to that one site on the internet where brand histories are siphoned from myriads of articles and posts and sources and presented in easy to consume format. Guessed it yet?
Those statistics are for the Twitter article on Wikipedia over a period of 90 days. The number recorded is 677,865. Even if that is halved, its a significant volume of traffic that is looking at the Wikipedia page. How many other brands are losing out on valuable traffic and links because they just don’t bother to curate and build a decent brand history somewhere on their site?
Business History
A business’s heritage is an important record of its successes and failures, its people, its ever-changing DNA. Yet we find that very few brands really dig deep into their history and build content that stays as such a record. And when some brands do, they tend to be half-hearted efforts. We mentioned the Marks and Spencers corporate site early on, but they also have a “Marks in Time” site that looks at exactly that:
And backlinks?
It is interesting to note that in our search for examples, a lot of this work is done by the traditional marketing or PR departments and agencies. The lack of proper on-page optimisation and social share-ability makes us quite interested in knowing how hard these resources could actually work if taken over a modern online content marketer with SEO and social traffic in mind. They guys behind PrezzyBox did a really good post for example about their history – we would love to see more of these.
History of the niche / industry
Every niche in the world has at least some interesting history, and where an interesting story exists, readers and customers do. A well put together history can do fairly well on social media and in search. The image above is Hubspots Infographic on the history of marketing. Apart from the social traffic, lets look at the links the piece gained:
