An SEO Fable: Grasshoppers Beware!

With apologies to Aesop, today’s post leans heavily on the fable he wrote a few thousand years ago, on the story of the Ant & the Grasshopper.

Therein, he tried to show the reader that there were two schools of thought on hard work and preparation. The grasshopper it seems, spent the warm comfortable summer months fiddling away their time on fun and trivial pursuits — while the industrious ant on the other hand, worked hard to store up food for the upcoming hard winter.

In the fable, of course, the winter starts and that grasshopper finds that he quickly is in trouble and asks the ant for help…and is rebuked after being told that he wasted his time and now must suffer the consequenses. Generally, this fable teaches the virtue of hard work and saving and the allied peril of wasting your time and improvidence. 

And that’s my point today, that when it comes to SEO and a practitioner’s skills, many of us are ants but there are SEO grasshoppers out there for sure!

And what do I mean?

Running an SEO firm is a difficult set of tasks, not the least of which is knowing what to do and how to do it. There are so many theory’s and hypothesises on what you should do,  must do, must not do, can try to do,  should never do that you could spend all day every day just trying to figure out what works. And for us SEO types, that’s what we did do for the first few years of building our SEO skillSets….learning what works.

Once you however, have established some empirical evidence on that set of tactics, you can then provide an SEO Campaign for a client. Most of us learned those basic set of skills on our own sites or for smaller local clients who were a part of that learning process knowing full well that as we learned, they would gain traffic and business leads.  At this point, in my mind, you are the grasshopper…you know some basics and you use them to while away the time counting on the fact that what works yesterday will work tomorrow. And yes, in some cases you are correct….but not all. Not by a long shot, eh!

However, as in all things, once that set of skills is learned and you then market them in a wider context, ie globally, you find that those skills are really basic…and you need to quickly read-learn-test-analyze and add new tactics to what “used to work fine” but now needs help and add-ons to drive new serp rankings for your clients.

And what do I mean, you ask to move from grasshopper to ant when it comes to your SEO strategies?

• You need to extrapolate on your theories and test every single item that comes down the pike at you, from an SEO standpoint.
• You need to test variables and try to determine how they will gain more serp traction while at the same time not lose any already gained ground for your clients.
• You need to add more hours to the day or more staff to the building of superior content and the acquisition of authority/trusted backlinks for clients.
• You need to remind your self time and time again, that as the SEO marketplace is a changing moving target, you need to react as quickly as possible all the while being proactive with what you already know to do!

Grasshoppers exist in every profession, and in SEO there are multitudes of them all around us. Go to any major SEO forum and read a month or two of threads, showing that tons of grasshoppers appear to ask for the shortcuts, the tips and tricks and gimmicks that most grasshoppers still think exist.

And for us SEO ants….we moved past the “fiddling” mindset of a grasshopper — and into the “ANT-NESS” of SEO via the only way we know….via hard work and dedication to learning something new every single day, eh!

Tips? Gimmicks? Tricks? There aren’t any, grasshopper….just plain hard SEO work!

Google