Through my recent experience doing SEO for a large company, I finally learned to compromise and thus make the keyword list look nice, even though it meant wasting time and being flashy.
Before I talk about this project, allow me to use the case I shared earlier about a Ukrainian client as a comparison.
Why could I keyword optimize tens of thousands of words of texts on his website without charging extra for it? Besides the extra motivation he gave me by finding me through this blog, another important reason was that he was my direct client and I was able to cut out a lot of tedious and unnecessary processes.
Don’t forget, as I described on the About page, I first learned about SEO as I created my own websites, and that’s the fundamental difference between me and a lot of other Chinese SEOs who take for granted the process their employers require and don’t think much about why they’re doing it. I, on the other hand, am used to getting straight to the point and spending my time on the most important things.
Going back to the SEO project I was working on for this large company, I frankly had many arguments with the project manager, but unfortunately, I didn’t get any positive response from him to my queries; he just repeatedly asked me to follow the process, and his new process made the original cumbersome process even more formalized.
Let me give you an example to simply illustrate the rationale. Imagine we want to promote a niche fruit, such as “lychee”, in a new market through SEO. I know it’s probably not a good idea to promote the fruit through SEO, but this is just an example to make it easier to understand.
To explain to my audience what lychee is, I might use keywords like “Chinese fruit”, “sweet fruit”, “round fruit”, “peeled fruit”, “tropical fruit” and “summer fruit” apart from “lychee/litchi” itself. (Note: I haven’t done any research on fruit keywords and I don’t know what the search volume is for these terms, just a few examples, so please don’t be serious in this regard).
I went through meticulous research, including the use of Baidu keyword tool, internet search, competitor research and so on, to determine a few of the above keywords.
However, unfortunately, all the words I chose did not have a high search volume in this new market, and my project manager told me that the words I chose were not correct and gave his “insight”.
What keywords did he develop? “Food”, “fruit”, and even “dessert”.
My first reaction to this was one of bewilderment.
First of all, “food”? Are you kidding me? Using such a broad keyword? But the project manager told me that this term has a high search volume (of course it’s high, don’t even have to think about it). But are you sure it will rank? Or that it will really bring you customers?
Secondly, “fruit”? God, all the keywords I wanted to adopt contain “fruit”, that’s because the property of “lychee” is “fruit”, I cannot even get rid of it! But the project manager does not think so, he stubbornly believes that the “fruit” should be listed separately, I think the reason is obvious, the search volume of “fruit” on Baidu is very high, which will make the keyword datasheet look beautiful so that the client will be satisfied.
But will customers really be satisfied? I doubt that if the client is not a fool, he can only be satisfied because he thinks too deeply about SEO…
As for the last keyword “dessert”, it is even more outrageous. The only thing it has in common with “lychee” is “sweet”, so would a person searching for “dessert” change his mind to buy “lychee”? Well, there might be a chance…
The above example is my fiction, but it truly reflects my dumbfounding situation in this project.
I had to embed these keywords that surprised me in the meta titles, meta descriptions and even the body texts of the website. Seeing colleagues from other countries happily implementing the recommendations of the PM, I even suspected that my SEO experience over the years has become a stumbling block for me.
In short, it does not seem to be difficult to make SEO deliverables look beautiful. In this project, the work of SEO seems both difficult and simple to me. Just follow the established process of the project manager, find some popular keywords, and then put them into the text, everything will be fine and everyone will be happy.
But, is this really what the customer wants? If so, is SEO still necessary?