From Meta Tags to Meta Discipline
4th April, 2025
Good SEO isn’t about rankings. It’s about influence. It requires expertise in areas traditionally considered separate disciplines, such as product positioning, conversion optimization, and policy-making. The best SEOs don’t just optimize websites. They shape how businesses operate in a search-driven world.
And that’s a problem. SEO has expanded to the point where we either take on responsibilities we shouldn’t, like fixing development issues and analytics tracking, or struggle to influence areas we should, like branding and PR. Instead of focusing on insights and opportunities, we’re stuck firefighting, fixing, and justifying why we’re even in the room.
Now, it’s going to get even harder. SEO means different things to different people. One SEO might focus on technical audits, another on digital PR, another on analytics. The skill sets, approaches, and even definitions of SEO vary wildly. How is the market supposed to make sense of that? How can hiring managers compare one SEO to another when their expertise barely overlaps?
To address this, we need to recognize that SEO is a meta-discipline, which must weave throughout an organization. It connects search behavior, business strategy, and technical execution. It’s about spotting opportunities based on data, competition, and market trends, and helping businesses make better decisions.
Because the best, most impactful SEOs don’t just write content or tweak websites. They facilitate, educate, and influence. They ensure developers build performant, crawlable sites. They help marketers understand search intent. They guide leadership on what search trends reveal about demand.
So if we want SEO to be taken more seriously, we need to stop begging for buy-in. Stop bribing teams to implement best practices. Stop fighting for scraps of influence. We belong in the conversations that shape businesses, not just the ones that fix them.
We can make that happen by changing how we present and position ourselves. The market’s understanding of SEO exists because we defined it. We taught businesses what SEO is, and we can choose to reshape that narrative. Instead of allowing SEO to be seen as a narrow, tactical function, we should actively position it as an essential strategic role that operates across an entire organization.
This is no longer about rankings or technical tweaks. It’s about understanding how search, business, and technology intersect and using that knowledge to drive meaningful change. That’s what SEO should be. That’s what we should own. We must position ourselves as strategists and consultants, not just executors. If we want SEO to evolve, we need to take control of that narrative – because if we don’t, someone else will.
