In our daily life, we usually learn things from different spheres as in addition to work we also have hobbies (you do, right?). And as we think more about it, we start seeing analogies between those different parts of our life. Our brain just works like that: it builds stories around everything, and it’s fun!
Being an SEO specialist and having a keen interest in fitness and a healthy way of life, I noticed that search engine optimization and fitness have many similarities. They both can go wrong if you’re using the tools in a wrong way 😀
SEO? Fitness? SEO fitness?
Follow my thoughts on that! Don’t forget to add yours.
Building a plan and following it
Without a thorough plan, you won’t achieve any substantial results.
You want a body of your dream? Find a gym near you, an instructor if needed, study information on healthy eating from the influencers, think over your expectations in a month, 3 months, 6 months, etc. and start working hard to achieve your goals.
You want high rankings? Analyze the website you are going to work on, find its weaknesses and faults in terms of optimization, write down what should be done to eliminate them, set up KPIs for different periods of time, find the necessary tools and start working hard to achieve your goals.
Celebrating even minor wins
When you are starting a long way, it’s important to stay motivated all through it. So notice even minor positive changes and praise yourself for achieving them.
Lost 5 pounds? Great work! Buy new trousers you couldn’t wear before.
Increased organic traffic and sales from it by 5? Great! Free some more time and spend it with friends.
Checking things regularly
Some changes just happen, and they are not always good for you. For example, the pages of your site may lose rich snippets because of the recent update of some plugin which seems to be not even connected with microdata.
The bad news is that leaks may appear where you don’t expect to see them, and they ruin your results and can even “send you to the bottom”.
The same applies to fitness: make photos of yourself to observe the changes, count calories that you consume to make sure you don’t overeat.
Using only healthy techniques
If you want to achieve long-lasting results, you have to accept that it will take time, sometimes lots of time.
Of course, you will hear from some “experts” about quick and easy wins that can be achieved overnight. But in reality, they are not “healthy” and they will eventually come back and bite you. You might require weeks and months to recover from such super-duper techniques which will put you even further back from the point where you initially started.
Have you heard about those troubled pseudo SEO specialists who couldn’t resist putting more keywords to a page copy and showing them only to search spiders (known as cloaking)? Or those who added numerous sitewide links to their sites and sparkled it all with buying dozens of exact match domains? They all had to face penalties from Google and start building their web presence from the very beginning.
The same can be said about strict diets and different slim belts. At best, such methods just don’t do any harm but don’t help in any way (e.g. belts and the like). But, for instance, “over-the-top weight-loss” mono diets which involve eating only one type of product are extremely dangerous for your health, muscles, and metabolism. You may lose some weight, but trust me, it’s just an illusion, you will have to spend more time on recovering after such things.
As you can see, such dubious quick unhealthy techniques are not worth your time and the risks they involve neither in fitness nor in SEO.
Cutting down on some products
Yes, you will have to eat much fewer sweets and you will need to stop getting spam links. Just that simple.
Working on all aspects simultaneously
In order to build your perfect body, you will need to take care of your eating and sleeping habits and exercise regularly. If you miss one point, you will hardly see any results.
SEO is also manifold. On-site optimization, off-site factors, user-experience – all these aspects are important for a website, so you should take into account each of them.
Trying new things
Tried and true techniques are good and really help to attain goals. But one day you may find yourself facing a wall: every working tip you read has been implemented, every path has been walked on. This is known as the plateau effect. According to Wikipedia:
The best way to overcome this is to try something you’ve never did: change the website layout, rewrite the text copies completely, study what the competitors are doing.
When it comes to fitness, you can change the type of exercise, do it in the morning instead of evening, change the ratio of nutrition elements. Welcome experiments!
Anyway, each system needs a shake-up now and then. Just try to think bigger next time something that used to be effective stops working.
Keeping it going
Once your website starts to perform well in search results, your work is not over. Maintaining results may be harder than breaking the ice at the beginning. Have you ever seen organic search results graphs of websites that have been abandoned by SEO specialists? Such graphs are depressive: a slow decline is observed over time, and if one compares a post-SEO half-year with the previous period, the substantial decline will become evident. So don’t stop SEO, it’s actually a never-ending process.
The same can be said about fitness: never stop. Once the goal is achieved, it needs to be maintained, otherwise, it will slip.
Time for SEO exercise
Now when you have finished reading the previous points, you must be thinking about more spheres and their interconnection or about new SEO techniques you should try. Go ahead and try something new!
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After 10+ years in SEO, I founded MarketingSyrup Academy where I teach smart SEOs. Over 500+ people have gone through my courses, including SEO Challenge and Tech SEO Pro.
I’m also a creator of the SEO Pro extension with 30K active users worldwide.