📝 Our day 1 SEO strategy

March 07, 2023

Hi 👋

When Bing started to get a lot of press a few weeks ago, you know what everyone was saying on social media?

Google is dead. SEO is dead. Search is dead.

You know what we ACTUALLY saw happen to our website?

We got more traffic from Bing search.

And it made us think. SEO is not dead. If anything, SEO will start to become less synonymous with the word "Google."

And this realization reassured our reasoning behind why investing in content on your own website is such a great strategy.

If new search engines pop up, and you have amazing content on your site, it's the job of those search engines to find and surface your content.

You're not limited to one platform for distribution.

Whereas, in social media, you're dependent on that one platform.

So, with the increase in interest in growing SEO traffic, we want to quickly go over how you can create an SEO strategy from day 1.

First step to growing SEO traffic is to stop saying the word "SEO" and think more about the phrase, "content creation."

SEO is simply the act of optimizing for an algorithm. It's not the thing that makes you grow. What makes you grow is content, that is then SEO optimized. Content first.

This is why many SEOs aren't great writers. Because they look at SEO more as a game of hacks and tactics, instead of a game of good content creation.

But, it is also important to note that you want to create great content on a platform that can give you the maximum amount of success in search engines. Your platform is your website, and not all websites are created equal.

In other words, as Emily from MKT1 would say, your website is your "engine," and your content is your "fuel."

Race fuel in a 1999 Toyota Corolla isn't going to make you go 200 mph. Race fuel in a Ferrari will.

So step 1, fix your engine. You do this by making sure your website:

  • Is designed with clean, semantic code and has incredibly fast hosting (see Webflow)

  • Has clean URL structures (i.e. your blog lives on yourwebsite.com/blog)

  • You have canonical tags set on all web pages

  • You have article schema markup on all blog posts

  • You have a proper sitemap.xml that is submitted to Google Search Console

Step 2, create great content. You do this by:

Step 3, check you expectations:

  • Websites with new SEO strategies can take 6 months to get out of the Google "Sandbox" and start seeing results. But don't stop creating content in the sandbox phase.

  • If your engine is working properly, and your fuel is word-class, you will start to see results. Patience.

This is what we did for Marketer Milk, and saw some great growth last year:

MM growth graph

So no, SEO is not dead. And it's not a black box.

A great "engine" (your website), with word-class fuel (your content), and a healthy dose of patience, will make you grow.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

  • Marketing news from the past week

  • Find & accelerate your marketing advantages

  • Become a better writer in one day

  • How to implement schema markup

  • The psychology of price relativity

  • Ad from the past

  • Website of the week

  • Cool marketing jobs

  • And much more

🗞 In the news

🚀 All things growth & 

Duolingo's user retention tactics, how to find & accelerate your marketing advantages, growth planning in marketing, and refreshing your GTM strategy in 30 days.

Duolingo's User Retention: 8 Tactics Tested On 300 Million Users

Discover Duolingo's top 8 user retention tactics (and the psychology behind them), as well as behind-the-scenes stats and facts to help your product.

https://growth.design/case-studies/duolingo-user-retention?ref=marketermilk

Find & accelerate your marketing advantages to grow much faster

And why startups who leverage marketing advantages are way more likely to win

https://newsletter.mkt1.co/p/find-and-accelerate-your-marketing?ref=marketermilk

Marketing Needs Growth Planning Not Media Planning – The Growth Machine

https://inspiremartech.com/2017/08/marketing-needs-growth-planners/?ref=marketermilk

How to refresh your Go-to-Market within 30 days

I spoke to an old friend a couple of weeks ago, who is a CMO at a SaaS company. He was in the process of updating their Go-to-Market (GTM) for their new Fiscal Year and wanted my thoughts on it. Below is an approach I proposed – not an exhaustive study but something that allows him to update within 30 days - ongoing tweaks to their messaging/value proposition to stay current, as well as where they should (re)focus their solution in terms of new geographies and industry verticals/sub segments.

https://anilgupta.substack.com/p/how-to-refresh-your-go-to-market-withinhtml?ref=marketermilk

💭 Guess the riddle

What happened to the blogger that stole his neighbor's computer?

Answer is at the bottom of this email

✍️ Content, social media, & email

How to pick content marketing topics, becoming a better writer in one day, a story about going viral, and using gratitude in your email marketing.

Choosing Content Marketing Topics That'll Grow Your SaaS Company | Ten Speed

We’ll walk you through some of the ways our strategists and content marketers think about what and when to choose certain content topics.

https://www.tenspeed.io/blog/how-to-choose-content-marketing-topics?ref=marketermilk

The Day You Became A Better Writer

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a...

https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/the_day_you_bec.html?ref=marketermilk

I remembered how awful it is to go viral

Read to the end for some really good horse content

https://www.garbageday.email/p/i-remembered-how-awful-it-is-to-go?ref=marketermilk

Gratitude Is a Powerful Ally for Email Marketing

What marketers can learn from two simple words

https://medium.com/better-marketing/gratitude-is-a-powerful-ally-for-email-marketing-ca1f4b27dbc0/?ref=marketermilk

⚙️ SEO

Does brand name at the end of a title tag impact organic traffic, how to implement schema markup, and the ROI of SEO.

Does appending the brand name and location at the end of the title tag have an impact on organic traffic?

In this week’s #SPQuiz, an ecommerce customer for outdoor wear tested whether appending the brand name and location at the end of a title tag made any impact on organic traffic. The change would add the brand name of the customer followed by a locale, Canada, to the existing title tag, This change was only implemented on their Canadian domain. We asked our followers on both Twitter and LinkedIn what they thought the impact would be on organic traffic.

https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/appending-brand-name-and-location-to-title-tag/?ref=marketermilk

How to implement structured data (schema) without needing a developer's help

A practitioner's guide to just "getting the job done" yourself

https://derekseo.substack.com/p/how-to-implement-structured-data?ref=marketermilk

The ROI of SEO: How to Measure SEO ROI (With Formulas)

SEO ROI measures the impact of your SEO efforts. Here‘s how to measure it. Step by step.

https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-roi/

🔮 Psychology & branding

Evaluating emotionally then rationalizing, the psychology behind price relativity, and why brand designers make great product designers.

People evaluate emotionally and then rationalize their decision - Inverted Passion

Many evolutionary psychologists believe that reason evolved to justify our actions to strangers. This justification was necessary because strangers couldn’t take one another’s claims at face value. Such claims had to be backed with reasons to convince the other that one is not taking advantage of him/her. As we all know, actions speak louder than… Read More

https://invertedpassion.com/people-evaluate-emotionally-and-then-rationalize-their-decision/?ref=marketermilk

Price Relativity - Customer Camp

Price Relativity is how your product’s comparison set influences its perceived value. Let's explore more about it here.

https://customercamp.co/price-relativity/?ref=marketermilk

Why brand designers make great product designers

Issue 133: The intangibles brand designers bring to product design

https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/why-brand-designers-make-great-product?ref=marketermilk

🧠 Extra stuff

The startup pyramid, content marketing salary negotiation, and ecommerce myths.

The Startup Pyramid

Every six months I rethink the optimal startup go to market approach based on new insights gained at recent startups. Lately I’ve been using a pyramid to

https://www.startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/?ref=marketermilk

Content Marketing Salary Negotiation: 20+ Resources to Get Better Pay

https://www.superpath.co/blog/content-marketing-salary-negotiation?ref=marketermilk

Ecommerce Myths

Building a DTC brand is tougher than it seems. An expert debunks many misconceptions, offers helpful tips and has a couple of suggestions for media companies.

https://www.peoplevsalgorithms.com/p/ecommerce-myths?ref=marketermilk

📣 Ad from the past

Wall Street Journal ad

(The Wall Street Journal ad from 1988)

Let the ad do the talking.

💻 Website of the week

Poet.so | Create Beautiful Images of Twitter Posts

Capture and share Twitter posts as beautiful images.

https://poet.so/

🏝 Cool remote marketing jobs

Okay, that's it for now 🤍. See you next Tuesday!

Cat bye

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“I cannot expect even my own art to provide all of the answers — only to hope it keeps asking the right questions." — Grace Hartigan

Riddle answer: He got RSS-ted