Some progress on SEO
by Rahul PandeyI published a post about tech company layoffs on the Taro blog 2 days ago. It immediately got indexed by Google, and then pushed in thousands of peoples Discover feeds (28K to be exact).
The traffic we got from the Discover feed yesterday was more than the past 3 months combined 🤯 Take a look at the spike in our search traffic:
A few hypotheses on why this blog was so impactful relative to dozens of other posts on the Taro blog:
- The post covered something happening right now in the news, explicitly mentioning the layoffs happening in the past few days. News always has
- The post contains a YouTube embed from a video on my channel that did really well (> 100K views). Perhaps Google interprets this as a positive signal? Or at least a signal that it should this page should be indexed faster.
- The post offers both an explanation of current events, along with actionable advice about what to do. So I imagine retention on the article was relatively high.
We kept hearing that SEO is a long game which takes 6+ months before you see tangible results. But the above example shows there are at least a few instances where results are much more immediate.
The question now is, how to replicate this success...
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Interesting, thanks for sharing!
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We kept hearing that SEO is a long game
I am starting to think that nowadays things are changing so fast that SEO is a short-term game, where you have to constantly publish the right things at the right time and hope that the algorithm likes you. Not only that, but more and more the freshness of content is used as a strong metric when ranking content.
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Google definitely cares a lot about freshness. The challenge is that these articles generally don't provide durable value for your audience over time.
So we're trying to weigh the approach of newsworthiness vs longer-term articles which target a keyword.
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Just out of curiosity. What Taro offers that I can't get on one of the many platforms out there like Udemy, Coursera and even YouTube, where you can find such courses taught by experts?
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- Structure and a point of view on what should be learned has a lot of value
- There are experts on Taro (primarily FAANG engineers + directors) who are not on other platforms
- Taro attracts a distinct group of people which makes the community quite valuable
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