Creative SEO: Fixing Things is Not Enough

creative

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When the Web is a series of tubes SEO experts are just the plumbers of it.

Just cleaning up and fixing things only gets you so far.

What about creative SEO practices everybody can implement beyond just fine tuning?

Optimization is also about actively improving things.


Fixing Things is the Foundation

Take a look at what some SEO practitioners do most of the time!

You may notice that the scope of tasks they work on is pretty limited.

SEO people are mostly fixing sites and links. Of course it’s a beneficial thing to do.

Upfront and often regular fixing of

  • broken links
  • bad site architecture
  • messy code
  • irrelevant content
  • bloated file sizes

is the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.

Without that foundation of best practices the actual link building won’t work. Also when approaching link building

only fixing broken links or building them manually using other means is not sufficient.

High quality optimization for search users and people searching for solutions on other channels starts when you get creative.

When do you get creative? You are creative when you literally create things.

Yes, modern SEO is about creativity in its deepest sense.


Coming Up with Words for Google to Index

In conventional SEO we still witness people focusing predominantly on

  • fixing sites
  • connecting sites
  • adapting sites to Google’s requirements

While guessing Google’s ranking factors is important only following them and doing nothing else is short-sighted.

You need to find your own path and to create accordingly.

You need to create things Google has to follow.

One of my favorite techniques here is creating words or re-contextualizing words.

Many people assume that language is something fixed. It’s not.

You can come up with new words or new meaning for old words.

The only thing you need to take care of is that other people understand what you mean when you use new words or use old words in new contexts.

The easiest way is to come up with new words you then rank on top with.

You’ve come up first with them so Google treats you as the original source. The techniques is to name your products creatively.

There was no iPhone before Apple coined the term.

Now it’s one of the world’s most popular keywords and guess what Apple owns it.

When you search for [iphone] on Google Apple.com shows up first.

Very time someone speaks of the iPhone the person needs to refer to Apple or ideally has to link to it.


Creating Experiences for People and Google to Notice

Making up words is a good start of popularization. Creating things, ideally in real life is even better.

It doesn’t have to be a meet up or event but making or becoming the news is an excellent way to stick out of the anonymous crowd.

Even ages old PR techniques can help you with becoming popular in real life not just online.

Instead of sending out a keyword-laden “press release” for the spiders to eat why not announce something spectacular enough for people to write about.

It can be as small as inviting people to your offices or a free barbecue for your supporters.

Does a BBQ sound far-off? Well, it was an actual example from a client of mine.

We did some outreach to bloggers and influencers and we got several links as a result.

Of course we also used a new word for it. Instead of of a flashmob we called it something similar to a lunchmob.

It was in German so you won’t find our example when searching for it but you get the point.

There are plenty of lunchmobs out there though.

It sounds a bit scary though. Ideally the word you come up with doesn’t have such an ambivalent meaning.


Real Life Link Building or Optimizing Reality

Meet ups and events are just one option to popularize things in real life.

You don’t have to go real life that far.

When you publish a book or a short movie the title is also something new ideally that hasn’t been there before.

Then Google has to adapt and to find it. Whether it’s on your site or at least Amazon or YouTube.

I hope by now you understand the way it works.

Creating something new compels Google to index it.

They can’t ignore common knowledge, they can only ignore sites.

Yes, sites are the biggest problem of SEO until now.

You try to optimize a site for Google and when Google tweaks the algorithm your site drops in rankings.

All your work has been futile in the worst case. When you optimize the knowledge or the reality Google has to follow you.

When something starts to exist Google has to make sure it’s available on their search engine.

This way you become both future-proof and you turn the responsibilities.

Now it’s Google’s responsibility to show you in their results not yours not please them.

Please adapt to this new reality and embrace creative SEO 2!

* Creative Commons image by Paul

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