Why I don't bother with SEO
(This originally appeared in my newsletter. Sign up now to get content like this, for free, every two weeks.)
If you search "copywriter NZ" on Google, you'll find me, eventually - at the very bottom of page 4. This is not what they call good SEO (search engine optimisation). Good SEO is about ranking at or near the top of the page for your chosen term.
The reasons for this are pretty intuitive - if you're one of the first results for a term, you'll get a lot of traffic to your website from people searching that term. A percentage of that traffic will turn into leads, a percentage of those will turn into customers. So if you get more traffic by ranking high, you'll make more money. Pretty basic stuff.
Ranking high for terms - particularly competitive ones like "copywriter" - is challenging. It takes serious investment of time, money and often both. \
And for me, it's an investment that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And it might not make sense for you to invest in ranking for your terms either. Here's why:
What would you do with a whole bunch of leads?
I'm a one person operation. This means that there's a pretty hard limit to how much work I can take on. There are only so many hours in the day, and I can only extend a wait list out for two or three months before people decide to work with someone else.
I don't have armies of junior staff or subcontractors that I can scale up to absorb work.
And this is just as true for a lot of product businesses as well as service businesses like mine. For example, if you have a sales team, there's only so many discovery calls and product demos that sales team can do. Even if they're all putting in 12 hours days, you're still going to hit a limit.
So if you rank so high that you get more traffic than you can handle, you're effectively ending up with the same outcome that you would have ended up with had you not ranked at all - you might get lots of leads, but if you don't have the resources to close those leads or service the contracts that come out the end, the outcome is the same.
Are you getting the right kind of leads?
Even though I'm on the fourth page of Google, I still get cold calls from people who found me through search every now and again. Maybe once a month or so.
Here's how many of those calls have turned into paid work over the last four years: zero. I've had conversations, I've written proposals, but none of it has ever turned into work.
You can see why if you think about your own behaviour when you search for a professional. If you search something like "plumber," you're clearly not looking for a specific plumber - if you did, you'd search their name.
Rather, you just have a plumbing job you want done. You're not going to care too much about any one provider over the other, so you're going to make your decision on other factors, like price and availability.
It's exactly the same for people who search "copywriter nz." They usually have a copywriting job that they want quickly, for a low price. I tend to be booked out by several weeks at least, and my prices tend towards the high end.
This means that the people who find me through Google searches are often not going to be a good fit - which in turn means that any calls or proposals tend to be a waste of everyone's time.
On the other hand, I also get a reasonable number of calls from people who searched my name specifically, after seeing my content on Linkedin, reading this newsletter, or something like that.
These people are pretty much invariably a great fit, because they decided they wanted to work with me, rather than with any old copywriter.
It's also not hard for me to rank for a term as unique as my own name.
Not for me, but it might be for you
If I was selling information products, I would definitely use SEO. Information products can be bought at a click of a button - they don't have the whole back and forth of conversations, proposals, contracts and start dates. So I'd be able to handle the leads that come through, and if a large portion of those leads were unqualified, it wouldn't be a huge deal.
Likewise, if my business was larger-scale, and I had staff, I would certainly consider SEO. Once you have staff, you need a lot more work to come through the door in order to pay them.
Or, if I was selling more templated services, with less back and forth - again, I would consider SEO (and indeed, it occurs to me now that it might be a good strategy for out-of-the-box services I offer like this one).
But in general, it's not for me. It might be for you - but have a think about what your business looks like before you plunge into time consuming, expensive SEO. It's great for some businesses, but not so great for others.
See you
Sam
PS: There are more than 30 comments discussing this issue on my post about it on Linkedin. Tune in and drop one of your own.
PPS: If your SEO is bringing tons of traffic to your website, but it's not converting, it might be a problem with your website's copy. Book a copy review to clean it up for $599. I'm raising this price soon so better get in quick if you've been on the fence.
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