Yep, a good product / service and happy customers can take you a looooong way. If your product sucks, no traffic in the world is going to make it work.
But that doesn't mean that SEO is useless. We might be biased, but there are a ton of benefits - traffic, leads, brand awareness, etc.
Agreed! For the most part, anyway. If you can create content that 1) can go viral or get a ton of shares, and 2) at the same time, be created with a specific keyword in mind, you'll get amazing results real fast.
Unfortunately, that's not really something you can do for a lot of industries or niches. But when it does work, it works!
yeah, haha. It's super meta - we're trying to get this article to rank on "SEO case study." It will probably take a while since the domain is pretty new, but we'll get there.
As for which keywords to focus on, our rule of thumb is, find one of your competitors that's winning with their SEO, and borrow their ideas. In most industries, if you combine the keywords from your top 3-5 competitors, your keyword strategy is gonna be pretty comprehensive. As for the "how," just run your competitor's website through SEMrush or Ahrefs, and voila!
Yep, the impact of social links is pretty low on their own. You do, however, get these 2 benefits:
- If your content gets a ton of views, people will start Googling for it and clicking your result, specifically. This will increase your CTR, which is a known ranking factor.
- People who LOVE your content on Reddit or wherever will link to your website from their blog (hence, more backlinks).
True, but in most cases, you won't write Harry Potter - you just want to drive leads from people searching for process management solutions, haha.
What you did mention IS an actual strategy though. The idea is, you coin a new term or strategy, and if you PR the content enough, the term will have a ton of searches (and you'll rank #1). More often than not, though, you have to be a big fish to really pull this off
Most of the organic traffic is content SEO, yes. Around ~2k of monthly searches is branded search (people looking for the company). And, well, it IS pretty reasonable - the company IS ranking for most BPM / workflow keywords.
I do get why you'd think SEO is snake oil. Yeah, useful website, service + good content is the way to go. You can't just "SEO" a mediocre website and expect anything to happen.
That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc.
Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope that makes sense :)
Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.
That's super situational and really depends on the keyword you rank on. Can't give you the numbers, but yeah, the high CPC keywords are usually the bread-winners.
Maybe it's easier to read on a PDF? Here's a link to it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1muiO5ze7asCp9tHcF-t_mf_tIBe...