But the truth is, most people aren’t willing to put in the work required to attain that status.
At least once a week I get an inquiry from someone that has a list of their website needs, then at the bottom, they’ll include this:
“And I also need to be first in Google.”
It’s a little hard not to chuckle when I see that. Yes, you want to be number one in Google. I’ll hit my “Google 1” button and make it so! I wish it were that easy. But we get asked this a lot because Sumy Designs ranks really well in Google, and in fact hits the #1 spot for some searches. So the reason people expect us to make them #1 is because we did it for our own site.
But it didn’t happen overnight.
There was nothing that I did in terms of SEO that made our site rise in the ranks overnight. Yes, I chose keywords I thought would be good, and I optimized a few pages. But I’m not an SEO expert, and most of that wasn’t going to really make a dent. There are literally millions of competitors for web design related keywords.
We had to work at it.
The secret to doing well with keyword placement isn’t going to be through your meta data, your optimized images, or your XML sitemap. The secret sauce is your content. And that’s how we got ourselves where we did. We started writing. And we didn’t stop.
In January 2013 we decided to perform an experiment. We committed to write a blog post every single day for a month to see if it made any change in the traffic to our site. It did. In fact, we were so inspired, we did it for two months. Then three months. And wouldn’t you know we made it six months and barely missed a day blogging.
After about six months we dropped off to four to five blog posts a week and we even started taking off on holidays. But after 3.5 years, here is the result of that hard work:
It’s not always easy.
Some days I sit here and the words pour out of my fingertips faster than I can think them. But some days I sit down at the computer and can find nothing to write about. I stare at the keyboard. I stare at my screen. Sometimes it’s just hard. But we keep doing it. Some posts are better than others. Some are just not good at all.
But we keep doing it. Because it works.
The path to the top isn’t always easy. But it feels pretty great to be able to see all the hard work pay off.
Amy Masson
Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.
Ok, thanks Amy!
Thanks for this. We struggle to write blog posts once a week! But this will inspire us to try harder:-)
Just wondering…do you also consistently post on social media (facebook, etc.)? Do you feel that also plays a role in the rankings?
Hi Laurie,
All our blog posts get shared on Facebook and Twitter and Google, but in terms of other types of online interaction, I am not that regular. For a while we were posting regularly… mostly aggregated content. We’d share posts, pictures, etc but the only difference I saw with that was that we got more followers. I don’t think it made a difference with our Google ranking.