Screw SEO
I’m typing this post with one hand because I’m wielding a pair of nunchucks with the other to keep search engine optimization ninja Michael Martine at bay. I was like, “You know what, Michael? Screw SEO!” And then he started doing that thing where you run up the wall and do a backflip while pitching throwing stars at me, and I knew I’d hit a hot button.
This SEO question has been a topic of interest with me recently — after the fifth or sixth person in a row that I’ve coached in a row asked me about search optimization, and how to lick the engines’ nuts so that they keep knocking on your door.
I always give these people my pat, Cracker Jack answer to that question:
1. I know some stuff about search engines and how to optimize for them, but
2. Really, Michael Martine is the best SEO guy I know if you’d like to increase your search engine ranking by like a billion percent, and he’s so into it that if you even think about not optimizing properly, he’ll do backflips and use kitanas and shit, or
3. At the very least, do yourself a favor and pick up Naomi Dunford’s SEO School because it’s written for normal people and is easily the most accessible guide to this complex subject that I’ve ever seen, but actually
4. Fuck it, SEO sucks.
Which is totally the wrong answer, and totally makes people hang up the phone, get on a plane, fly to Cleveland, rent a car, drive an hour to my house, and then start doing ninja flips off my walls. And it’s also actually (in a not-even-sarcastic manner) REALLY the wrong answer for a whole lot of people. Like, probably for the majority of people trying to do business online.
But for me? For people like me, for whom “personality” is a big part of their value proposition? Yeah, not so much.
I used to try with SEO. Really. I even got this plugin for my humor blog called “SEO Slugs.” Now, it turned out that the plugin actually has NOTHING to do with slugs (okay, almost nothing), but instead takes little words out of the name of your post when it makes the permalink to that post. So basically, a post called “I suck and am lame” becomes www.yourdomain.com/suck-lame instead of i-suck-and-am-lame. The idea is to increase your SEO appeal by taking those nonsense words out and leaving only vital keywords for Google to masturbate over. All it really did for me, though, was to make my links more hilarious.
So the sales motivation piece I wrote called Stop being afraid of selling, you pussy became
stop-afraid-selling-pussy.
And more notoriously, my post This goat is your goat, this goat is my goat became
goat-goat-goat-goat.
Which was totally, totally optimized for people searching for goats (or multiple goats) but which brought me EXACTLY ZERO NEW CLIENTS, whereas the selling-pussy post attracted only pimps.
Search engine traffic has never converted well for me, which really isn’t a shock. For one, ranking is hard in itself. It’s nearly impossible to optimize for humor, and I’d end up drawing well only for “webelos” and “testicles.” It didn’t matter how descriptive I made my tags; it was and remains nearly impossible to encapsulate “what I’m about” in a handful of keywords . So I gave up. I know, I know… today, I could, in theory, start optimizing again for “Wordpress blogs” and “technology consulting” or whatever. But I remain given up.
And here’s why.
SEO is great if you’re selling something that is easily describable, that is essentially the same from any seller, that people know they need, and that they know how to put into a search. If you’re looking for widgets, you Google “widgets” and pick the first listing that doesn’t look like it’s operated by crackheads. But let’s see how people like me fare on those tests.
1. Easily describable
As far as the stuff I charge for, I set up websites, build custom stuff, teach technology, and so forth. Okay, not too hard to describe if you leave it at that. I’d argue that “what I offer” has a lot to do with my humor and personality as well, which is harder to describe… but let’s give criterion #1 the benefit of the doubt and move on.
2. Essentially the same from any seller
This is where it falls apart. You can’t turn around today without finding another post about how the internet is getting more intimate and how people are starting to become jaded with its often-faceless nature. If the internet-as-small-towns model is on the rise, the seller matters in the way Sam the Butcher mattered on The Brady Bunch. I’m not like most technology guys. And think how hard this one is to meet for life coaches, for instance. You don’t buy life coaching undifferentiated and off-the-shelf the way you buy toilet paper… although if you use my guy, it’s definitely as squeezably soft.
3. People know they need it
My readers and clients don’t tell me that they came to me because they needed to know X or needed Y service and that I provided it adequately. They say they came to me because they were referred by a friend, or they read me on IttyBiz or another site they trust. They tell me that I make things easy to understand, or made them laugh. All of this goes into a decision to read my stuff or to work with me. But do people know they need these things? Not always. And to borrow from my example in #2, I wouldn’t have know that “Life coach with an English accent who will sometimes tell you to hang on while he calls his dog a cunt” was a criterion, but apparently that kind of thing is important to me in a life coach.
4. Easy to put into a search
If the qualities that make you compelling to your readers and customers are hard to put into a few words, people will never think to search for them or will not know how to do so. Try Googling my criterion for a life coach above. Google doesn’t see that phrase often and, honestly, doesn’t know quite what to do with it. I mean, maybe you’ll get Tim if you run that search, but I’ll bet it’s more likely that you get sites like ZooPorn.com.
I’m not saying SEO is worthless for people like me and Tim. I know that Tim does optimize (although I don’t know his results; he may just attract “webelos” and “testicles” traffic), but I know it’s not the whole picture. I know that his best contacts come from referrals, which have little or no ties to the search engines.
Now, me? I could, probably, get a bit of mileage by optimizing for a few terms that describe the concrete nature of what I do, but I’m too lazy to try. That stuff bores me, and I think my time is better spent making new relationships, culling referrals, writing more often for sites whose audiences are likely to contain my kinds of people. I think I’ll do best by nurturing relationships with the folks I’ve already met and worked with online.
I could optimize for “Wordpress setup” and get a handful of undifferentiated traffic. Half would be offended by the way I write. Half would find me unprofessional. And half would not understand how half + half + half in a percentages situation even makes sense.
Or I could keep doing what I’m doing. I could keep meeting more people and networking, just being my proactive, gregarious self, and watch those six degrees of separation shrink. Like how I met my latest partner in crime Chris Johnson, who I’m already starting to do some great new stuff with. I don’t know Chris due to random internet traffic. I know him through a series of very qualified and solid online friendships. If you start back when I first joined Twitter almost a year ago and knew nobody, the chain goes Havi Brooks > Naomi Dunford > Clay Collins > Michael Martine > Chris.
(Now, there’s actually another, much shorter route that it turns out I could have taken to Chris, but I’ll tell that story a bit later. It’s an interesting one.)
Point is, that connection — as well as any one of a dozen others that today is about to sprout something really, really, really cool and beneficial for me and my buddies — came not through the engines, but through good old-fashioned networking. You meet people. You meet their people. You look for mutual benefit until you find it, and you repeat.
So yeah, you shouldn’t maybe be as blase about SEO as I am. Maybe you should use it. Probably you should use it — especially if you’re in a widget kind of field. But while you’re doing so, remember that whether you’re a dog trainer or a quilter or a fish thrower or an irreverent life coach, you’re missing out on some very seriously good stuff if all you’re doing is relying on Google.
So get out there and shake some virtual hands.
By the way, has anyone seen Michael? I’ll bet he’s in my attic again. Damn. These nunchucks are going to be virtually worthless up there.
