Laura's Tales #9 - The Queen Sacrifice
Have you ever sacrificed your queen in chess? What about SEO in marketing? How are they even connected. They're not. Or are they...?
When you play chess, you must protect the king. Fail, and you’ll get check-mated. And yet… ask chess players which piece they feel is the most important, and almost all of them will say the queen. Why? Well, she’s the most powerful.
The king is cool and the game can’t go on without him. But the queen is the real deal. She does whatever she wants, moves in whichever direction she wants, and is worth the most points.
If you watched the Queen’s Gambit series on Netflix, you might remember the iconic moment when Beth, learning to play chess in the basement with the orphanage’s janitor, makes a mistake and loses her queen. It is the first difficult lesson the janitor teaches her. “You resign now.”
Beth is new at the game and doesn’t want to, but the janitor continues. “When you lose the queen that way, you resign.”
It is a lesson that follows Beth throughout the entire series. In key moments, when she’s in lost positions on the chess board, she hears those words over and over again.
You may think that’s a lovely poetic moment in the series, but if you’ve ever taken a chess class, you’ve likely learned similar lessons. In most cases, losing your queen is bad.
“Most cases” being the keywords. Just like there are two important keywords in the janitor’s lesson. “When you lose the queen that way, you resign.”
That way.
What if you don’t lose it that way? What if it’s not a mistake, nor an accident, but a planned sacrifice?
Well, you obviously don’t resign, that’s what. And you might actually win the game. You see, there are some lovely moments where sacrificing your queen will get you an unstoppable mate.
Your opponent will sometimes choose to reject the sacrifice, especially if they’re very good at the game, near a professional level. But most people will fall for it, thinking you made some silly mistake, only to discover, a few moves later, they’re completely lost.
Is there a Laura’s tale in all of this? Or some marketing/writing/freelancing lesson? Yes.
To SEO or not to SEO?
In content writing, especially if you write blog posts and other website content, you’ll quickly learn SEO is king. Or, well, to go with this chess analogy, SEO would be the queen.
It puts your site on search engines, which means visibility, organic traffic, and potentially more clients.
And so you go in, create your entire strategy around SEO, and keywords that have a good chance to get you on Google’s page 1, and you add them in naturally (or not, depending on how good/bad you are at writing).
If you’re really good at it, you’ll keep your audience in mind and do your best to write the article in a tone that’s just perfect for them so that once they find you through a search engine they also stick around.
Believe it or not, just like sacrificing the queen will sometimes get you a winning position, so will sacrificing SEO.
What, how, why?
Authenticity over optimization
You’re writing for search engines but…you’re not actually writing for them, ya know? They’re not your audience.
So sometimes, going for that raw, genuine content, and speaking directly to your audience’s heart will be 100x better.
Maybe it won’t get you on page 1 of Google for that particular article, but it might make people click buy. You decide which one’s better.
Quality over quantity
“Write conversationally but insert this ridiculous keyword that nobody uses in a real conversation a gazillion times in the article.”
A post I recently wrote on LinkedIn about this tells me that 99% of people in content writing got a similar request at least once.
Plus, there’s an old wives’ tale that says you need to post so very often to get Google to know you exist. In other words, quality be damned, we need to post *today*. Preferably yesterday, but we don’t have a time machine.
Sometimes you have to put quality first, or your readers will run away as fast as they can.
Well, preferably you put quality first all the time, but personal experience tells me many brands still feel that publishing less is the equivalent of losing their queen in chess.
Memorable brand content over keyword stuffing
Ah, good ol’ keyword stuffing. You’d think it’d be long-dead by now. It’s not. I once worked with someone who told me, “I have so much to say on this, but I can’t seem to figure out what keywords to target with an article where I just share those thoughts.”
The topic at hand was about privacy laws and the discussion about one in particular was getting really heated everywhere. But he had decided to play it safe and stick to the SEO strategy, without sharing his thoughts.
“Well, you’re already on Google’s page 1 with so many keywords. And you have like 100k organic views monthly. What if we try something new and write an article where you share your thoughts without having a set keyword in mind?”, I replied.
Sadly, he didn’t agree right away until one of his competitors did what I had suggested.
It still had a good impact on his audience, and he got many more comments than on other articles. I still can’t help but wonder how much better it would’ve done if he’d dropped the SEO obsession a week earlier.
Look, opinion posts, controversial topics, and personal anecdotes are risky. There’s no denying that. It’s not something you should do every day. But if you want to become a brand people will actually remember, you gotta do something different every once in a while.
OK, OK, we get the why. But when do you sacrifice SEO? This is a complex answer. Like everything marketing and content-related, I don’t believe there’s a one-size-fits-all approach. That being said, I do have a few thoughts on the when.
When you’re in a saturated market
A few years ago, I used to write for a lovely health-related website. The content was amazing (if I do say so myself), but we were competing with websites like Healthline, Mednews, and Mayoclinic.
There was no way we were ever going to win that race. We tried a lot of strategies, some did better than others, but we were nowhere near the top.
So we decided to kinda drop it at least for a while. Not the writing. Just the keyword chase.
We still followed SEO principles but created genuine content without following some weird keyword strategy. We didn’t get any higher on Google.
But the newsletter subscribers started increasing. People became more interested in what we were writing, so they wanted that little notification in their inbox.
Not too long after that, we started using the newsletter to actually talk to people. We asked what topics they were interested in and created topics based on their answers. The response was amazing and the customer base grew exponentially.
Did we win the Google race? Nope. But I think the results were very much worthy of praise.
When you’re an established site
Yep, when you have high authority, and lots of subscribers/followers, you can do whatever you want (OK, OK, within reason) and people will still be around to read.
A bit like my client in the privacy sector, you have little to lose and a lot to gain.
Whenever, wherever
(we’re meant to be together *insert Shakira dance*—no? The lyrics and music didn’t automatically pop up in your head when you read those 2 words? Just me? OK…)
Unlike good ol’ queen sacrifices in chess, which must be very well calculated, sacrificing SEO for the sake of authenticity once in a while won’t lead to checkmate.
The world is not going to end because you didn’t get the green light from your SEO tools for one blog post.
Your business won’t go down because you posted an article that doesn’t align perfectly with the SEO strategy while you were testing out some new ideas.
So…did I convince you to try that queen sacrifice sometimes?
If you’re not sure how, I’m taking new clients starting in January 2025. Sooner if you’re really cool. So let’s chat.