SEO is a mindset not a step in the process

It might sound unlikely but SEO and basic kitchen hygiene have something in common. If you’ve ever cooked food you’ll know the importance of good hygiene. You don’t use a dirty cutting board and you don’t use a frying pan full of grime and dried fat, you clean it first.

Throughout the whole process of cooking your meal you need to have good hygiene, you need to wash your hands after cutting the chicken before you start with the salad otherwise you risk getting salmonella, and I’m pretty sure that’s not something you want. Being clean throughout the process is an essential part of cooking.

What does cooking have to do with SEO?

“I came here to read about search engine optimization and how to get better at it, I’m not interested in a lecture on cooking and hygiene!”

I hear you, but in order for you to actually get better at SEO you need to understand one fundamental thing about it, and comparing SEO with hygiene in the kitchen is a very good way of achieving that.

SEO is not a step in a process, it’s a mindset

Search engine optimization is the process of making sure your website has the best possible chance to rank well when potential clients search for information in relation to what you do.

The first step is therefore to know what your target audience is actively searching for, and making sure that the content you produce actually answers those questions. Doing this is SEO. But SEO is also the act of tweaking a page’s title to make it more optimized and it’s also when you leverage browser caching to make your website load faster (that’s a complicated one, don’t worry if you don’t understand exactly what that means). SEO is everything you do in order to rank higher in the search results, it’s not one single action.

There are hundreds of different aspects of your website and your content that impacts your chances of ranking well in the search results, and you need to be mindful of all of them in order to maximize your chances of appearing at the top of the search page. This means that SEO needs to be on your agenda in everything you do.

No matter how closely or broadly you look at your digital marketing, there is no single “SEO step” in the process. Not if we look at it from a strategic point of view where you plan your yearly activities, and not if we look at it from a “I’m going to write a blog post” point of view.

There is no point in either of those scenarios where someone says “Now I just need to add the SEO, and then it’s done”.

SEO is like water that flows through everything you do, it’s a mindset, not a step in the process.

Let’s go back to the hygiene

At the beginning of this blog post I mentioned that SEO and kitchen hygiene had something fundamental in common. Both of them needs to be a part of the whole process, neither of them can be added at the end if you want a good result. I mean, have you ever tried eating a caesar salad that you just poured a pitcher of hand sanitizer on? It’s disgusting.

What do I do with this information TODAY?

If you are serious about leveraging the most important traffic source out there; organic search, then you need to gather your team and align on a new way of working.

You can’t just tell everyone that from now on they also need to think about SEO, because that would just be to drench the sallad in hand sanitizer. No, you need to change your ways of working and add an SEO mindset to the whole process, from content planning to production of blog posts and collaborations with external partners.

But Sebastian, that sounds really, really hard!

I understand that, but don’t worry, that’s why we’re here. At Nordic Morning we are experts at precisely this. We have experience in creating and implementing new ways of working for large, international organizations.

And if you don’t have a team, then I’m happy to introduce you to our big team of expert consultants, from copywriters and SEO consultants to senior developers. We’ve got what you need.