Peg Fitzpatrick, a prominent social media strategist and author, approaches the role of SEO in content creation by emphasizing a "social-first" or "social media optimization" (SMO) mindset. Rather than focusing on traditional SEO tactics to "game the system," her strategy is centered on creating high-quality, valuable content that people genuinely want to engage with and share.

Here's a breakdown of the key elements of her approach:

1. Content Quality and Value Over Quantity:

Focus on the audience: Fitzpatrick's core philosophy is to create content for people, not search engines. She believes that when you create great content that is educational, entertaining, or inspiring, it naturally gets shared and links back to the original source.

"Write good shit": A quote she attributes to Guy Kawasaki perfectly encapsulates her viewpoint. The priority is to produce a single, excellent piece of content rather than a high volume of mediocre posts.


Problem-solving and relevance: Content should be solution-oriented and address the pain points or curiosities of the target audience.

2. Social Media Optimization (SMO) as a Priority:

SMO vs. SEO: While she acknowledges the importance of SEO, she advocates for SMO as a more organic and sustainable approach. She defines SMO as using social media to build your blog and online presence.


Community building: She emphasizes building a valuable community and engaging with high-quality people and companies. This social engagement naturally leads to shares, mentions, and links, which are a strong signal to search engines.

Strategic sharing: Fitzpatrick encourages a thoughtful approach to sharing content across different platforms, tailoring messages for each audience and using different formats (e.g., video, images, carousels) to maximize reach.

3. Optimizing for Discoverability within Content:

Visuals are key: She is a strong advocate for creating high-quality, branded images and visuals for every piece of content. She advises using keywords in image file names and alt tags to help with image search.

Strategic use of keywords: While she avoids "keyword stuffing" and other outdated SEO tricks, she does recommend using keywords in social media profiles and content to help with discoverability. This is about making it easy for the right people to find you.

Proper content structure: She suggests using formatting like bullet points, headings, and subheadings to make content easy to read and scannable for both humans and search engine crawlers.

4. The Role of Relationships and Repurposing:

Influencer marketing: She recommends referencing and citing influencers in your content to make it better and to build relationships, but she cautions against doing it solely to get a share.

Content recycling: Fitzpatrick is a proponent of repurposing and transforming existing content into different formats (e.g., a blog post into a video, a podcast episode, or a series of social media posts). This extends the life of the content and helps it reach different audiences on various platforms.

In essence, Peg Fitzpatrick's approach to content creation is a modern take on SEO. Instead of a technical, "behind-the-scenes" process, she views it as a natural outcome of creating exceptional, shareable content that builds genuine connections and a loyal audience.