I’ve talked a fair bit over the last year or so about how in late 2016 we stopped taking on new SEO clients and re-homed the ones we had, essentially closing down a very nice SEO business that we’d had for about six years.
For those of you who may not know the story, here’s the long and short of it – I got bored of focusing on SEO as a topic that had to take up
brain space, the clients were not focused on “results” that mattered and I decided I wanted to do other things with my limited time. There was no, “SEO is dead” or anything like that, I just didn’t find it personally very interesting and in fact, running an SEO agency as a side hustle online business had become quite the opposite, it was an energy sucking nightmare that I had to deal with.
Before you cringe and think, “Wow, not a nice way to talk about your former clients”, let me assure you, it had nothing to do with them. They were all lovely people. I had just changed over the time we’d worked together and what we were doing for them bored me to tears. For the first half of 2017, I pretty much ignored everything going on in the SEO community and whatever changes Google was making. I was so uninterested that the idea of thinking about it nearly sent me into a coma when I look back on it.
Then in July 2017, I started helping a friend with their site and the seed of what became the “Authority Matrix” program started to form. The more I helped him with his site, the more I started to dive back into the whole SEO thing.
I started re-creating processes and methodologies for him that I’d not thought much about in a couple years and found myself interested in defining new and better ways of doing things. I started looking more closely at the tools that were available and re-visiting how I thought about doing SEO as a site owner rather than as an agency owner.
It was intellectually quite interesting again.
Over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been working on creating the content for Authority Matrix, one thing that’s jumped out at me in that process is that the type of strategies and things I’m teaching in the program assume certain SEO knowledge. In particular, it assumes a certain understanding of white hat SEO practices and strategies that I find myself brushing over during the content.
I came to this realization the other day as I was working with Zac (my son) on the site he’s building as part of his case study in Authority Matrix. As we would go through something, he would stop me and say,”Can you explain that a bit more?” or “Why do you say that?” The great thing about the way the modern education system works is that it teaches kids to be confident to ask questions when they don’t understand something. When I would gloss over a topic like “domain authority” he would stop me and say, “Hey, how exactly did they get that domain rating?”
It made me realize that I’m going to have to do a companion course to Authority Matrix that teaches the fundamentals of SEO in 2018 as it relates to building authority sites. I don’t really have anything concrete planned, but it just has become blindingly obvious that people who want to build an authority site and might not be “au fait” with SEO are probably going to need to learn that too. One thing I do know for a fact is that the current Foundation Members of Authority Matrix will get it for free when I do decide to create it – as the Amex people always say, “Membership has its privileges”.
In my mind, SEO is going through a bit of a renaissance. I’m sure there’s a bit of confirmation bias going on with that statement, but nevertheless, I do feel it’s true. Content marketing has matured now to the point where people appreciate that quality is more important than quantity and that it’s not enough just to “create great stuff” while hoping the traffic fairies magically deliver visitors.
What I’m not talking about is re-opening my SEO agency. I couldn’t think of many things worse than that actually. I’m talking about actually DOING more SEO, talking about it more and showing people what I’m doing in that area. Rather than being paid to do it for other people, I’m thinking that I’ll just do it for myself and share what I know – that seems like more fun.
It’s been a pleasant part of this entire process, rediscovering the enjoyment of something I used to find fascinating and then grew to dislike – hopefully, it continues.
In the meantime, you can expect me to talk a bit more about some tactical stuff in these blogs as it relates to SEO and such.