Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog

Chapter 12: Life After Google Is Now: 9 Pieces of Advice on How a New Site Can Succeed Without Search

By Stephen Croome

Editor's Note: After producing print content for 170 years, Illustrated London News finally launched one of its print publications online—with Social, not Search. In this post, which was originally published on The Moz Blog on Nov. 8, 2011, Stephen Croome gives us the inside scoop on this groundbreaking strategy, which proved to be as successful as it was risky.

PODIUM is the magazine with “an intelligent view of sport” (http://www.thepodiummagazine.com). Our major articles are in-depth interviews with sports stars, our commentary is from globally renowned pundits, and we often do our own photo shoots. Cover stars so far have been Usain Bolt and Frankie Dettorri. Other articles have focused on golf, F1, the All Blacks, horse racing and the 2012 Olympics.

On the face of it, that sounds like an SEO's dream—rich, unique content that search engines love. It's a pity that it did not help us one little bit.

Was I going to get search engine traffic for “Usain Bolt” on a brand new website? Enough to beat his own website, his sponsor, Puma, the BBC, or The Guardian? Not a chance.

So I decided to abandon the un-loyal scraps of long-tail Search and design for Social instead.

This is the tale of what I did to grow online traffic for PODIUM Magazine when SEO wasn't a viable option.

What Does Designing For Social Mean?

 We had a clear strategy to leverage Social from Day ...