A lot of us SEO’s pride ourselves in years of training and experience. Some of us had gotten through the toughest times in SEO with dozens and dozens of campaigns that had been brutally eaten alive right in front of our eyes.
But what is inspiring (but can be greatly infuriating for a lot of SEO’s) is that there are people out there that are really good at actually optimizing things online without any sort of formal training.
It all comes down to the basic understanding of how your audience think.
Back in the 60’s, Chevy was in the lead in the whole automotive game in America with their cars the Impala, Chevelle and the Nova. Chevy got all 3 categories covered here, the Full size car (Impala), Mid-sized (Chevelle), and the Small sized car (Nova).
So in 1964, Ford unveiled the world’s first “Pony-car”, (an entirely new category) the Mustang. They strategically used that name and all the imagery related to it on all of the advertising material.
You know, horses running in the canyons, trippy swirly graphics 60’s kids liked. In fact, baby boomers loved it so much that in its first day, 22,000 Mustangs were sold. Everyone was enamored by all of this to the point that Chevy copied them and released the Camaro.
This says a lot on how a product was advertised, how a company targeted and understood their targeted audience and hence, potential buyers.
You know you’re doing something right if your competitor is already copying what you’re doing.
One other good example is every news article’s favorite villain, Pewdiepie.
Now, at this point it’s literally safe to say that he may now know a bit about optimizing online content. But remember that back in the day, he was just a normal kid from Sweden who played a few games on YouTube.
Anyone can become famous on YouTube, but because of the fact that he decided to go and make videos of games that no one had ever tried yet at the time, he quickly grew his channel.
There were a few bad years for him too, but all that bad events were slowly and painfully paid back through the years by him doing good deeds such as being involved in charity and filming a few Book reviews every once in a while.
But one of the biggest and most recent reason why he’s good at optimizing online (while not being an SEO) is his recent “battle” of sorts with T Series- an Indian YouTube channel that had amassed almost seventy plus million subscribers in a short period of time.
While it became sort of a meme, there was a moment where, everyone on the internet was subscribing to Pewdiepie just to beat T Series. In return, T Series gained exposure and also a lot more subscribers. Pewdiepie not only got up to 80 million subscribers, but he also helped an unknown channel gain more as well.
In our side of the ocean, there are some that are closer to “our kind”. Online sellers that utilize ample amounts of content to describe the products they’re selling tend to get more interactions and more potential buyers. Those that use mobile apps to sell are also at a greater edge. Without reading about it on any of our favorite SEO blogs and news sites out there, they know for a fact that more and more people are going mobile. This means that the attention is right there on their phones. That’s where you need to sell. Once you understand that, you’re already doing it. You’re optimizing yourself basically.
Lastly, a very good example can be seen on the film Chef. We’ve covered this before here on our blog and even though this is a film, there’s no doubt that many small businesses out there had tried to use Twitter to gain a following. Even YouTubers do it.
So to answer the question, in a way, yes you can technically optimize things online without knowing SEO itself. #EasyPeasy
But if you really are interested, start reading about SEO online right now. Who knows, you could be the next successful business online.
