A lot of digital content creators, online business owners, website owners, bloggers and so on have SEO nightmares on a daily basis. Especially the newbies, but even some seasoned content creators still have these nightmares.
They’re always worried about the best way to optimize their website for search engines, SEO best practices, how many times their keyword should appear in their content, whether or not their main keyword is in the subheadings, the next Google update, whether or not to change their SEO plugin, their Rankmath or Yoast SEO score, and so on and so forth.
It’s crazy the amount of things some content creators worry about when it comes to their website SEO. I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about these issues, that you should not ensure that your website is well optimized for search.
That’s far from what I’m saying.
All I’m getting at here is that these issues are causing a lot of nightmares to you guys. A lot of people I come across online, on Facebook, on Reddit forums, on YouTube comments and even Quora, worry too much about these things. They worry so much that I’ll be willing to bet it keeps them awake at night.
I use to be like that. I used to think about my website SEO a lot, and it’s still something that I take pretty seriously right now, but unlike before, it doesn’t keep me awake at night. I don’t even think about it anymore.
And that’s because I discovered one simple truth. The truth is: You do better SEO when you’re not trying to do SEO.
I want to repeat that again.
You do better SEO when you’re not trying to do SEO.
Look, if you’re into SEO, if you want consistent traffic to your website from search engines like Google, Bings and the rest, if you want to never worry about the next Google update affecting your site negatively, you need to print the above words on paper, frame it and hang it on your wall.
Hang it somewhere you’ll always see it everyday.
You do better SEO when you’re not trying to do it.
What does that mean?
It means you want to write and create content designed to please your customers not the search engines.
Write for your audience, write for your customers, don’t focus on keywords, write content that will help your customers understand your products better. Try to teach with your content, try to help people with your content.
When you’re focused on doing that, you don’t worry about how many keywords are in your article or in your headings and subheadings. You don’t care if your Yoast or Rankmath SEO score is green or up to 100 percent before publishing an article. You don’t even care if it’s up to 50 percent.
Instead, you hit publish, when you’re sure that you have written enough to help your audience, your customers or whoever that article is intended for, answer whatever question or resolve whatever issue that led them to your article.
Don’t write for search engines. Write for your customers. Immediately you start doing that, your SEO worries are 80 percent over. And then you can really focus on creating helpful content worth ranking, worth reading, and worthy of your name.
Here’s what happens when you have this kind of mindset and write like that.
You create better content.
Content is meant for people not search engines or robots. When you don’t create to please search engines, you create better content. You create content that really helps. As a result of that, people will love your content more, and they’ll share it and link to it more.
And what’s the biggest ranking factor? Backlinks! Quality backlinks. When you create high quality content for people, without caring much about optimizing for search, you indirectly optimize for search.
You get more shares, people link to your content more, and you grow faster.
So, don’t worry about how many times your keyword appears, how many words are on the page, your SEO score, whether it’s up to 100 or if it’s green.
The only thing you need to worry about and ask yourself before you hit publish is:
Did I answer the question that led readers to this article? Have I provided enough information in this article to solve the problem in question?
Is this article helpful?
That’s it.
If the answer to these questions is yes, then you hit publish.