There’s a popular phrase “if money can solve a problem, then it’s not a problem”. My background is in paid media, meaning I help bring awareness, traffic, and revenue to brands by investing into platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, to help amplify their presence, product or message. So in a way, that has been my mantra. But in starting a personal blog, I can’t employ that strategy and not be broke, so I had to rely on something I’ve previously not had exposure to: SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
Building up SEO juice and credibility takes time, and a lot of effort in understanding how Google works as a search engine, and the myriad of variables they take into account when serving up their results.
But it is definitely worth the time investment and research into this, as the results can compound over time, and the incremental volume as you continually add on organic content to drive traffic will only be additive to your efforts. (This is in direct contradiction to paid media, where the day you turn off your money engine, is the day your traffic falls off the cliff).
SEO – A Slow Burn
The above is my actual SEO traffic from this site. I started the blog in November of 2018, and you can see I barely had any organic search traffic coming in until late March. That meant that for almost 4 months I’d been blogging into the void. It can be lonely and disconcerting, but if you keep at it, and hammer out interesting and useful article after article, the results will speak for themselves.
As an SEO noob, I’m pretty pleased with myself with the results so far. This chart is taken from Google Search Console, and I’ve previously written about the things you can do with Google Search Console.
Good Content is Global
The internet is border-less, and that means you should prep your content to be read and understood by a global audience. I’m but a single voice in a little dot known as Singapore, but my content has reached out to people in the US, UK, Germany and India.
The world is huge, but we’re a lot more similar than we think. We all face similar challenges, familiar routines and chase the same dreams. If your content can tap into a global psyche, you can amplify that little voice and shine that content across many parts of the world.
Google Discover – A new way to SEO?
Recently, Google Feed rebranded to Google Discover, which is a way for Google to surface content that could be interesting to you, based on your profile, interests and past browsing behaviour.
This is a way that can enhance Google’s bottomline (now they can surface content to you without you making a search query), of course, ad-supported, and also act as a living news and lifestyle feed by surfacing content of interest tailored specifically to your needs at the time.
It’s super new, and so I’m stoked to see some of my articles appearing on the Discover feed. It’s early days yet, and so far, the metrics for Discover on Search Console has not been super helpful in identifying optimization options. But I’m looking forward to seeing how I can make use of this new channel for traffic opportunities.
All in all, I am very pleased that my personal pet project is helping bridge my professional capabilities and tying me up to becoming a better all-round marketer.
How has your SEO journey been?