Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk and Tea.
Today's conversation is about how SEO is not about hacks or optimizations really, it's about resource allocation. And if that sounds weird, SEO is a industry that was born with hacks and different shortcuts that people wanted to use, and it creates this whole school of thoughts of black hat SEO, white hat SEO, gray hat SEO. What I want to focus on is regardless of how you feel on this spectrum, SEO truly is not about hacks and shortcuts or about these unknown optimizations. It's really about resource allocation. But before we jump in, today we have another special guest. My favorite chrysanthemum tea that I like to have chilled every so often, especially on super duper hot days. As you can see the sun beating down. I'm doing this at nine in the morning and it's still this hot.
But regardless, we move on. But what I want to discuss, jumping back into this because I don't have to prep this, is again, what we talked about, resource allocation. So I've worked on many different SEO campaigns and when I first started out, like anybody else, I thought it doesn't matter what company we work with, as long as we know our SEO we will be able to just create these simple systems and then they'll be able to rank. What I've learned over this period of time of consulting and working in SEO, that's really not the case. Yes, it depends on the customer, and we can optimize everybody and do a good job with everybody, but when it came down to the nitty gritty, it wasn't about hacks or the same thing over and over again that we did for every client.
What we've found is that SEO is really about resource allocation. And what we mean by that is if you've watched our videos about the three pillars of SEO, we talk about how everything revolves around those three pillars, which are link-building referring domains, content development, content marketing, and third is technical SEO. Now why we say that this feels really about resource allocation, like anything else in business, is because those are the three pillars. And oftentimes when we're working with businesses, they have a limited budgets. In addition, they have limited marketing budgets, and to cut even lower, they have limited SEO budgets. So we can't just overwhelm and blitz everybody just by sheer volume of budget and everything. That's often not the case. We work with a lot of businesses that have resource limitations. So often what ends up happening is that what we find is based on those three pillars, we can optimize on different levels.
As a technical, do we want to optimize link-building, do we want to optimize your content? Because for example, I could tell you, "Hey, if you want to create a thousand blog posts, well if the average person can write one blog post a week, that's four a month. That is a 48, so let's just say 50 a year. It would take you, I think 20 years to get a thousand blog posts. That's way too long, right?" So what you could say is "Well, why don't we just write a thousand blog posts?" Well, if the average blog writer who writes 500 words at a good clip is $75, so what's it round up for easy math? $100 times a thousand. That's way too much money you're going to be spending on all of this. So SEO truly is about resource allocation. Where can we focus our current resources that we have to optimize the areas that we can.
So for example, some of my clients, they don't have the marketing resources to invest in hiring writers or creating a content development team. So what they do have is they have the ability and they like to go out and speak. They've built a huge network. And so what we often do with those people or companies is we use a more backlinking approach where we'll go out there and do guest speakerships built thought leadership, write on other people's websites, and we drive links to our site. And that's where we spend most of our efforts. [Boyd, 00:03:50] with a little bit of content and technical SEO. Or as some, you know what? They don't have very much exposure. They don't really think that they have what it takes to be a thought leader just yet.
So they invest much more on content and tactical SEO or they might just write a lot of content and then we help optimize the technical SEO with the internal linking and everything like that. Or if you just have zero time, like you don't like writing and you don't like going out and networking, but you have very strong technical skills and you can build a strong website quickly, you could always just build a huge website quickly. Although that has a lot of factors like do you have a lot of users on your website? What are you building quickly? If you don't have content, how do you build a big website? There's a lot of questions that you can see. You could take this a multitude of different ways and there isn't one single answer, but what we found SEO is about knowing your resources, what is capable for you.
And then when it comes to optimizing SEO, honing in on your strengths and then being okay with not having to do everything A plus. You just focus in on what you're good at. So when you're running an SEO campaign, know your resources and augment what you're good at. And that will really help you from there. Yes, there are some traditional hacks or optimization, but because SEO is so competitive now, they don't really work anymore because they're literally just the baseline, if not lower than the baseline. Everybody does them. So they're not going to work. And a good example is, "Oh, put the keywords everywhere." But it doesn't really work anymore and it's not really going to work for your business that well. What I want to go over and what I meant by this video is as you're thinking about your SEO, think less about hacks. Try to think more about strategy and resources.
Because those hacks aren't going to really go that far. What really is going to go really far are those strategies and those resource allocation of you know your competitors, you know what you have, and you know what you can double down on terms of your resources and strategies. If you focus your resources on any of those pillars of SEO or a combination of those pillars, you are more likely to succeed in the longterm because hacks and optimizations are really one-off short terms, but a longterm, highly organized, resource-allocated SEO strategy will not only succeed in the longterm, but it will be a self-sustaining campaign that will be able to continually grow and grow and grow. And before you know, it's an organic thing that's growing as a part of your marketing. So it's a complex topic, but hopefully that will help you think about how you're doing your own SEO.
I always think it's a really good thought exercise to kind of go through these because a lot of people want to take shortcuts or they think it's so simple. But when you think of simple answers, oftentimes you can get frustrated when those simple answers aren't working. And I've seen a lot of people try SEO hacks for two weeks, it didn't work and they never come back. It's unfortunate because you're turning your back on a marketing channel that is very valuable to a lot of people, and these hacks trick people into thinking it'll be overnight.
But overall, if you're going to try to build an SEO campaign for your own company, ensure that you are having discussions about your resource allocation. What does your SEO team actually have to work with? And then from there you can plot your SEO strategy out. So there's a lot to think about there. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy some of this chilled tea because it is really hot. But if you guys found this video valuable and you liked it, please like and subscribe and I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks.