Don’t make SEO the CEO
Did you know that 68% of online experiences start with a search engine? Go ahead, Google it real quick.
Considering organic search drives over 53% of website traffic, it’s no wonder 69% of marketers invested in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in 2021.
In a nutshell, it’s the practice of making it as easy as humanly (and non-humanly) possible to find your content via search engines. Most of this is done in the back-end of websites through subtle tweaks to metadata and breadcrumbs, but a lot can also be done by changing how content is written. Hence the existence of SEO writers.
So far so good, right? Well here’s the catch: SEO may be important, but it should only be one of the lenses you view your strategy through. It should not be your strategy in and of itself. Here’s three good reasons why.
Content by humans, for humans
The very first rule of content is that it has to be high-quality and engaging for real people. Humans have to like it. And therein lies our first problem with taking SEO-friendly writing too far. Not only is there no guarantee that it will actually result in more organic search traffic, it could actually reduce it.
This isn’t just because algorithms are now smart enough to flag and penalise content that has been littered with keywords and backlinks, but also because it means you will have been writing with the explicit goal of ‘tricking the algorithm’. If you write for the benefit of a robot, you’re probably not going to be writing for a human. In other words, readability must always be the top priority.
What about the video star?
I have previously defended written content in the face of video’s meteoric rise. This is in large part due to the benefits of SEO, which as of yet have not translated fully into the realm of visual content.
Sure, you could prune and polish your metadata and alt text descriptions, but will that actually do justice to how great your video or your image is? Imagine describing the Mona Lisa in 200 characters… including spaces. Exactly! Trying to apply SEO principles like keywords, headers and back links to your videos could ultimately reduce the quality of your content, meaning you will miss out on the vast audiences that online video attracts.
Cisco predicted that 82% of global internet traffic in 2022 will come from video streaming or downloading, whilst last year it was reported that online video had a global audience reach of 92%. As these numbers suggest, good video content will do more than fine without SEO. And is that wasn’t enough to persuade you…including video content in website pages actually helps your SEO efforts anyway!
Audience is king
Prioritising SEO essentially means aligning your content strategy with what the search engines want to prioritise or with keywords that are ripe for the taking. So, the topics and the structure of your writing are dedicated to you by opportunity and strategy. This is great in some cases, but it does leave your audience out of the equation.
At The Content Engine, we firmly believe that great content adds value to your audience. It tells a story, moves people to action and brings more followers into the fold. By letting the search engines dictate your content plan, you may be neglecting the needs of your core audience and missing out on building a loyal following for the sake of a few clicks.
It is important to view your content through the SEO lens as it can do wonders for expanding reach and making it more easily accessible to new audiences (did you notice I subtly plugged a few back links in this post?). It can also be a great way to ideate new content as it can offer a fresh perspective when you’re scratching the bottom of a dry barrel.
But putting all of your eggs in the SEO basket could seriously hinder your efforts to resonate with your audience and build a loyal following. Take it too far and it could even detract from what you were trying to achieve through SEO in the first place. As with everything, balance is key.