When I began blogging seriously back in 2010, I made the same mistake so many others are doing at this very moment. I wasted an incredible amount of time doing what I thought was right, only to discover that my time could’ve been better spent elsewhere. I spent countless hours trying to bring visitors to my website, but I was doing it the wrong way.
My mistake? Trying to rank as highly as I could in search engines.Â
I’ve spent a lot of time in various webmaster forums recently, only to discover that people are completely obsessing over SEO. They feel as if the only key to success is to get their website ranking as highly as possible. If they can’t rank in search engines, they’re done for.
But I have to think to myself, why are these people in business? Are they in business to make money, or are they in business to see how many visitors they can pull from search engines? It’s hard to tell! 🙂
The fact of the matter is, so many people are completely ignoring the fact that there are so many different ways to bring in traffic other than search engines.Â
If you’re signed up to my free 7-day traffic building course, you’ll already be familiar with a ton of techniques that are way better than SEO for bringing in visitors that buy.
I’m in several different niches, and I do a lot of analysis to see what kinds of visitors are the best for my business. What I’ve found is that organic traffic from search engines actually converts THE WORST! Organic visitors came to my websites with a problem. As soon as I solved their problem, they left. They didn’t check out any pages. They didn’t follow me on social media, and they didn’t buy any of my products.
In other words, they’re probably not returning until they have another problem, and they didn’t make me any money. I don’t know about you, but I’m in this business to make money. I’m not going to try and sugar-coat it – while I absolutely love helping others make money online (or solve whatever problem I’m helping them with), I do so to get a paycheck. This is my job.
So why the heck would I focus on SEO so heavily when other platforms make far more money? I wouldn’t, and the only reason I’d imagine others are doing so is because they are misinformed.
Organic Traffic Still Has It’s Uses, However
That’s not to say organic traffic is useless. In fact, it’s still a huge part of my business and is one of the best long-term traffic generation strategies that exists.
It’s strength in my opinion, comes in its numbers. If you can rank highly for competitive keywords, you’re bound to get a ton of traffic from them. A very small percentage of that traffic will stick around, but because you’ll have so many visitors coming in, that small percentage will add up to a good sized audience over time!
So instead of focusing on how you can rank higher, you should instead focus on how you can make your readers stick. Focus on making your content as incredible as possible, so your organic traffic can’t help but stay around. Try to retain as many visitors as possible – the visitors you retain will be the ones that make money.
Meanwhile, you can use all of this extra time you now have to focus on other traffic generation strategies! It’s time to take a break from SEO, and focus on what really matters:Â Making Money!
Hey James,
Much like you, I learned things the hard way. I focused on rankings in the past. I ended up getting the site penalized from really bad advice I’ve read or totally lost focus on the content.
Sucks, I know. That was like 8+ years ago now and I only got back to blogging (as myself) mid this year. That’s a lot of wasted time and opportunities. Haha.
So it’s great that you are already at that point where you experienced things already and know a lot about what’s important.
Keep up the great work man.
Dennis(Quote)
Hey Dennis! Not quite sure how I missed replying to your comment… sorry about that!
I’m sorry to hear about your old site getting penalized. There’s a lot of bad advice going around even today, and it’s sad to see that some people push bad tactics on people.
Of course, you know a lot more about SEO than I do so I’m certain the work you’re doing with Leapfroggr and other sites you’re working on are going to be successful.
Thanks for stopping by, Dennis!
James McAllister(Quote)
Hey James – First time I’m stopping by you site to check things out, and obviously first time commenting. I recently saw you mentioned over at Jackson’s site at Worth Blogger and thought to myself I need to check this guy out.
Anyway, I’m with you on obsessing on this SEO thing. I’ve been blogging for 3 – 4 years now, and just started trying to take it a little more seriously. I’ve always been obsessed with SEO for my posts. It starts with analyzing keywords and affects my writing as I’m always trying to chase some mysterious keyword density and trying to force the keyword into my content.
Let’s talk about bounce rate for a bit. You’re right, organic traffic from Google has in the past been my top referred. As you stated, these people don’t stick around. They’ve found what their looking for, problem solved, and are off to some other blog to try and find an answer for their next problem. No matter what I did, I couldn’t drastically improve my bounce rate numbers. I wasn’t targeting an audience that was willing to stick around.
So with my new blogging adventure I’ve taken a whole different focus. I’m really not worrying about on-page SEO at all. I’m targeting a whole different audience. I feel like this approach isn’t limiting me and I”m not having to worry about cramming some keyword into my content that just doesn’t seem to fit.
Just wanted to leave a quick comment and let you know I dig your site, just subscribed, and hope to learn a thing or two from you in the coming new year.
Craig
Craig(Quote)
Hey Craig! It’s great to meet you.
I’ll be honest – I was the exact same way with one of my old websites, and spent a ridiculous amount of time doing keyword research beforehand, and trying to find a way to get that keyword in the content without it sounding completely unnatural. Easier said than done!
Then I realized what a huge waste of time that is. I stopped worrying about SEO so much, and began focusing on writing for my readers rather than for search engines. I used all the extra time I had to focus on marketing with other channels – these days its primarily blog commenting and forum posting.
And let me tell you, this has actually been far more effective (even for search engine traffic) than traditional on-page SEO ever has. I’ve been doing some serious networking with other bloggers, which has gotten me the real, natural backlinks Google loves. It’s great!
Thank you so much for leaving a comment and subscribing. Hope to talk to you more in the future.
James McAllister(Quote)
Thanks for sharing..! This is really nice article about blogging and driving up traffic discussion. Surely, we are working for our business and not search engine working. So, what we have to do is to bring visitors to our blog and convert them into buy.
I think that wondering SEO and how to rank our article on the top of listing is something that useful for us. So, what should we wonder about..?
1. How to product quality content that able to reach at least 1k share across various social media platforms.
2. How to promote our article to target people who value it and spread about it.
I would agree with you. Search Engines traffic is conversion traffic, they are not going to buy our products or service. According CopyBlogger, the most of buyers are return visitors. So, the almost important think that you should consider about it is that how call visitors back to your blog.
I am not meaning that search engines traffic is useless for us. You know..? search engines traffic is they best sources and opportunity to grow your mailing..!
Kimsea Sok(Quote)
Hi Kimsea!
Appreciate your insight. The way I see it, it’s all about quality visitors rather than quantity. I do think it’s important to diversify your traffic sources and continue to expand into other areas where you can reach new sets of people, but it all comes back to how often those people convert.
I’d much rather have 100 visitors a day who opt-in to my mailing list, leave comments, buy products etc. than 10,000 who bounce immediately after arriving.
Thanks for commenting Kimsea!
James McAllister(Quote)
Yes, sure..! This is what I learnt from David Wood of Empower Network. You know, what he said..? He said if we want to success, we have to slow.?
He have mention that we don’t thousand readers from the search engines or spending thousand dollar for Adwords, but we need quality article with CTA.
You know..? The formula to make money is just only 3 steps.
1. Capture leads
2. Convert Sales
3. You got Money.
That is what we have to do in order to make money online..!
Kimsea Sok(Quote)