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Is this stupid for SEO?: Blogging about subjects not directly related to your products?
Posted by on May 12, 2021 at 1:14 amI run a company called Next-Level Artwork where we sell posters and canvas art. Naturally for an SEO strategy, you might think: Blog posts about matte vs gloss posters; interior decoration tips; fun facts about famous artists—everything you’d expect a conventional artwork site to blog about, basically.
The thing is, blogging about those subjects bores me to tears. Like, shoving my head into a meat grinder level unbearable.
What I’ve started doing is only blogging about subjects I’m super passionate about, which generally revolve around: business, entrepreneurship, self-improvement, personal productivity, time management, things of that nature.
In those blog posts I relate it to the business itself, to what improvements are being made in the business. It’s not just like “Way To Be More Productive” and there’s zero relation the company or the products leaving people scratching their heads. For example, talking about the importance of not checking e-mail or social media all day but instead batching these to one session per day — but relating it to my experience in running this business, how it’s allowed me to focus on other areas of the business that are more important, etc.
So I guess my question is, to put it bluntly: Is this fucking retarded? For SEO blog posts to have value, do they need to be the sort of “conventional blog posts” you’d expect such a company to write about? Where it’s like: “Ah yes, company X sells posters, and they’re publishing blog posts about posters. All is good.”
Because I just won’t have the motivation to write blog posts like that. I’ve tried it and it’s just agony. It takes way longer than it needs to, it’s excruciating and I’m like “When will it end?” First world problems I know, but if that’s my option, I’ll just find a different way to spend my time where I enjoy the work, instead of this grueling slog writing long-form posts about stuff I frankly don’t care about and that bores me to death.
So really my options realistically are: Take this approach, or just abandon the long-form blogging until I can hire someone to do it for me.
So my question is: Is there still SEO value to blog posts that may not be directly relevant to your products themselves, or your industry itself — but still discuss your company in a more indirect way, where it’s like: Ways we run this company more effectively; strategies that have helped us to manage our time better in running it; advice on improving your personal effectiveness, and examples of how it’s practically applied in running this company; etc.
The reason I ask is because, it feels kind of stupid. I know that I’m making them relevant to the business in those ways, but just seeing blog posts on time management & entrepreneurship on a site that sells posters & canvas art, it feels kind of dumb. And may be of dubious SEO value.
At the end of the day it’s my company and I can blog about baseball players or gay porn for all I care (what am I gonna do, fire ME?), but I’m just having doubts about whether it’s even worth taking the time to do this, from an SEO perspective, and if the posts would still have SEO value. Entrepreneurs and people seeking self-improvement advice need posters too ya know! I’m just having doubts as to whether it looks stupid, and might be irrelevant from a SERPs perspective due to the lack of 100% relevance to our products themselves.
Your thoughts? Am I a moron? A genius? Or am I overthinking this?
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15 Replies
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Generate content, get links, get traffic
Your conversion rate mayyyy be lower – but if you are passionate, write well and create good content then maybe outsource the boring stuff and publish that too
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I get search visits for various topics unrelated so why not.
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Your conversion rate is going to suck unless the blog content is directly related to your product offering. That’s CRO 101
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If you really want to write about entrepreneurship, you should just create a second business/website that offers classes or books about entrepreneurship. Use your poster company as a way to prove your expertise.
As for blogging about business on a website about posters, yeah…that’s fucking dumb.
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I don’t think there is really anything wrong with sharing. But it is really much better for your SEO to keep your content in line with your niche. I think it will narrow down the keyword focus and give you more authority for those keywords.
I mean if you sell tacos. And you also write about recipes on how to make the taco bread, thats great. Writing about people’s favourite food, that is also a good stretch. But if you sell tacos and you write about anime cartoons all of a sudden, I don’t think that will be good. Say a lot of people love your anime content, you will start ranking for anime keywords and no one will ever end up on your taco pages to buy tacos.
I am now in the mood for Tacos. God. Damn. It.
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!RemermerMe 10 hours
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What about the artwork itself, is that of no interest to write about? The subject matter, the artist, etc.
If you are good at writing other content, then certainly start an additional site about those subjects, not on the artwork site.
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I think if there’s a face behind these posts, you can use this as a way to promote your company. SEO-wise, I’m not too sure if this is a good idea.
For my clients, I’ll always make sure that the content is somewhat related to the product offering. For instance, one of my clients offers skincare items for men. One niche I create content in is men’s dating advice because I can at least relate this to keeping a skincare regimen and our niches are related in the sense that the products are meant for men.
For content that isn’t anywhere related to our niche, we usually leave that to our newsletter since those are people we know are already interested in our company.
In your case, writing about business and productivity will most likely put you up against websites that only talk about these things. Thus. Google might favor these sites over yours just because they’re sites that are in the niche you’re creating content on.
If you really don’t like creating content on, I’d recommend outsourcing to a writer who you trust, creating templates for all the niche-related keywords you want to target, and using that to automate your content creation process. It’ll take a little time to set up since you might need to critique the writer’s content or ask them to link to specific blog posts. However, once you’ve done everything, it works like clockwork.
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Woo, long read, passionate writing!
LinkedIn. Go to LinkedIn, publish your long form there, and build a network. Or do this on a Facebook business page.
What you’re doing is great for personal branding. This branding might give some branding juice to your business.SEO is intent driven, so it seems hard to connect what you’re writing to what users need. People who’ll land on your website will be confused about why they landed there, while people who want to know more about your art supplies might not find the info they need.
If you can’t do these long form posts for your business, you could always do short product highlights, create excitement about an incoming shipment of whatever, etc.
Hope you can find someone to write great highlights about them.
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In the nicest possible way I would say you need to think more about your audiences and less about what interests you.
The idea of a blog for SEO purposes is to attract visitors, as someone has quite rightly mentioned before, if you start blogging about business, entrepreneurs and so on this is more than likely going to be a different audience to that who are in the market to buy posters and you are most likely to turn off readers who see a motivational blog coming from a poster website (I would even question whether your website was hacked??), this would most likely result in either limited clicks or high bounce rate (neither of which are good for SEO).
Likewise those in the market for posters may not necessarily want to be “preached to” when all they want is a poster for their kid’s bedroom.
As others have mentioned I would separate the two and create a blog that you are passionate about and can write till your hearts content and really enjoy it, whilst keeping your poster website separate with blogs about decor design etc (if it bores you that much – how about outsourcing to companies like upwork? For a fairly cheap price you could get a copywriter to write the boring blogs for you).
However if you don’t want a separate blog and maintain what you’re doing – the only thing I would suggest and this is tenuous but could work – is to write a motivational blog and at the bottom have a link to a section on your site that is all about motivational posters and inspiring quotes – that way you can tie in the two and those reading the blog might be inclined to buy something.
But if I was you – I would separate the blog and create one purely based on your interests away from posters.
All the best
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There is nothing wrong for SEO. You can write about the strawberry, space, quantum physics, wooden toys, etc. Just add link to your site and anchor text. It is the only legitimate way to spam Google.
Many SEOs will say that is wrong because it isn’t relevant content/pages or something else about relevancy. But a relevancy is a biggest myth of SEO.
Google says, if it useful for your audience, put this link with anchor text. That’s all. Your blog isn’t spammy source because there are no manual actions. Your site have no manual actions. So, you can link your articles to your product pages.
Many SEOs do that and they have: a) trust, b) additional traffic c) better crawling d) maybe some ranking benefits.
Many SEOs deny that, but a link gives a few SEO values and minor SEO advantages. In fact, a ling can improve crawling process, help search engines to find new pages, can be a signal of trust. Google changed their link algos many years ago.
What are about site/domain signals? It depends on some factors. It can have an minor impact or can not. There is no problem or issue in many cases. Google focuses on pages, not sites or domains.
So, if you want to write about subjects not directly related to your products, just do it. SEO is a part of your marketing strategy. You can use own approach to drive relevant traffic.
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There are plenty of websites in my niche (business) that offer software and app creation services but publish all kinds of content to drive leads. Wouldn’t know how well they convert, but it’s definitely not uncommon to do.
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>Is there still SEO value to blog posts that may not be directly relevant to your products themselves, or your industry itself — but still discuss your company in a more indirect way, where it’s like: Ways we run this company more effectively; strategies that have helped us to manage our time better in running it; advice on improving your personal effectiveness, and examples of how it’s practically applied in running this company; etc.
Sounds like a pivot from B2C to B2B. I think it’s always interesting to read about things through a lens of a familiar industry, or one you’re interested in vs. some generic advice from productivity gurus lacking experience in that industry.
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Content should help or educate your ideal prospect. It doesn’t have to be directly focused on your product or service. It should be targeted at the user of that product or service.
For ecommerce websites we optimize product pages for product searches and we create and optimize content for the ideal prospect.
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I woukd say do it, but create a section for if like “other interesting reads”.. this way
1. You get seo benefits
2. You get outlet for youd imagination
3. Users can choose to gloss over it (design the UI to this effect)
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