An open letter to the guy who pitched me his SEO services. Three times. In one hour.

Dear SEO “Professional” (See also: maven, guru, champ):

Within a half hour span last night, I received three times your email which basically urged me to consider utilizing your services in order to guarantee more organic search hits to my blog. That I received your email three times doesn’t exactly fill me with a great confidence about your attention to detail, but even if that hadn’t been the case, I have to say:

I think you’re full of garbage.

I spend a lot of my time day-to-day having to know and care about things such as search engine optimization, but my philosophy on it – from several years of web-related marketing experience is that yeah, there’s a time and a place for it, but I sure wouldn’t want to put all my eggs in an SEO basket. While there are certain methodologies I’ll routinely employ to boost the odds in my favor, search wise, I still am a firm believer that content is king.

If you had read my blog you would see that it is free of ads. You’d see that I rarely do reviews. That it’s not often that I align myself with brands.

Perhaps, oh guru, this would have lead you to the realization that maybe my blog is not how I make money but how I feed my creative side. Perhaps you’d have realized that whether I have one person finding my blog through search engines or a million, financially my bottom line stays the same (unless I have to hire you to make it happen. Then I’m out whatever the going rate is for quackery, and for what? Having people read my blog is nice but adoration doesn’t pay my bills).

I started blogging seven years ago when my youngest was an infant – I wrote because I had something to say, because I had time to say it, because I love to write. No one read it for the longest time – partly because I didn’t give the link to anyone I knew for the longest time.

It’s evolved into something that people read and it surprises me when I look at my stats sometimes – I’m definitely not one of the biggest and best – but considering I’d have been happy to have a handful of people reading, I’m totally okay with that.

Would I like to get cool swag and have awesome relationships with brands? Perhaps. If it made sense, if I could do so in an organic way, if it didn’t require me to start publishing crappy cookie cutter blog copy in order to feed the SEO beast.

{You can find the people who write the crappy cookie cutter blog content. Most of them are probably your clients.}

I don’t want to rely on gaming the keyword system for people to come by my blog. That gets them to come by…once? Fact of the matter is, if they don’t like what I have to say and how I say it, they won’t come back. So you can keep YOUR keywords and I’ll keep MY “poison words” and I’ll keep on doing whatever it is that I’m doing.

My way is free and makes me happy.

Your way just annoys me.

Your grammatically incorrect sales pitch states that I might not be getting enough organic or social media traffic – says who? It says I need to update my social media profile regularly (uh, which one and seriously? Bite me).

You might be better off saving your pitch for someone without a love of writing, someone who has no passion for the craft, someone who doesn’t do it for the love of creativity but for the hopes of page views and the misguided vision of blogging dollar signs in his or her eyes.

That someone isn’t me.

But thanks for playing and giving me something to vent about. I guess that counts for something.

Peace, love, and keywords,
Sarah

About sarah

Sarah is a book nerd, a music lover, an endorphin junkie, a coffee addict. Oh, and a goof ball. She writes, she tweets, and she sings off key.

Comments

  1. Preach it! 🙂

  2. High five! 🙂

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