Digital Marketing Insider (128): 3-4-24

I have officially been doing SEO longer than my entire grade school tenure.

(woof, that made me wince a little… feels knees ache with age)

It’s fun, and a little bit silly, to think back to how SEO worked in the early days.

• Directory listings

• Link wheels

• Keyword stuffing (including writing keywords in the same color as the background in the margins(!))

• Writing unique pages for plural and singular versions of keywords

Ah, simpler times.

And while there have always been tactics that worked in any given SEO era, I found them more akin to a ‘trend’ than a ‘staple’.

Viewing SEO forward in time, suggest thoughts like:

• Well that worked, and then it didn’t

• And then we had to do that other thing, and then that didn’t work either

Viewing SEO backwards in time, suggests something different entirely:

• Wow, this would have worked… the whole time.

But what is ‘this’?

In some ways, it’s simple.

Write useful, thoughtful, comprehensive, and valuable content that aligns to a searcher’s need at any given time.

So, if you’re still doing SEO like this:

• Keyword research

• Find high volume keywords

• Write single blog post for each

• Repeat until you retire

Let me offer a suggestion:

• Continue doing the above, but also…

• Collect as many questions as you can from your users/prospects

• Put the questions into like-categories

• Align those categories with high volume keywords

• Write less pages, but cover the entirety of all questions/answers within a given category on that page (less URLs, more value/URL)

• Attach schema where relevant

• Repeat until promoted

The latter, is where SEO is right now. The former is where SEO was prior to this year.

More details on exactly HOW to do this - can be found here in this video.

Cheers,

Josh

This newsletter is sponsored by WebMechanix, the digital marketing agency that makes you smarter. 💡

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways WebMechanix can help you:

1. Free Audit: For qualifying companies, WebMechanix can provide 30 minutes of free consulting around your biggest area of digital marketing opportunity. Options include paid search, paid social, SEO & conversion rate optimization (CRO). To learn more and see if you qualify, apply here.

2. WMXtra: Our newest premium content portal for Digital Marketing Insider subscribers. You'll get instant access to all our exclusive content, strategy guides, trainings and best practices that will not be posted anywhere else. You'll also get direct access to our digital marketing experts, a peer to peer network made up of hundreds of marketers and details on our partner program (more $$ in your pocket). Get instant access here.

3. Promote yourself to 5,000+ marketers by sponsoring this newsletter (limited spots available.) Reply "sponsor" to this email for details.