Question
How important is SEO for blogging?
Answer
Two words: Bounce rate.
And thereby hangs a tale.
The Baseline
There's a baseline cost-of-doing-business SEO level that every site needs. That's a no-brainer in two ways:
Beyond the minimum is where the question gets interesting. I believe there's a tradeoff between writing for people and writing for robots that simply cannot be broken at this point.
Let's call the former HEO: Human Eyes Optimization.
The HEO-vs.-SEO Pareto
At the current state of the art of the technology, there is no possibility of win-win here. It is not exactly zero-sum, but it is a Pareto boundary. Depending on your planning horizons and short-term vs. long-term value you hope to get out of each visit, 1 unit of SEO-juice gained may or may not be worth more than 1 unit of HEO-juice lost.
ANY accommodation of the needs of robots will necessarily reduce the content quality for humans in some subtle way. The cost/benefit analysis depends on your situation. If you are running a 1 month campaign to sell something on a microsite, SEO is good.
The basic difference between great headlines that grab human attention versus clear headlines that grab search-bot attention is only the tip of the iceberg.
If you focus on SEO, your traffic will grow faster than your human market, but most of it will wash right off. Your site will suffer from what I think of as "SEO inflation" -- the perception that it is bigger than it is because you mistake all traffic for attention. You can measure SEO inflation. I'll get to that.
If you focus on humans, your traffic will grow in lock-step with your human market. This is about an order of magnitude slower than SEO-fueled growth. But this is uninflated site value. You will not be able to delude yourself that your traffic is higher value than it actually is.
Life near the HEO asymptote
I have never had any doubts: I have ALWAYS written for humans. Beyond that, I put zero effort into things like link exchanges with other bloggers, linkbaiting bigger blogs, leaving comments on others' sites just to build a link and all those other short-term off-page SEO tricks. I also do nothing to optimize my headlines or first sentences. If they are SEO-friendly by accident, so be it. But I never think about it.
Not because I have any moral issues with them but because I am bored to death by those things. Writing for the bots is like writing for idiots, and is not fun.
So out of sheer laziness, I focused on the only part of the game I actually like: writing. I let the rest take care of itself, and in hindsight, that was a smart thing. I hit on the right strategy (for me) by accident.
It is right for me, because the time horizon for my blog is basically "till I die." This is something I love doing, and I am going to continue doing it till I either die or am am unable to for some reason, or the technology is disrupted and vanishes.
If you have such a long/indefinite time horizon, SEO-inflation is not your friend. You are best served by a site that grows at a sustainable human pace. Random peaks of transient/fly-by SEO-juice driven traffic are a distraction. You are creating capital asset depreciation (lowering the quality of content) and hurting retention for uncertain acquisition gains.
The cost of HEOing your site is time.
Today, I have a pretty decent sized site: PageRank 5, maybe 20k visits/month, a decent balance of direct vs. search traffic etc. But It took me about 3x longer to get here than people who try to grow very fast, but since rate of growth is not of much interest if you have long time horizons, I don't really care.
Others can speak to life at other points along the SEO-HEO Pareto. In some of my other projects, I live elsewhere on the curve, but the HEO end is where I like to live. I don't like the other parts of the curve as much.
So how do you measure where you are on the SEO-HEO pareto? Welcome to the bounce rate.
Bounce Rate
I don't pay serious attention to most common Web metrics like visits, visitors etc. I look 'em up when people ask, but that's it.
I pay attention to ONLY one metric. Bounce rate. It is a measure of the percentage of people who are actually engaging with your content versus deciding it is irrelevant and moving on.
For certain categories of sites, it is the ONLY metric that matters.
There's a couple of ways it is measured, but the intent is the same:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2...
The rates reported by various tools are not terribly accurate, but good enough.
The point is, bounce rate is a good proxy for SEO inflation. The higher your bounce rate, the more your site suffers from SEO inflation. For most types of content, this hovers around 20-30% for "good" sites, and can be as high as 70% or more for new sites, and 90% or more for spam sites.
The only category that has low bounce is product information (which makes sense, since if you are searching for Mr. Coffee model 13559, you are looking for some focused information with a very precise search):
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/...
Here's the aha bit. I have a ridiculously off the charts bounce rate of 3.4%, which shocks people who have a sense for these numbers. I didn't know this until an experienced Web person happened to look at my analytics and was stunned into disbelief. She refused to believe the number was real. She thought there was a reporting error.
Nope, it's real, and I know because I've confirmed it with other slices and dices of my traffic. I also know because I've paid the cost for this via slower growth.
Picking Your Strategy
So let's put it together. It's really very simple. In certain asymptotic regimes of content strategy, bounce rate is all that matters. Away from those asymptotes, other things start to matter.
And thereby hangs a tale.
The Baseline
There's a baseline cost-of-doing-business SEO level that every site needs. That's a no-brainer in two ways:
- It's a no-brainer because you MUST do it. Not doing this is like going out in public in your pajamas.
- It's a no-brainer because most good CMSes like WordPress do it out of the box, and you'd have to work hard to turn it OFF. If you are custom-building a site, get to WP levels of baseline.
Beyond the minimum is where the question gets interesting. I believe there's a tradeoff between writing for people and writing for robots that simply cannot be broken at this point.
Let's call the former HEO: Human Eyes Optimization.
The HEO-vs.-SEO Pareto
At the current state of the art of the technology, there is no possibility of win-win here. It is not exactly zero-sum, but it is a Pareto boundary. Depending on your planning horizons and short-term vs. long-term value you hope to get out of each visit, 1 unit of SEO-juice gained may or may not be worth more than 1 unit of HEO-juice lost.
ANY accommodation of the needs of robots will necessarily reduce the content quality for humans in some subtle way. The cost/benefit analysis depends on your situation. If you are running a 1 month campaign to sell something on a microsite, SEO is good.
The basic difference between great headlines that grab human attention versus clear headlines that grab search-bot attention is only the tip of the iceberg.
If you focus on SEO, your traffic will grow faster than your human market, but most of it will wash right off. Your site will suffer from what I think of as "SEO inflation" -- the perception that it is bigger than it is because you mistake all traffic for attention. You can measure SEO inflation. I'll get to that.
If you focus on humans, your traffic will grow in lock-step with your human market. This is about an order of magnitude slower than SEO-fueled growth. But this is uninflated site value. You will not be able to delude yourself that your traffic is higher value than it actually is.
Life near the HEO asymptote
I have never had any doubts: I have ALWAYS written for humans. Beyond that, I put zero effort into things like link exchanges with other bloggers, linkbaiting bigger blogs, leaving comments on others' sites just to build a link and all those other short-term off-page SEO tricks. I also do nothing to optimize my headlines or first sentences. If they are SEO-friendly by accident, so be it. But I never think about it.
Not because I have any moral issues with them but because I am bored to death by those things. Writing for the bots is like writing for idiots, and is not fun.
So out of sheer laziness, I focused on the only part of the game I actually like: writing. I let the rest take care of itself, and in hindsight, that was a smart thing. I hit on the right strategy (for me) by accident.
It is right for me, because the time horizon for my blog is basically "till I die." This is something I love doing, and I am going to continue doing it till I either die or am am unable to for some reason, or the technology is disrupted and vanishes.
If you have such a long/indefinite time horizon, SEO-inflation is not your friend. You are best served by a site that grows at a sustainable human pace. Random peaks of transient/fly-by SEO-juice driven traffic are a distraction. You are creating capital asset depreciation (lowering the quality of content) and hurting retention for uncertain acquisition gains.
The cost of HEOing your site is time.
Today, I have a pretty decent sized site: PageRank 5, maybe 20k visits/month, a decent balance of direct vs. search traffic etc. But It took me about 3x longer to get here than people who try to grow very fast, but since rate of growth is not of much interest if you have long time horizons, I don't really care.
Others can speak to life at other points along the SEO-HEO Pareto. In some of my other projects, I live elsewhere on the curve, but the HEO end is where I like to live. I don't like the other parts of the curve as much.
So how do you measure where you are on the SEO-HEO pareto? Welcome to the bounce rate.
Bounce Rate
I don't pay serious attention to most common Web metrics like visits, visitors etc. I look 'em up when people ask, but that's it.
I pay attention to ONLY one metric. Bounce rate. It is a measure of the percentage of people who are actually engaging with your content versus deciding it is irrelevant and moving on.
For certain categories of sites, it is the ONLY metric that matters.
There's a couple of ways it is measured, but the intent is the same:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2...
The rates reported by various tools are not terribly accurate, but good enough.
The point is, bounce rate is a good proxy for SEO inflation. The higher your bounce rate, the more your site suffers from SEO inflation. For most types of content, this hovers around 20-30% for "good" sites, and can be as high as 70% or more for new sites, and 90% or more for spam sites.
The only category that has low bounce is product information (which makes sense, since if you are searching for Mr. Coffee model 13559, you are looking for some focused information with a very precise search):
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/...
Here's the aha bit. I have a ridiculously off the charts bounce rate of 3.4%, which shocks people who have a sense for these numbers. I didn't know this until an experienced Web person happened to look at my analytics and was stunned into disbelief. She refused to believe the number was real. She thought there was a reporting error.
Nope, it's real, and I know because I've confirmed it with other slices and dices of my traffic. I also know because I've paid the cost for this via slower growth.
Picking Your Strategy
So let's put it together. It's really very simple. In certain asymptotic regimes of content strategy, bounce rate is all that matters. Away from those asymptotes, other things start to matter.
- Figure out the TIME horizon for your site. Do you expect it to last 6 months, 6 years or the rest of your life? This is your site horizon (or business model lifespan).
- Figure out the lifespan of your typical content. Is it going to be of 24 hour value or 24 year value? This is your product lifecycle.
- If both times are small numbers, SEO to death. Remember, you have lots of competition here, so you have to be VERY aggressive to peak to a high traffic level in your short window of opportunity. Bounce rates of 50% -70% are acceptable. Above 70% you are getting close to spammy (or your site is very young). Your content strategy is like a sprinter's: unsustainable anaerobic respiration, but if you only want to dash 100 meters, who cares? You can recover later.
- If both are big numbers, ignore SEO entirely and go all HEO. Shoot for single digit bounce rates. This is a marathon. You need to be in aerobic mode for as long as you can. Cruise control.
- If the two numbers are out of sync (eg. a news site with a 24 hour content cycle, but a business model that they hope will last 100 years), you need a professional. Hire an SEO expert to figure out your strategy. You'll also need to pay attention to numbers beyond the bounce rate, so you want your SEO expert to counsel you on the right set of numbers to pay attention to.