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Perfectionism kills search rankings.
One of the hardest things I’ve had to unlearn as an entrepreneur is perfectionism.
If you’re anything like me, you might have come up through an education system that rewards absolutes: there’s one right answer on a test: if you don’t get it right, you’re wrong and a failure.
When you perform for an exam, or in a concert, there’s no space for mis-steps, or bum notes.
A lot of us have experienced this. And we’ve grown up thinking there’s no room for failure, right?
I spent my early career in publishing, where attention to detail is rewarded, and evne minor grammatical errors are seen as a terrible tarnish on the company’s reputation.
And high standards are important, don’t get me wrong. There’s a time and a place for these standards.
And without mistakes and imperfection, you don’t learn.
And progress does not happen.
The same is true for SEO.
If I had waited until I knew what I was doing to start my ecommerce business, I would never have ‘just published’ 350 articles, which over 5 years attracted over 45k organic visitors/month.
So many times, business owners fail to publish content on their website because we don’t think it’s good enough. We haven’t made a minimum word count, or we haven’t included an important sub-section.
And don’t get me wrong – there’s a balance to be struck here. But while we’re figuring out what that is, our competitor has already written three more blog posts, and their site is getting indexed for more pages, while ours isn’t.
When it comes to SEO, these things are important:
🔥 Volume of content
🔥 Consistency of publishing
🔥 Keywords
🔥 Number of pages
🔥 Internal links
(And of course there are more...)
And this is why:
🔥 Volume of content This shows Google you’re an authority.
🔥 Consistency of publishing This shows Google your business is active and your website is constantly being developed, and you’re investing into your search appearance.
🔥 Keywords The more content you have on your site, the higher the chance you have
🔥 Number of pages Sites with fewer pages are much less likely to rank high in search.
🔥 Internal links The more links to a page Google sees, even if they come from your own site, the more importance Google will attribute to your page.
So this week’s tip is this: publish when you aren’t ready.
If you haven’t yet started a blog for your site: publish your first blog topic. Write about your primary service. Answer FAQs your clients ask you.
If you already have a blog and haven’t updated it in a while, commit to publishing one new article this week, and one next month.
If you’re already publishing to a regular schedule, well done! Perhaps it’s time to consider outsourcing some of the content creation, so you can increase your cadence and volume, and the variety of keywords you’re ranking for.
And if you’re wondering how I take my own advice on this… Hell, what do you think I’m doing right here?
Is this the best post I’ve ever written? No way.
Is there more I could say on this topic? Certainly.
Do I think critics could pull this apart and rewrite it better than I could? Absolutely.
Have I missed glaringly obvious points that someone could point out in a millisecond? Probably.
But is it good enough to inspire maybe one person to take action to improve their business? Yes, probably.
And sometimes, that’s all that matters.
So get out there and publish, even if you aren’t ready. And if you want someone to celebrate with you when it’s live, drop me a link in the comments and I and anyone else reading this will celebrate with you!
My name's Claire and I’m an SEO and content strategy expert. I help startups and ambitious businesses improve their content, so that customers can find your website in search, and so that when they do, they convert.
I’m a former startup CEO, and I’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest publishers (Penguin Random House, Oxford University Press), as well as training with Google's in-house SEO team. I even built a website to attract 45k in organic search visitors/month. Drop me a line if you need help of any kind with SEO and content.
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