I’ve been building sites with the thought process that content matters more than SEO. I’ve been doing that by solving peoples problems. I look for those problems by finding sticky posts on forums, reviewing Yahoo Answers questions, and reviewing search terms for people finding my site (only works after you have content).
Here are some recent graphs of sites once I started using this method:
What I’ve learned from that is that there are direct search results related to doing this strategy and I spend very little time backlinking because I don’t have to. They customers find me because I’m solving a problem for them – they look for me instead of me trying to bait Google to make them find me over someone else.
After reading what this sales guy, Frank Rumbauskas of Never Cold Call (Again), has written and listening to his webinar, I’ve realized that the crux of his premise is that by creating content on your blog or in an email or fax that you send, you’re answering a problem, fixing something that your customers care about.
The result is that you’re spending more of your time finding out what problems your customers are having, solving those problems and publishing the results so that other people who are looking for the same solutions find you and hire you. You’re no longer selling, you’re taking business as it comes to you, and it will.
Don’t get me wrong, SEO is not useless. In fact it can be often be very useful as 70-80% of all traffic is organic vs. paid. I make part of my living from SEO web design, but I also make part of my income from affiliate marketing. Those are somewhat in juxtaposition as I make money from people who want more organic results and from people buying ads that display on my sites.