Does SEO ruin the Internet?
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SEO has always been considered by many to be sneaky subterfuge that is deployed by websites to gain an edge in search. This reputation was likely well deserved more than a decade ago, but in recent times, many of those tactics don’t work any longer.
The things most non-marketers use to label digital marketers as spammers, like "keyword stuffing,” “white on white text,” and the dreaded redirect to a spam site, haven’t worked in nearly two decades.
The popular joke about an SEO expert walking into a bar still shared by many about SEO has not been valid for many years due to advancements in Google’s text-matching algorithms. (Try variations of any of these searches yourself, and you will see how little results will vary between these words.)
Some tactics can take advantage of a loophole in the algorithm, but nearly all of them will be shortlived and, therefore, not a strategy that sites with hopes of building sustainable traffic would use. Now that we know more about the inner workings of the Google Algorithm, thanks to the DOJ’s antitrust suit against Google, it can be assumed that anything with negative user metrics (look out for an upcoming newsletter on this topic) will quickly be discovered and demoted.
Nonetheless, this reputation of SEO harming search has persisted, so it’s worth asking:
Is SEO bad for the Internet?
To answer this question, it’s worth discussing what SEO actually does.
“SEO” is quite simply an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and that is all. It doesn’t have the word marketing in there, nor does it have the word engineering; optimization is a very passive term.
For most people who practice SEO, it is not a game of deception with users or search crawlers. Instead, it is a process of taking known rules of how search engines work and building that into a plan to improve their search visibility.
There are about 1.5 billion websites in the world today, with most of them completely unaware of their SEO missteps. Yet, search engines still have to figure out how to understand these websites without SEO.
If one wishes, there is always an option of doing nothing at all and still seeing search traffic. However, any site that wants to be more proactive and in control of its growth, will eventually need to do SEO.
SEO is more than just a baseline.
Given the scale of websites that don’t do deliberate SEO, understanding the web without SEO is a core feature of a search engine. Nonetheless, this baseline understanding is not the most ideal outcome for users.
I would even argue that Google (or every other search engine) needs SEO to catalog and organize the web correctly. SEO takes those known rules and adapts web content so search engines can efficiently process it. Without SEO, some of the Internet’s most essential destinations could even be missing from the Internet.
Brand benefit in search
The reason brands do so well in search is that users expect them to do well, so the search engines have to meet that expectation. Without SEO, it would be that much harder for Google (or all search engines) to show the brands the users expect. Even more than that, if a user did a search and didn’t see the desired brands, they would perceive the search engine to be broken and inefficient, an outcome that would be detrimental to the search engine’s business.
In this paradigm of websites needing SEO and the search engines needing it too, SEO is more like a broker than a bait-and-switch salesperson.
The role of SEO is to take the known rules of how search engines understand content and the web and incorporate them into a website’s architecture. This is the bare minimum requirement for visibility. Great SEO is truly understanding the nuances of what users and search engines seek in a website’s query silo and then incorporating that into a strategy.
The future and Generative AI
The basics stand the test of time, but the best practices and tactics are always changing because users are always changing. Great SEO in the coming years will need to account for a volatile landscape of search as generative AI is incorporated into search results. Generative AI won’t just change how the search engines work, but it will also change how users seek information and act upon it.
As I have discussed in prior editions of this newsletter, that means focusing on the midfunnel of a buyer’s journey, even if it doesn’t seem to be where most of the searchers in that vertical might be.
A world without SEO would have been what many generative AI naysayers say about generative AI today, which is replete with hallucinations and incomplete information.
Hallucinations are what happens when algorithms alone seek to publish information. When there is input from the sources - the websites in how their information is presented and shared with the world, that is search. That ideal search could not happen without SEO to guide and even train the algorithms.
The future of search
I believe the future of search is precisely what Google is building with SGE: a world where generative AI is a part of the search experience. It is available when users want a quick answer, but there will always be a menu of other websites to continue the journey. Since Google’s generative AI is indexing the web, even if SGE has quick responses, it will still be influenced by the SEO of the sites it learned from. Even more than that, the results that are visible beneath the generative responses need SEO efforts to be maximally relevant to the query.
SEO might get a bad rap, but the world would have been a lot worse off and dumber without it.
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