Why going back to basics works: a personal story

I was running a vaguely unsuccessful magazine, which you could find in about fifty pubs and bars around Paris – as many as I could reach within a couple of days trawling around the city with a shopping trolley full of magazines, basically. We worked day and night to ensure that the magazine was as packed full of information as possible – we had some brilliant contributors from a wide range of backgrounds, and we met up once a month for editorial meetings. It was fun. But as a magazine, it was doomed to failure.

As a website, however, it was a raving success. I had already tried my hand at making websites for my band, but the magazine’s website was growing rapidly. And I knew nothing about websites. Anyone who looked at the site design would have known I knew nothing about websites. It was a mess, full of patches and widgets and adverts that nobody clicked on.

I did know about content, though. I wrote loads of articles – some of them were popular, some of them weren’t. I then started thinking about which articles did work, and why they were popular. So I started throwing in words that people might use. I started writing about ‘trending’ topics. Hey presto, more visitors.

And still, not a drop of SEO.

We started doing this thing called ‘podcasting’. It was really popular ten years ago, and once a month, we’d sit down in my mate Jonny’s shed (which was also his studio) and record ourselves rambling on about stuff, playing a few records and even playing our own music.

Some people started listening so we thought – hey, we know lots of musicians. Let’s get local musicians to play live sessions for us. And we did. We had some great bands, such as Rosemary, we had Johannes Hopfner and Sophie Cappere, we interviewed people like local comedy entrepreneur Karel Beer, (do Google them all, it’s worth it). We basked in their brilliance and more people listened to the show.

So many that it broke the server. So I had to get a new one. We ran the “Eurovirtual” song contest in parallel with Eurovision. All of a sudden, people in Malta were listening to us and Carrie Haber’s massive fanbase was urging everyone to vote for her.

It was around this time I got interested in just who was reading & listening. All kinds of people were linking to the website, it was amazing. Perhaps this was why our rankings were so good.

Some people were writing bad things about me. I managed to annoy some neo-conservatives in America, and you can still see what they wrote by googling “Gareth Cartman is pathetic” – a keyphrase that I remain bizarrely fond of. I’ll be sad when it disappears.

Some people were ‘sharing’ my articles by e-mail. This was in the days before social media, of course, so there was no Facebook or Twitter to speak of. Other bloggers were quoting me, and sending traffic my way.

Again, all of this without a drop of SEO. Or so I thought.

You see, much of SEO tries to replicate the success of sites who don’t know they’re doing SEO. Many of the expensive “SEO services” that claim to build “link wheels”, squidoo pages and High pagerank backlinks to your website are trying to trick Google into thinking that your site is as good as a popular one.

But they’re not trying to make your site popular.

Far too often, people turn to SEO because their site isn’t good enough to rank in Google, and far too often, SEO professionals compensate for the fact that the site isn’t good enough. Simply changing a few headers, adding a blog post and building some backlinks isn’t going to cut it.

And this goes for any site, even if you make industrial polymers or you provide accounting services for the construction industry. Go back to basics, the way I accidentally did it ten years ago.

You have an audience, so try to understand them. Try to understand how they speak, what they say, and what they want to know. And then provide them with something they’d be interested in. You could – if you wanted – do some keyword research to understand this, but you should have an instinctive feel.

Then reach out. Why not find some influential industry figures to write for you? They’ll bring along a whole new audience, just like those Paris bands and singers did. Each singer we had on the podcast blogged about it, and provided a backlink. You can’t get that kind of approval from an SEO company offering “link wheels” or hubpages.

Do things differently to everyone else. Too many websites scream out “me too!” Too few websites accurately reflect the businesses behind them.

If you’re going to use SEO services, use it to help your site become better and more popular, more interesting and more relevant – not to compensate for its downsides. Take it all back to basics, and let SEO support your efforts – almost without thinking about it – and let SEO guide you in how to attract more visitors… and customers.

If I’d known about SEO all those years ago, the site may have been technically better, but there’s not much I would have changed about my approach. Write, reach out, analyse, work hard, and you’ll always win.

(credit to Los Cardinalos / JBennet on Flickr - CreativeCommons - for the image)