What SEO Taught Me About Losing Weight – My Personal Story

Disclaimer: This post is more of a personal story, and might not be what you are looking for. I would love for you to read it, but I would understand if this is not your type of post. If that is the case, have a good day.

I got comfortable! When I met my wife what seems to be an age ago now, I fell into a very comfortable way of living with little exercise. I then moved to Hatfield, for a job and everything changed. I had given up football, which was huge for me as I was quite decent at it and it is a sport that I love and continue to do to this very day. After a while of living in Hatfield, things started to get difficult, I stopped all exercise and started to eat crap food including takeaways on pretty much a regular basis. Whilst I was there I put on 3 stone, now that is hard to admit but food became a comfort.

After a year, I moved in with the wife in our very first house and things got a little better. I started bootcamp which was every Saturday, and I enjoyed it, unfortunately I got injured and it started to pitter out. Things then went back to how they were, eating and not much exercise.

Fast forward three years, and not much had changed. I had threatened to lose weight for a long time but never kept to it. That was until I saw a good friend of mine lose some weight in a short period of time, and how it has changed his life around.

You are probably thinking what the hell has this got to do with SEO. Well, so far it hasn’t. What I had to do to was have a strategy of how I was going to lose weight and this is where my SEO background came in.

Long Term Strategy:

Although clients want results instantly, and on occasions this can happen, the majority are long term plans to achieve sustainable growth and stability when you reach your targets.

This is the same with weight loss. We’d love to lose all your weight in a couple of weeks, and I am sure it is possible. But is it sustainable? Is it healthy? Will it stay off? In most cases its a no to all of those questions. Don’t set a date to lose by, just ensure that you plan what you are going to do to achieve your goals.

Set Goals, Achievable Goals:

We want to be number one on Google for our most competitive term, increase traffic by 200% and revenue by 100% and we want it in 6 months. Sound familiar? Yup, I thought so. Managing expectations of your client, and what can be achieved with the budget that is allocated and the timescales given is the first part of a successful campaign.

To me, this was the biggest thing that I had to think about when I started to lose weight. Where did I want to get to. Once I knew that, I had to break it down into manageable chunks otherwise I would see the target as too big, unachievable and therefore more than likely break my resistance at some point.

Think big, but break it down into more realistic micro targets.

Multiple Tactic Strategy:

You are often telling your clients that you need to come at the project from multiple angles, especially when link building as it creates a more natural profile. Weight loss is no different!

You need to manage your diet (on-site optimisation) and eat well, but more importantly you need to get active and with more than one type of exercise. I have seen many people start with a single exercise, then just get bored of it and stop. This defeats the objective. Back in January I started Boxing twice a week and Spinning once a week, and haven’t looked back.

Boxing is amazing for fitness and works all parts of your body, whilst spinning is just like going out clubbing, but instead you are on a bike. As well as those two exercises, I try to throw in a short run a week (I hate running) and a game of squash. These are all different types of exercises and only running is where I do it on my own and need that extra motivation. Class based exercise is the best for me as I can feed off other people and my competitive nature means I want to beat them, burning more calories in the mean time.

Don’t stick to a single tactic, it won’t work on it’s own. You need to attack the project from all angles and ensure you are running a 360 degree project.

Measure, Refine and Optimise:

This one is obvious on both counts. We are constantly measuring our efforts to see if they are working. Where they are not working then we are refining what we do to make sure that we can tweak the project.

Now I get a little obsessive over this and weigh on a daily basis, but I think that way I can work out whether I eat a little more today, or I need to cut back to get into line. It’s one of those things that you need to do it as much as you need.

You might think, this is all obvious, but isn’t SEO? Create good content, generate links and have a good website? Obvious right! Well as of last night, these key points have helped me achieve my first target. I have lost 1st 13lbs in 4 months. 🙂 Although a long way to go, I am really happy that I have got this far and feel a lot more confident. Thanks for reading, now on to the next stage!