SEO

TL;DR: SEO is weird and you should probably know which type(s), if any, is relevant to your job. If it happens to be editorial SEO, I include a step-by-step guide to crush editorial SEO at the bottom. It's a real "do as I say, not as I do" situation.

SEO before I knew what it was

My first "SEO" project was more in the vein of fanfiction than it was of marketing. I wrote a couple of WikiHow articles about my favorite tv characters that got something like 200,000 total views over the last 16 years. Please don't look for them. They're... rough.

If you can picture 15-year-old Adam typing away furiously on an iPod Touch while watching Star Trek dvds from the library after school on a Tuesday, you're in the right ballpark.

My second "SEO" project was a competitive research project I did while interning in college. I was scouring both competitor and channel distribution partner websites across hundreds of products to see how well certain information and assets had been updated across the pages. I didn't take this project very seriously at the time.

My third "SEO" project was a personal blog I wrote about Stoic philosophy as a senior in college. We had the choice of either a website or a blog as part of our capstone course, and I think we were supposed to be learning about the power of a "personal brand." Not a lot of views on this one, but I did win a small award at Senior Night.

Getting an education

When I started at Katapult, I wasn't thinking a lot about SEO or SERP or those three silly projects of the past. I had a seemingly simple goal of selling software that was way better and way faster and way safer and way more accurate than anything else on the market.

Except it wasn't simple. It took three months for me to help us make our first real software sale (which had nothing to do with what I was working on), and I still don't know if it was because of our published content or because of a referral from someone familiar with our services. Or from showing up at tradeshows.

We didn't have any marketing experts on staff, but leadership believed in the ability to stake our claim through SEO/blogging so that the right people could find us.

100 blog posts later

I dug in really deep on this hypothesis, and spent a couple days blogging each week for my first few years at Katapult. It was helpful to learn a lot about the industry and have an excuse to ask my bosses to point out the things I was struggling to understand or to clearly articulate.

By the time I got to article 100 or so, we had a wide enough customer base that it was a better use of my time to answer the phone, provide technical support, or connect our customers with partners or projects that would help them grow.

At this point, publishing technical documentation became the only real writing priority.

Full circle

When we built out a new department to tackle support, documentation, and services for existing software customers in the summer 2022, I got a chance to re-tackle sales and marketing like it was 2017 all over again. This time around, I did a little more research to understand SEO from the ground up. Here's what I found:

• Technical SEO is what you do to make sure your website and pages are utilizing the structures and tools necessary to take advantage of modern algorithms, crawlers, etc. to improve your page rankings. This could be updating metadata, alt text, changing your site architecture, indexing, all that fun stuff.
• Programmatic SEO is what you do to create thousands of landing pages from a database in an automatic or semi-automatic way. You can improve search rankings and target keywords without having to build out hundreds, thousands, or millions of landing pages manually. Think Ebay, Zillow, etc.
• Editorial SEO is what you do to create content that is highly relevant and appealing to your target audience. This is typically blogs, recipes, definitions, or other landing pages that provide meaninful, long-form content.

Let's talk a bit more about editorial SEO,

because I don't know anything about the other two types. Search engines have gotten better and better and not letting scammers rig the rankings to drive traffic to crappy sites.

And you can pay Google a ton of money to show people Ads for your website, even if you're not showing up in the organic rankings.

But if you've ever wanted to crush editorial SEO on your own, here's my guide:

1. Get clarity on your purpose, audience, and what your win would look like. If building awareness through organic traffic is the win, you're in the right spot!
2. Find your list of targeted terms - check out Search Console to figure out what search terms (queries) are getting people to your page, and make sure you know what terms you want to target. Don't worry too much about search volume, unless you need lots of visitors for this effort to be worth it. Make sure you have a tracking tool to monitor your progress for these targeted terms. You don't really need more than a Google Analytics account and a spreadsheet for this step.
3. Do your research - where are you currently showing up in SERP? What are the top performing pages for each term looking like these days? You could consider a rankings-tracking solution if you don't have one yet.
4. Create - draw inspiration from others' top-performing pages to tweak or build new landing pages for your site. For example, if 18 of the top 20 results for your keyword are recipes, you might need to create a landing page that looks more like a recipe than a product page.
5. Iterate - find what works and keep improving on it. Know your stuff and make sure your content is engaging and truthful and resonates with your audience. (Do the exact opposite of what I do in this newsletter)

Well, that's about all I know about SEO. Hope some of it helps!