Why I Don’t Do SEO

Well, Black Friday madness now evolves into “Cyber Monday”. And then, of course, you’ll have a bunch of these offers magically extended to last all week. Or longer. 😜

Anyway, I ended up picking up a couple of deals last week myself. Both to serve as new additions to the Concierge Toolkit. I’ll tell you about them below.

But, lots to get done this week. And on a personal note, a thing my daughter and I have been doing for the last couple months is likely to come to an end this week…. which means I’ll be in the office with less distractions hopefully this week and pushing a lot of things forward.

Sometimes, balancing family life and business is more interesting than others. 😇

Anyway, let’s dive into this week’s issue…

Why I Don’t Teach (Or Really Do) SEO

One thing I’ve never gotten particularly into when I was doing more online courses was SEO. And you may be surprised to hear that I barely spend any time actually even doing SEO for myself. It just isn’t a thing I spend time thinking about.

What most people seem to think of when they think of SEO is the act of researching and understanding the inner workings of Google’s search algorithm… then to implement certain techniques and tactics across the website to best approximate the latest guesses about what that algorithm wants in order to rank high in search and get traffic.

So, what you end up with in too many cases is people and businesses spending more time acting as if Google is their customer rather than…. the actual customer.

You’ve got people with blogs writing for algorithms instead of writing for people.

You’ve got businesses sometimes paying stupid amounts of money to “SEO Experts” to “do SEO”… usually with pretty mixed results.

I’ve heard too many horror stories about people wasting a ton of money on SEO. It is sad, really.

Plus, things are changing even more. People are using AI search summaries more and more. More and more, the classic SERP pages mean less and less.

So, truth is, I’ve always found SEO to be the wrong target. On the whole, SEO is the wrong thing to focus on.

Sure, do the basics. Basic on-page SEO basics haven’t changed much. And by all means, those thing remain important. But…

SEO is not a replacement for a solid brand. And SEO is no replacement for a real business on a solid brand foundation. SEO is no replacement for a solid relationship with customers and brand loyalty.

I’ve always said that instead of getting overly concerned with how best to feed the search algorithms…. one should spend their time optimizing for human beings.

When I sit down to write an article or create a video, I don’t spend an ounce of thought on what some keyword research tool told me people are looking for. I don’t even subscribe to a keyword research tool. 😇

Some things I do concentrate on in my own business are:

• Sending out newsletters like this one in order to keep the relationship up and continue to be helpful to you each week
• Lean in on video content so people looking for solutions in WordPress can SEE me and get a feel for me as I speak
• Keep my business as personal as possible
• Focus on quality of my services with Concierge

My strategy (if you call it such a thing) is to be a human-optimized business. To offer solid help that answers questions and problems in WordPress. Do so in a personal way. And as a result, have a brand. Have a relationship with the people who enter my world.

What I find is that this human-first strategy works more efficiently than if I were to spend a bunch of time in keyword-research tools and trying to satisfy the Google gods.

It is also easier. 😇

So, my view on SEO today is to spend a minimal amount of time on it – if any. Do the basics while you’re creating your content, but otherwise, focus on more important things.

Focus on people. Focus on making your offer rock their world. Focus on being personable. Being real. And building a solid brand based around all of that.

This Week In Concierge

A few updates for Concierge clients…

First, during the next week or two, I’m going to be installing Fatal Error Notify Pro to most websites. The idea here is that I can monitor any fatal PHP errors that occur by getting automatically notified and be able to proactively step in as needed. This is all part of ensuring all client sites are running as smoothly as possible.

Secondly, I’m going to be taking stock on any clients running the RankMath SEO plugin on my license and be making the switch over to SEOPress. If you would like to stick with RankMath, that’s fine, but you would either just use the free version (which is more than enough for most people) or get your own license.

Below, I will also be discussing a new addition to the Concierge Toolkit called Conversion Bridge. This plugin is going to make tracking conversions and events on sites much, MUCH simpler. No more complicated tracking codes. For all clients running Fathom Analytics through Concierge, I will be converting you over to Conversion Bridge. This is going to provide a significant upgrade in capabilities so we can optimize conversions across your sites.

Some other changes coming! A few I’ve already mentioned. But, all in the direction of making Concierge even better and ironing out little system issues. 2025 is going to start off strong.

WordPress Quick Bits

Competition Heats Up. FluentCommunity just launched and is getting off to a solid start. But, it now has a another competitor and that’s SureDash. SureDash is the new community plugin from the team behind SureCart, SureForms and all the others. Now, competition being what it is, people are comparing these two tools. And frankly, there’s also been some false things being said. I respect Adam, but he’s a pretty competitive guy and I personally think he’s said a few false things about FluentCommunity in order to position SureDash as the better option. Things like FC being “side loaded” and not being WordPress-native. These things are being said as if they’re shortcomings of FC. Truth is, FluentCommunity is an early stage product (just like SureDash) and the way it is built is specifically why it is so FAST. That was the point. If you want my opinion, FluentCommunity is the tool I’d go with. I like the way the team works and iterates much better.

WordPress Notes. Kyle from The Admin Bar released a little plugin called Noted! which you may find useful. It is very simple and allows you to create and manage internal notes inside of WordPress. Could be used for collaboration, reminders, etc.

Is BuddyBoss Spying On You? A concern has popped up (link to Facebook thread) about new telemetry tracking being added to the BuddyBoss platform. In fact, there’s been a notification about it but most people just dismiss it and move on. Some are claiming that BuddyBoss is now collecting site data and sending it to BuddyBoss without consent. And, it indeed is doing that. It doesn’t appear as if there’s anything nefarious here, however Buddyboss users should be aware of it and take control as needed. In BuddyBoss settings, go the Advanced section and you’ll see options for Telemetry. The default is “Complete Reporting” (which is a little shady since people didn’t really opt-in for that). I would at least change it to anonymous or outright disable it.

Say Hi To Logtivity. Interesting tool here I may consider and that’s Logtivity. This is a service that implemented full activity logging into your sites, including error logs. The cost is only $1/site/month. Now, this isn’t the kind of thing most people need, but if you’re managing a bunch of different sites like I am, this could indeed be a handy tool.

Judge Signals Support For WPEngine. The whole fiasco between Automattic and WPEngine is now a matter for the court, and WPEngine filed an injunction for relief. To quote the WPE attorney: “That’s not how trademark owners operate. That is not how you protect and enforce your mark. You don’t wait 15 years and then drop a demand for $32 million.” The judge seems to be signaling support for the WPE injunction, but said their proposal was pretty vague. You can get the more complete breakdown over at The Repository.

Conversion Bridge (This Plugin Rocks)

So, this last week, I invested a lot of money into picking up a lifetime license to a lot of websites for a plugin called Conversion Bridge. I made this investment for my Concierge clients (and myself, of course). Let me tell you about it…

Conversion Bridge is a utility plugin that is designed to integrate your website into your chosen web analytics tool and make it easy to track conversions.

The big idea here is that it is tightly integrated right into WordPress itself by it’s very nature. This makes it a simple, “no code” experience to track conversions.

See, most of the time, when you want to track conversions, things get pretty nerdy. You have to place complex pixel codes into specific pages. Or, if you’re running paid ads into your site and you want to track performance, you’re once again having to wade through your site and place tracking and conversion pixel codes in various places. It feels nerdy…. and that’s because it is.

With Conversion Bridge, these things become far, FAR simpler.

First of all, it works with a lot of different analytics platforms. This one isn’t locked tight in with Google Analytics. It works with 13 different analytics tools, one of them being Fathom Analytics which is what I use with my clients.

Most importantly, though, it is automatically tied in with a variety of popular WordPress plugins. Currently 54 of them and more to come. Which means it is brain-dead simple to track conversions in things like WooCommerce, various membership site plugins, and more. You can easily track form conversions with forms built with tools like Fluent Forms, Gravity Forms, WSForm and more. You can track events in your Learndash courses. You get the idea.

Conversion Bridge also automatically tracks customer journeys. This means you can see where people entered your site, what they did before converting.

The plugin also puts the data right where it is useful. For instance, it’s integration with FluentCRM actually places a “Journey” tab into a client’s contact profile so I can see that specific user’s journey throughout my site and what events they’ve done.

There’s also a dashboard widget that will tell me about my recent conversions and top converting landing pages.

The really cool thing is that much of this is automatic. I simple enable the options in the plugin settings and now I am getting a much better enriched set of data in my Fathom Analytics data.

I will be doing a full review of this plugin… as well as a video to show how best to get things set up. But, this plugin (combined with Fathom Analytics) is now going to be my “go to” duo for my clients on their websites.

This way we’re not just tracking traffic stats, but we’re getting actual conversion data so it is actionable.

Concierge Clients: No need to purchase this plugin as I’ve got you! In fact, for those of you currently running the default Fathom Analytics plugin for integration, I’ll probably be switching it out with Conversion Bridge because this solution is far more robust and useful.