All they can think about is their next “fix.” How many backlinks do I have? What PageRank do I have now? Are these links nofollowed? Should I target more keywords?
Newsflash… SEO is the NOT the “holy grail” of traffic anymore.
It was until 2006. Search engines were pretty much all there was. If you were looking for something, you either searched for it, emailed some friends, or went to the store and looked.
Since 2006 I’ve noticed a shift in my traffic. It’s drifted away from SEO and search, to social media and syndication services.
I’m talking MASSIVE traffic from the YouTubes, iTunes, Twitters, PRWebs and social bookmarking services of the world. One podcast I did snagged over 100,000 downloads, a PDF newsletter 50,000.
Plus, I get all sorts of traffic from written content in articles, posts, newsletters, whitepapers, ebooks and blog comments. In fact, one single comment on a tech blog drove over 400 visitors to my site in the first hour.
My advice to those individuals obsessed with SEO? Get your head out of your stats. SEO has limited clicks, or “inventory” available.
For example, take a commercial keyword that has 20,000 searches per month. Divide that by a “normal” 1.5% conversion and that’s 300 potential sales for the month. Now split those sales over the top 10 search results and all the paid ads.
If you’re lucky, you might snag a couple of those sales. Sad huh?
The solution? Go where the people hang out. That’s the key to getting more traffic.
Even if you rank for dozens of keywords, here’s a reality check. Unless you own the search engine, you don’t OWN those search results. All it takes is one small change to the search engine algo and… Blammo!
You got nothing. You’re knocked out of the top 10 results.
Months of SEO work down the tube. You could be out of business overnight. I’ve seen it happen to hundreds of people. Especially affiliate marketers. Right or wrong, that’s how it is.
The solution? Be social.
