Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
So I promised a World Series blog and with Game 3 later tonight, I figured it would be a good time to talk game strategy and how you can improve your SEO. (Hint: if you know nothingabout baseball you may have to skip this post.)
Baseball “experts” almost all picked the Texas Rangers to win this series. 21 out of 25. Their reasoning was fairly consistent and clear: the Rangers hit more homeruns and pitch better than everyone else and thus they’ll win. Game One, however, went to the Cardinals. This would lead you to believe that the Rangers didn’t out-pitch or hit the Cardinals as the experts predicted, right?
Wrong.
In Game 1 of the World Series both teams had 6 hits and 0 errors. Our brains trick ourselves. 6 hits each should mean whoever had the “bigger and better” hits should have won the game, right? The Rangers hit the game’s only homerun. Their starting players had one more hit than the Cardinals starters. The best hitter on the Rangers outhit the best hitter on the Cardinals. So how did the Cardinals win? How does this have anything to do with SEO?
In baseball, like most sports, there are many ways to get to the desired result (winning.) The Cardinals won the game with singles. All of their runs came by way of single. SEO is like baseball that way. You have many ways to get the same result. You can build your team like the Rangers (hit homeruns, pitch well) or you can play “small ball” – hitting lots of singles, sacrificing something for a better result elsewhere and making tweaks rather than wholesale changes.
Hitting Singles
You can definitely succeed with homeruns. When I make on-site changes to a client’s website I’m trying to fix “everything at once.” That’s basically going for a homerun. Almost always in baseball a homerun hitter is also among the leaders in strikeouts. When you swing for the fences you can often miss.
Hitting singles means taking the small victories. Do little things right. Title your blog posts appropriately. Go back and add tags to your old posts. Track your social media presence. Make your site 100% crawlable. Commentstorm your weekend away. These are small changes that affect you in the long run. When you make small changes and incremental improvements you are hitting singles. Just remember: the Cardinals won Game 1 based on two singles that scored three runs. Texas’ homerun scored two and they lost.
Sacrifice for a Better Result
As I discussed in the SEO depth vs. breadth discussion, you can’t have it all. Your site will *never* be ranked #1 for every known keyword. It’s not possible! Every choice is a sacrifice. If I choose to write a post about seo services for photographers I’m not writing a post on seo for wedding professionals. My word choice will either reflect a target audience of photographers or other wedding vendors.
When you make your choices, make smart choices. Don’t leave out your main keywords and insert more nonsense. Your blog posts are already full of “am, the, in, on, an, my” Try and fill them with relevant, interesting keyphrases and keywords. Try to use keywords that relate to your title. To fully understand seo strategy, you need to understand that you are *always* sacrificing one keyword for another. You can’t use photographer and photography in every sentence. ”We had fun being wedding photographers for Amy & John for their Carolina wedding photography at their wedding this past Saturday at a great wedding venue in Charleston.” Admit you have to sacrifice, choose what’s most appropriate and hit another single.
The Smallball SEO Twins: Tweak and Test
Your site may need huge SEO changes. It may only need slight adjustments. You won’t know without extensive testing. So try it – change your title, write a different sort of header for your new blog post, alt keyword images in one post and not another. Testing Google is how you solve the riddle. If you are not testing something on your site right now, you’re wasting time. Go run a test. Start some sort of SEO test. Whatever you need to improve try to think up one way you could do it better and do it. Then watch what happens on Google. If it works, do it more or do it again! Test, test and more test.
Do baseball teams tweak & test? According to 2007 statistics, Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa “used 150 different starting lineups in 162 games.” He tweaked his lineup almost every.single.game. He’s been doing this for years and has been wildly successful using a trial & error test method. Basketball coaches try to find the 5 guys who work best together, soccer coaches want their best lineup at all times and in war we have learned what combinations work (air strikes then ground & pound) so fewer casualties happen. To be successful means to better yourself and testing is a great way to see what specifically makes you better.
So, enjoy the World Series. Go watch Game 3 and think of some really great SEO strategies you can test starting … now!
(PS. The Rangers won Game 2 of the World Series even though the Cardinals had more hits. The Rangers won 2-1 on a sacrifice… #justsayin.)
