Are you doing Jenga SEO?
Mature SEO is very different than early stage; SEO is not a party game.
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It’s easy to target triple-digit growth in the early stages of SEO because the baseline is so low. At the outset, a website may receive just dozens of clicks, but by adding a few pages of content, that could easily turn into hundreds of search clicks, especially if the competition is light.
Many marketers and even SEO practitioners are very familiar with this early stage and judge all future SEO growth with this lens, but that is completely unfair.
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Mature SEO is not early stage
The baseline gets bigger as SEO matures, and triple-digit growth becomes a distant memory. One of two things happens: the team gives up or starts practicing what I have recently termed Jenga SEO.
If you are unfamiliar with the popular party game of Jenga, you start by building a tower out of 54 blocks. Then, each person takes a turn removing a block and placing it on the tower. The person who causes the tower to fall loses.
The game's skill relies on finding a block that, when removed, will not destroy the tower's structural integrity and then gently placing the removed block on top of the tower so that the foundation isn’t rocked.
SEO is not a party game
I have seen SEO done precisely this way at larger companies with aggressive SEO growth targets. There is a foundation of growth drawn from years of good work, but to grow traffic, the SEO team needs to discover where they can pull levers without blowing up the site. As the years progress, they take even more risks—sometimes completely unaware of risks taken in the past until it all implodes.
There are many notable examples of major sites that had years of great traffic until one day, the tower fell.
Examples of this might be in creating too many pages. A company might discover that 100,000 pages drive more traffic than 10,000 and assume that a million pages will drive even more. This formula might work until one day it doesn’t, and traffic starts to decline.
Another common way is that a traffic base is destroyed on smaller sites with content topics. An SEO manager might see significant traffic coming from a single keyword and decide if they slice that keyword another way they could double traffic. That process might work, but all the prior efforts get destroyed on the fourth cut as each page competes with the other.
The analogy to the Jenga game stops here, though. In the party game, when the tower falls, the exact block and moment that caused the collapse are known to all. In SEO, there may be a specific time and cause, but the beginning of the collapse doesn’t reveal itself until the trend is already set.
The opposite extreme: giving up
While Jenga SEO can be extremely risky, the opposite is doing nothing and just letting SEO happen.
This giving up is because, with frequent algorithm updates, that baseline could even be repeatedly reset, and the goal might become to maintain the status quo, or worse, there’s no goal at all. SEO starts being measured by activities and tickets closed rather than actual progress.
I firmly believe that all marketing initiatives need defined goals, and if the metrics need to be adjusted, they can, but there shouldn’t be an automatic assumption that the status quo is good.
Doing nothing has a cost, too
A natural progression to SEO growth is tied to the overall growth of search as a channel, so a status quo goal is accepting negative growth. (Think of this like putting money under a mattress rather than an interest-bearing bank account. The cost of inflation on that money means you lost money.)
For starters, try to determine what the natural growth rate for an industry might be. You can use brand, competitors or Google Trends to determine that number. Once you have established that baseline, you can add a desired growth rate.
5% might be reasonable for a large baseline, while 10% is a stretch goal. Even though it doesn’t seem like a large number, for context, most governments strive for less than 5% GDP growth every year.
Grow without Jenga
Like building an actual tower, growth can be reinvigorated by expanding the foundation. This can happen by adding new products, building new brands, or even launching into new language translations. (Note: don’t just machine translate a website; you have to begin serving that market for translation, not just be another Jenga block.)
With these new avenues for marketing, you start from square zero, where you can again see triple-digit growth for some time before you again face the choice of quitting or playing Jenga.
However, even new products need to have an actual goal; developing actual forecasts is helpful for these avenues. If you have been subscribing to my newsletter for a while, you will have read my recommendation on how to build a TAM forecast, but if you are new here, definitely check it out.
Forecasting growth
Using a TAM forecast allows you to anchor to a reasonable growth expectation by tying actual acquisition to a metric like market penetration. Even when it comes to market penetration, the same elements will be at play where there is an upper limit of growth in a competitive market where penetration stops growing exponentially. When this happens, you again cycle back to expanding the base with new products.
One final note is that with all growth, a finite amount of new users could potentially be acquired from specific channels, regardless of whether those are paid or not. Spending significant sums on paid search will likely cannibalize organic search growth, and it is possible that social media campaigns could also have that same effect.
Widespread exposure and retargeting on social media could convert a user through that channel when they might otherwise have converted on search; social media just pulled that conversion earlier.
The best way to stop playing Jenga SEO is to have a long-term strategy that has specific actions to achieve those strategic goals. Jenga SEO happens when you are just probing for different blocks to insert into a plan.
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The "too many pages" thing is huge. Content debt is a major problem, particularly with smaller publishing outfits. People forget that unless you're writing about topics that truly don't change (or don't change very often), there's an inherent maintenance cost associated with each new page you write. Images, statistics and citations all have to be updated and updated manually, unless you're able to make changes to things like statistics or rates dynamically. And if you have a small team to begin with, now you have to weigh up the opportunity costs of updating what section over another section.
I've seen this happen again and again: especially now as many sites with reams of unhelpful content built up for years and years have been battered by the HCU and other algo updates. Recovery ends up being an impossible task because you've got a small team (or worse, one person) who has to weigh the opportunity cost of updating all that content (or choosing sections on it to work on) vs. whatever else it is they're tasked with and have to work on.
Have a plan in place for maintenance and take that into account with respect to future-casting resources BEFORE you try to blitzscale content publishing and compete with the big guys.