Gabs Writes

Tag: SEO

  • Content is about more than immediate rewards

    Content is about more than immediate rewards

    One of the things that is sometimes weird about being person who plans content within the context of SEO in the modern business world is that it doesn’t often fit within the expected frame of pumping out something as fast as possible to then show off the immediate and glorious benefits that made the company a gajillion dollars in five days.

    (Not that any thoughtful and consideration marketing plans should really operate on the above structure, but you know how it goes.)

    Quiet changes and small SEO endeavors are like the least sexy marketing on the planet.

    You put out an article, then you develop some other articles over the course of six to nine months and decide those should really become a content pillar. You do some analytics and some optimizations and your keystone piece of content slowly and steadily amasses views and conversions until two years later you have a pretty cool case study and something that ranks high and performs well in organic search.

    This is an exciting experience and can teach you a lot: Why is it performing best? Can you recreate it? Does it say something about what the audience wants or about how you crafted it? Is it worth optimizing again to get more traffic? How can it inform your content strategy in the long run?

    A delight for the too involved and deeply nerdy content strategist.

    Snail on green ledge, crawling down to lower surface.
    Let’s all just take a second, breath and reflect on our choices.

    But things can change fast in the business world and depending on the team you’re pitching to, it can be incredibly difficult to make the case for a thoughtful strategy that will take many hours to develop and then spend further time and money for careful crafting and building changes that you won’t be able to measure meaningful for a long time and a strategy that can only really be cohesively measured after a year. Maybe you work in house and you’re one of the only people who even knows what marketing is or the people at the top are calling the shots about where you should spend your time and who cares about content marketing. Maybe you work for an agency and your clients are more concerned about their next paid ad campaign and don’t want to invest time or money into the unsexy waters of SEO.

    Launching a new website is fun, publishing a new article and obsessively checking how many clicks it gets is fun. But maintaining the website, continuously optimizing it and building the structure and groundwork for more articles? Not as fun. Realizing that all the clicks you got on that article were essentially meaningful traffic that didn’t do anything for you? Ugh, least fun of all.

    It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works. And to figuring out which title is going to attract that most people. And what exactly you should be targeting to hit that first page of Google. And which CTA is going to convince people to buy.

    Basically, you have a hundred elements to test and each time you change one of them you have to wait long enough for enough people to see the change (or to wait for the bots to reindex the page) to see if that change did anything.

    Meanwhile, another team you work with created a viral TikTok.

    Okay, but does everyone know that you did a full analysis of how metadata is performing and plugged it all into an updated spreadsheet?

    Oh. Yeah, no. It’s fine.

    Ultimately, despite the fact that the world is becoming increasingly filled with more content and noise, it’s interested how a thoughtful plan and actually creative and helpful output make a difference. Sure, your AI can now spit out fifty articles. But what do those articles say anything?

    Careful planning and thoughtful work does something. Immediate returns are not the end all, be all (or at least, they shouldn’t be). What can we do to make an impact that can be measured over years and not hours?

  • SEO is like an onion

    SEO is like an onion

    Disclaimer: I did absolutely no keyword research to determine whether referencing Shrek when talking about SEO would gain me organic traffic.

    SEO has layers. So. Many. Layers.

    At first blush, it doesn’t really seem like it. Do whatever makes Google happy and set off on your way. You’ll be just fine!

    Three parts of a sliced red onion, showing off the layers inside.
    Behold: the SEO onion. You’ve got keyword research, link building, site maps, content clusters, crying silently, and data analysis. (Photo by Avinash Kumar on Unsplash)

    That’s how I felt when I first started optimizing content for SEO. As a bright-eyed little achiever, with the guidance of some really smart coworkers, I felt like I had a handle on the whole thing. I knew to write and check for keywords! To write headers and decks and optimize image size and write a caption. I could go look at how well an article performed to determine topics readers wanted. And I was taught repurposing by an awesome group who always looked for every which way content could be twisted and turned to take them to their full potential.

    I confidently strode into my next position. I understand SEO, I thought.

    Then I didn’t.

    SEO walks this interesting line for me and I tend to flop over either side of it on any given week. On some weeks I think, yes, SEO is common sense. Just write the best content you can and then you’re done. Other weeks I look at technical issues and the data and my brain falls out of my ear. One day I’ve reached the center of the onion, if you will, and the next, I realize I’ve only peeled back the outer layer. 

    I look at my efforts and the numbers with complete uncertainty. Does anything I do make any difference to our audience at all? Do I know how to look at customer journeys the right way? Are the numbers trending upward? Do I even know what a number is?

    While Socrates was super annoying a lot of the time, he was onto something when he said, “I know that I know nothing.” Anytime I start really diving into a subject and learning more about it, the more I become aware of all the things I don’t actually know. It’s the college freshman syndrome. Take your first social science class and the world suddenly makes sense! Take your sixth one and you realize just how dang complicated people are.

    SEO is a lot like this. On the surface, SEO makes sense. It really does. Clear as could be! Write compelling, helpful content. Target topics and keywords that people search for. Make sure the information is accurate and up to date. Include CTAs. 

    Right? Clear. Straightforward.

    When I think about it in that way, no problem. I have a clear vision of what I need to do.

    But then everything becomes weird and labyrinthian. Even if I’ve read ten articles on a topic and attended five sessions on that same topic, I can walk into session six and halfway through go, “Ohhhh. Yes! It’s all so clear to me now!”

    Why does this happen? Do I have the memory of a mayfly? (I mean, yes, but still.)

    It’s all about peeling back the layers.

    It’s the same problem I have with my weekly to-do list. I write down five things I need to do. Five tasks? No problem. I’ll be done by Wednesday.

    Then, on Friday afternoon, my hair is standing straight up and I’m frantically trying to get out the last thing of the week and I go to look at my list and somehow I’ve only checked off one-half of the first item?

    One of my former managers helped me break down this down once when I told her I felt like my productivity had tanked. She pointed out that the problem wasn’t my drive but the list itself.

    If item one is “Write and post an article,” it seems straightforward enough. But it doesn’t take into account all the tasks you need to do: research the topic, gather the information, talk to an expert, write the draft, go through revisions, check for keywords and headers, find and the refine the images, decide on internal linking and CTAs, and on and on and on.

    Didn’t get the first task done? Maybe you actually got the first 17 of 25 steps done. 

    This is where SEO comes back in. You look at your plan and decide to improve and target keywords.

    Easy. All you have to do is decide which keywords to target. Determine what resources you’re going to use to research keywords. Who you should ask about their input on company goals. On topic goals. On keyword goals. Does anyone even know or do you need to do it yourself? How many team members can help you? What’s the timeline? Do you have an idea of the number of keywords you want to target, what you’re currently ranking for, a posting schedule, a content calendar? How soon do people want to see results and does the organization even understand what those results mean?

    Whew. This is the largest onion known to all of history.

    The journey continues and somehow as you peel back the layers, you learn more and get better. The questions that you answered last month make next month’s tasks less daunting. The plan starts shaping up. When I look at numbers from last year and numbers from now, I can really start to pinpoint what’s working and what we can do more of in the future.

    I’m reading the newsletters and attending the sessions and continuing to try new things.

    Today, I’ve got this.

    Tomorrow, I’ll know that I know nothing.