Ever since I started this website, I have disliked everything related to SEO. I just wanted to write content and hopefully, some of that content was interesting enough for people to keep on reading.
My approach was fundamentally flawed though:
I relied on organic traffic, which wasn’t getting great results. I thought that meant I had to focus more on SEO instead of trying to give something meaningful to the reader. I was creating content with the hopes of people finding it interesting while refusing to look at the content from the user’s point of view.
Well, that doesn’t work. Obviously.
How to do it differently
I think a big factor of why I hated SEO, was because there are so many low-quality websites that explain SEO, but are themselves doing ‘the bad kind of SEO’: get ranked as high as possible with as little effort as possible.
There is another side to SEO though, which is focused on creating user-centric content. Google has been explicitly saying this for quite some time now I think. I read about it multiple times, but for some reason, it never clicked. While reading an article about how to rank higher on Google (that company has its content marketing on point), it finally clicked.
Part of SEO is fulfilling a user’s need and asking yourself: what is a user looking for?
Applying a new mindset
Silly that it took me this long to understand this mindset, which now suddenly feels completely obvious. It has been a surprisingly long journey to come to this pretty simple learning.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to rewrite the entire website and not every page will be focused on solving a user problem. In the end, this is still a hobby and I should do what brings me joy. I will spend some time rewriting certain parts of the website though and going forward, I will ask myself the question: “What does a user probably want to get out of visiting this page?”