As a blogger, which is more important to you, winning search or winning readers?
Quantity or quality? Spiders or readers? Left brain or right brain? Classical or Romantic?
Less filling or tastes great?
Some of the authorities in our blogging community believe quantity is more important. That as bloggers, it’s more important to just throw up as much as you can and see what attracts Google’s attention.
“Don’t worry about the quality,” one Spiders-oriented blogger told me. “Just get up as much as you can, as fast as you can. Spelling and grammar aren’t that important.”
I shuddered involuntarily.
“I don’t worry about search,” said a Readers-oriented blogger. “I don’t pay attention to SEO, keywords, backlinks, or any of that. I just make sure I write good stuff, and the readers will come.”
It works too.
Both are experts in their field, and are widely sought after as speakers and consultants in the social media and blogging realm. But the Readers blog has a much bigger social media footprint. He’s got more Twitter followers (18,000 vs. 1,200), more blog readers, higher Technorati rank (1526th and 598 auth. vs. er, none), more readers (approx. 50,000 vs. 7,000 via Compete.com), but fewer Google hits (84,000 vs. 44,000).
(I emailed my friend the Readers blogger as I was writing this post, and he told me he doesn’t pay attention to numbers at all, and wasn’t that concerned about them.)
The results are rather telling. Quality is winning out over quantity, readers are winning out over spiders.
Tastes great is beating less filling.
The problem is, you can write for spiders and search all day long, but if people don’t like what you have to say, they’re not going to stick around, let alone come back on a regular basis. Just because they showed up once doesn’t guarantee they’ll show up again. That’s where good quality writing comes in.
You could argue that it takes search to bring a person in and then hook them with good writing. But there are so many other ways to bring them around: Twitter, Facebook, speaking opportunities, networking, business cards, etc.
As a writer, I’m also more concerned about readership than, well, spidership. I’m not that concerned about winning search, because I write about a number of esoteric topics. However, I occasionally get lucky. On my Laughing Stalk humor blog, I have seen some pretty weird results.
- I once won search for “animal methane problem” out of 30,000 results, and topped out at 7th for “animal fart gene” out of 17,000 for 9 months or so. Results: 2 – 4 visitors per week during those 9 months.
- I beat the original “Suite Talk with Peyton Manning” website, where you could get customized greetings to you from Peyton (they got 2nd). Results: Big fat zero. Who wants to read about the commercial, when you can see the commercial.
- I’m currently second for “it’s in my raccoon wounds” out of 135,000 results. I held first for a few years, for a post in 2005. Results: I still get 1 – 4 visits per week for some variation of “raccoon wounds.”
The net result of this? About 3 – 8 visits per week on two rather weird and unrelated topics. But if I tried to build a readership off of this, I would have to write about a whooooole lot of weird stuff and win a series of long-tail searches before I started gaining traffic.
That’s why I do a lot better by focusing on writing, rather than writing a bunch of stuff as quickly and sloppily as possible.
Bottom line: anyone who’s interested in building a blogging following needs to devote more time and energy to their writing than their search engine optimization.
@Josh, I agree completely. As a professional blog writer, I DO have to be concerned about keywords and phrases for my clients, and I make sure I follow all the rules of the trade.
However, I have to balance that with the requirement of getting readers to not only read the whole post, but come back for future posts.
I have some clients that give me the leeway to sacrifice an additional keyword for the sake of quality, and others who are willing to sacrifice quality for the sake of the keyword. It’s important to know which client wants which side, and to strike that balance as often as possible.
Great article. I appreciate your argument and you make some very good points. (I’ll be honest upfront and say that I do work for an SEO) I think the best answer is write for both. There may not be value in ranking for random blog topics or phrases, but ranking for keywords your target audience is using is hugely beneficial. Now, that doesn’t involve throwing crap on the wall to see what sticks, but it’s not ALL about the readers.
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