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How a new query grows - “seo theory” example

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 21, 2008 in SEO Theory

I started my present job in the fall of 2006. At the time I was blogging about SEO in a couple of different places but my contract as Director of Search Strategies asserted an intellectual property claim over SEO compositions to my employer (for the duration of my employment). I had to stop writing on other SEO blogs (including my own blog, Google Says … and SEOmoz). By December 2006 I realized I needed to have a place where I could publish something about SEO for personal and professional reasons.

Thus was born the SEO Theory blog. I took the name from a comment that a fairly prominent SEO had made earlier in the year because I realized there was so little true discussion of SEO theory on the Web that it would constitute a new name space and query space. It was a way to demonstrate in a subtle fashion how you create traffic through content rather than through social media (which is not to say that content is better than social media — I’m just demonstrating one principle out of many).

The traffic comes because I keep writing more than anything else. Some of the SEO Theory posts have disappointed me in terms of depth and quality, whereas others have surprised me with their unpredicted popularity. I don’t write link bait articles as I don’t have time for that kind of work. I have to say what I need to say in as short a time as possible.

By establishing a relatively consistent track record of publication I have shown a growing audience that SEO Theory is a blog they can come back to and they’ll probably see something different from the last time they visited. There are very few SEO blogs that publish so frequently. And no SEO blogs write about the theory of what we do and where we are very often.

By writing such a narrowly focused blog I virtually ensured that this blog would have a small audience. According to Google Analytics (which underreports such things but is nonetheless that only analytic we’re using for this blog) SEO Theory receives about 10,000 unique visitors a month. Of course, it wasn’t always like that and in the early months most visitors found the blog through long tail queries.

Although I did provide links to the blog in my comments on various other blogs, and I promoted the blog through Spider-food for a while, I did almost nothing to actually advertise or promote the blog. It built its traffic through natural curiosity and referrals. I know there are plenty of referrals because I see the Yahoo! mail and Google mail references in the statistics.

But what I felt sure would happen in the search engines did in fact happen in the search engines: people started searching for “seo theory” (and quite a few variations thereof). The blog now receives traffic from more than 1000 keywords per month, many of them variations on my name, “SEO theory”, and various linking concepts. I even see referrals for keywords I never bothered to emphasize.

By shaping the message and delivering it consistently I have stimulated enough interest in the topic of “SEO theory” that people occasionally buy advertising for it, some other blogs have attempted to optimize for the expression, and the expression itself is occurring more often in blog and forum discussions that really have nothing to do with this blog.

I have created a small brand in cyberspace, something I have done before and which I feel I know how to do consistently. This blog is the proof of the concept that people occasionally ask me for. If you create the content and get it indexed, people will find it. It’s as simple as that. But of course effective marketing requires more than just random content production.

You have to choose the brand you’re shaping and you have to build value into that brand. SEO Theory is not just a blog, it also has an archive of SEO theory white papers and a free SEO ebook and it has an SEO glossary (although I have limited the number of terms I include there). People actually search for these other sections of the site, and people actually click through on the navigational links to these other sections of the site (although they still get the most traffic from embedded links like the two I just included in this post).

If you notice people talking about a previously unoptimized topic and you find there is relatively little content available for the topic on the Web, you have a golden opportunity for cultivating and dominating a query space by creating a brand for that topic. That’s how you utilize the power of grass roots movements. Just because SEOs seem to talk about the same tired stuff all the time doesn’t mean they never mention anything unusual. Quite the opposite, SEOs are introducing new ideas all the time.

I didn’t coin the expression “seo theory” but I own it (for now). Okay, my boss owns it. But the point is that I didn’t have to look outside my industry to create a useful resource that people interested in search engine optimization would want to link to, discuss elsewhere, and search for. This concept works just as well for travel, real estate, and all those other heavily competitive verticals as well as for smaller, less intense query spaces.

People literally do what I have done with SEO Theory every day. New blogs are championing previously undeveloped topics, new niche directories are gathering information that hasn’t been organized before, and new special interest sites are appearing all the time. As people find this content they begin to search for more. Eventually eclectic communities rise up, some even becoming so large and active that they draw major media attention. The process has been going on for as long as the Web has existed.

That’s an aspect of search engine optimization that I feel hasn’t been addressed very often and that is why I wrote about creating traffic for previously unoptimized keywords and queries. It’s a powerful method for building search visibility, accumulating Web site value, and building a brand that people respect. I wish I could offer more specific examples that match exactly what I wrote yesterday but I don’t have time to dig deep for publicly available data.

I hope this helps explain what I was proposing.