Why Good SEO Can’t be Automated
If you can’t build it, you don’t understand it.
If you can’t build it, you don’t understand it.
I think Feynman was talking about nuclear energy in the quote above. Being a part of the manhattan project the stakes to understand something like one of the fundamental forces of the universe was pretty important.
Yet, this advice applies to anything.
You can read, and read, and read, and read and still know nothing.
If you can’t build it, you don’t understand it.
If you want to lose weight, but you can’t, then you don’t understand your body.
If you want to grow your revenue by 10% this month, but you don’t, then you don’t understand your business.
If you want to make a friend feel better, but you don’t, then you don’t understand your friend.
If you want to give your partner an orgasm each time you have sex, but you don’t, then you don’t understand your partner’s unique sexual desires.
Let’s move from sex to SEO, this one comes up a lot in startup growth circles (SEO not sex in case you weren’t clear).
You can spend hours on YouTube, and Google finding blog posts, tutorials, infographics that tell you how to “Master SEO”. They amount to nothing more than a checklist of on-page SEO factors that Matt Cutts has been telling us for years.
On-page SEO is simple, SEO is hard.
SEO is hard, because it relies on people. That’s right. People. Not robots or crawlers or HTML, but people.
The way you win in SEO is by focusing on a few keywords that have high search volumes and strong search intent. You then create a page that meets the intent with a solution and then outrank all other pages for that keyword.
How do you rank for keywords?
Aha, that’s the real question.
The goal of SEO is to build sales, leads, conversions, signups, traffic from a search engine without directly paying for it. In order to get that you need to get into a search position that people actually click on (1–10) and then have some compelling content for them to see when they get there.
If you can’t build it, you don’t understand it.
We will dive into how to do this ^^ later on but I hope the message of this diatribe has sunk in.
Stop reading, and start applying the things you are reading.
If you work for a startup and have been tasked with SEO, then pick a keyword, build a page and do the hard work ranking for a good keyword with that page. If you are building a new business, set a simple revenue goal and get to work. If you want to start blogging everyday, stop reading and start writing.
Your default should be towards action. Tell people about what you did, not what you are going to do.
