Patience is a Virtue — Why I Needed SEO in 2018

“smartphone showing Google site” by Edho Pratama on Unsplash

I am not talking about my website before you go any further. Here I want to discuss what SEO has taught me about life and why I feel those lessons are crucial for our psyche in 2018. I am going to be simplifying things, so that SEO and some of it’s terminology are easier to understand.

So to start. SEO, stands for Search Engine Optimisation. What that basically means is that the practice of SEO is to work on websites improving various aspects to help them be found more easily on search engines. So you know when you google something, hoping to get the exact answer you need? We try and make sure that certain websites are on the first page with that exact answer. It is a reasonably new field with very few people in South Africa working in it, but it is an important one.

Now there are certain realities to the practice that most people don’t understand. First and foremost, SEO takes a long time. Most people think that if they pay someone to do their websites SEO they should be on the first page of google, for the search phrase “sport” within a week. Here’s the truth of that, a website that is any smaller than the BBC will probably never be on the first page for the term “sport”. Which brings up the second reality, you cannot aim to rank for broad searches unless you are one of the biggest sites in the world. So we have to find out specific searches that suggest that people are actually looking for what a website provides. This means that we have to help websites aim for a niche. So now let’s say someone wants to be on the first page for “sports ground in Cape Town”, then we can talk. So long as you actually are a sports ground. Which brings me to my third point, SEO is about telling the truth. You have to optimise for what is actually on the website. I cannot make a website rank for the “sports ground in Cape Town”, if that phrase and service is not actually on or relevant to the website.

Great, now we have a new sports ground that just opened in Cape Town. They want to rank for “sports ground in Cape Town”. It’s relevant and it’s refined enough that they can actually be found for it. But here’s the catch, you will be competing with Newlands, Cape Town Stadium, UCT Sports Ground and a variety of Sports Grounds around Cape Town. How long would the websites for those grounds have been online? I will tell you, many years. Which is my fourth point. Despite this, most people would still think an SEO could get them on the first page in a month for the phrase “sports ground in Cape Town”. I am afraid not.

Which goes back to the first point, in order to get a website to rank on the first page of google will take a long time. The reason for this is because it takes time for google to go through your website and to assess if it is relevant to certain searches. Another factor is how old your website is and how long your website is registered until. So you can do the best optimisation the world has ever seen, but if your site has been live for a month it still will not rank on the first page of google. There are things called google bots that need to crawl your website before that can happen and those take a long time. Google bots have to crawl trillions of websites every day in order to index a website, it only makes sense that this is a process that takes a long time.

So here are my four points in a nutshell:

1. To get a site to rank on the first page of google it takes a LONG time.
2. Know your niche. You have to stand out, one of the best ways to do that online is to aim for specific phrases and a specific market.
3. You have to tell the truth to rank. If you are trying to rank for something that you do not have on your website it will not happen.
4. With a website you are competing with thousands of sites that have been online for years. It is incredibly competitive.

Now that we have done a crash course of some important aspects of SEO, the question becomes what has this taught me about life and why did I need these lessons in 2018? Before I answer that, let me put my fellow SEOs at ease. I have not mentioned a ton of ranking factors, don’t stress I don’t ignore them in my job, they just aren’t relevant for this blog post.

I was talking to a colleague the other day about how can a website that has been live for only a few months outrank a website that has been live for 20 years. I used the analogy of exercise, I hope you wouldn’t mind if I took you on a thought experiment. Imagine you start going to gym in January next year and you meet a personal trainer at the gym that has been training for the last two years. For the sake of this example, imagine the trainer stops training as you join the gym. You are going to do the same style of training that the trainer has done for the last 2 years and you are both similar builds, with similar weights, etc. Now you have committed to go to the gym 5 days a week for six months until the end of June. So you do this for the whole January, you go 5 days a week religiously. Who would be stronger after January, you or the trainer? I would argue the trainer. After 2 months? I would argue still the trainer. After 3 months? Having done training for about 3 months myself before getting injured recently. I am quite confident it would still be the trainer. After 4 months? I would say still the trainer. After 6 months, with the trainer no longer training, then you may start to see yourself becoming stronger and after a year you would almost definitely be stronger than the trainer. Now this is naturally an over-simplification, but do you see the point I am making? You are not going to get stronger without exercise, but in order to grow stronger you have to exercise over time. You cannot exercise for two weeks and expect to be stronger than the trainer. It takes time.

We live in a society, where we can access everything now. We are obsessed with instant-gratification because everything is at our finger tips. I know I can’t stand in a SARS line without losing my mind. It is becoming more and more difficult for us to actually practice patience. Think about it, the adage of climbing the corporate ladder, do we really have any interest in that anymore? I know, personally, I would rather just start my own business and work at it till it grows. I don’t have the patience or the desire to stay at a company for 10 years to work up to being say the Creative Director. To any company that may want to or currently employ me, I promise, to still do my job to the absolute best of my ability no matter how long I work for you. That being said that element of patience is something I think we just don’t quite have anymore.

I know so many of us that have recurrent existential crises because we don’t feel we have achieved enough yet. Most people I know are under 30, there is no reason that we have to have our absolute dream job before then. If you do, all power to you, I know that is my goal. But if we fall short of that goal and get our dream job by the time we’re 40 or even later, that needs to be okay. The beauty of patience in life is that it helps us to be content with our situation.

Now I am not saying don’t work hard. Remember the trainer example? It is only by hard work that you could get stronger than the trainer within a year. What we need to be willing to do is to work hard, with very little pay off for some time. Being patient for our dream to come true. Most of us millennials grew up with the idea that we should pursue our dreams, and that is completely true. The problem was that we weren’t taught or we never decided to realise that our dreams will take hard work, resilience, patience and TIME.

I often have clients after 3 months tell me that SEO is not working for them. In truth, after 3 months they will not being seeing the results of what we have done in SEO but that does not mean that it is not working for them. We will only be able to tell if SEO is working or not within the next year. So if you are working at your dream and you’re 3 months in, do you think that it will take 3 months to achieve that? I have to tell you this, you will not achieve your dream in 3 months. It takes years of hard work. So here is a big lesson from that, do not get despondent, if you feel your dream may come true, don’t give up because you are not living it right now. Keep pushing and be patient with yourself. I could write about this forever, as I feel incredibly passionate about it, but so that I don’t keep you here too long, let me give your four life lessons that I have learnt from SEO:

1. Patience. Good things come with time. Go easy on yourself, you do not have to be a huge success before you are 25.
2. Be yourself. Being yourself is what makes you different and it is what will make you stand out. I remember being taught this while working in Radio. You have to stand out in that industry, like in SEO, and the only way to do that is to be you.
3. Tell the truth and be honest. In SEO an honest strategy for a website is what will bring the best results in the long term. I believe it is the same in life. As a side; there are stats to suggest that people now buy from businesses they trust and are authentic. It looks more and more to be the case that an honesty strategy brings the best longevity.
4. Life is competitive and that’s okay. In SEO we do competitor analysis to see what high ranking competitors are doing to try and outrank them. We also try to get industry leaders to reference our website. I feel in life we should learn from those who are successful in our respective industries and either emulate what they’re doing right or try and improve and what they are doing. Also don’t be afraid to learn from someone who seems to be a more successful competitor, why not rather see them as a potential mentor?

Finally, We are no longer taught patience because of how easily accessible many things are but what we need to teach ourselves to protect our mental health is patience. I do remember patience being preached to me as a kid from various teachers and parents but society most definitely is not teaching us it at the moment. When we are patient with ourselves, I believe, that can really help us to fend off a lot of anxiety and existential crises. When we are content to be pursuing our dream, while we’re maybe working another job to make sure we can eat, hoping that one day in time our dream will pay off, that is when I feel we will be happier.