Purple Widget – An SEO Experiment

I know the first thing you’re thinking – “he’s not dead”

No, I am not dead I’m just really bad at posting to my blog. I think I covered that in some of my early posts – you must stay committed to your blog and post regularly for it to have any value. Do as I say, not as I do.

Now on to the title of this long overdue post. What is SEO?
And I don’t really mean what is SEO – I mean it more like how do you explain to people what you do when they have that strange look on their face following the question “what do you do for a living” and you answer “SEO”. Many people are just polite enough to smile and nod like they have any idea what I just said. And in reality I rarely answer with just “SEO”, I usually answer something more like “I’m in search marketing”, or “digital marketing”. Unfortunately that gets the same bewildered look most of the time so I’m not sure my clever plan of spinning my job to make it easily understandable is not working. Or I’m just not that clever – this is the likely answer I admit.

Often the attempted follow up explanation of “I work for one of the largest advertising agencies in the world and I manage the team that helps our clients websites show up when you do a Google search” makes things better. Or at least makes them stop talking about and we can both get on with our lives.

So I have a new strategy when the guys I get randomly paired with on the golf course ask “what do you do” – I’m going to start this video and hand them my phone.

It’s not the best thing I’ve ever seen or anything, but in three and a half minutes it does a decent job of simplifying SEO.

Or maybe I just tell them I’m in sales. Because sometimes the only thing tougher than explaining what SEO is to some guy I just met who doesn’t really care is explaining it to a client who doesn’t really care.

PS – Just keeping with the theme of why this blog started, we still rank #1 for the search term “purple widget” – in fact we are in the first 4 spots these days. Of course this doesn’t really help my case that you must blog regularly (for the slow people: because this blog still ranks #1 for purple widget despite no activity for months at a time) but does add a lot of value to the whole idea of this blog…..you can rank #1 all you want but if it’s for a term that nobody searches for it simply doesn’t matter. Google is proving this for me by having this inactive, slightly below average quality blog still rank high for this term that nobody else cares about.