Back in part 1, we got as far as saying “SEO today means content marketing, and content marketing is dominated by Forced ARTificial Scarcity, or ‘farts’.” Today, we’re going to talk about why that’s important and what it has to do with relationship building.
May the Farts Be With You
Forced artificial scarcity implies that the scarcity in question — in this case, the limit of ‘top few spots on Google’ — are being artificially forced upon us. That’s not technically true; clearly, there are in fact only so many results on the front page of any one Google result. The ‘force’ in this equation is the algorithm Google uses to decide what of all of the content being created every day should show up for each of the 5 million or so searches that will get entered that day. If you’re a content creator, the chances you have of getting any appreciable eyes on your content is infinitesimally small unless you get lucky enough to ‘go viral’.
That Means Content Marketing is A Pretty Tough Game
Google started forcing everyone into content marketing as the Penguin update began to devalue or even penalize almost every other backlink building technique that SEO types were using. The problem being the same as the PPC game, only slightly different: as competition increases, the chances of your backlink being valued enough to meaningfully impact the SERPs for the page you linked to decrease. The more content there is, the more picky Google gets to be, and the more jawdroppingly awesome you have to be in order to be noticeable, much less significant.
The difference being that where PPC competition increases Google’s profit, content marketing competition doesn’t, so there’s little reason for Google to do anything about the ‘problem’ of content competition. If you pay for ten thousand dollars worth of high-quality content and you lose out because someone else happened to hire a well-known blogger whose name on the post automatically meant higher SERPs results, well, you know that SEO isn’t a sure thing in the first place, right?
Let’s get back to Detroit.
When the Detroit economy collapsed, the people who did the best were the people with personal ties to their vendors, customers, and so on. That’s because they didn’t have to rely on trying to pay for advertising out of their dwindling budgets — they already knew the people they could depend on to come in and buy things. With competition getting overwhelming, Detroit SEO experts are going to have to rely on the same trick.
How is that going to work? Next time…
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