SEO is no longer enough
1st December, 2023
As ever, SEO seems to be going through an existential and identity crisis. It’s clear that Google (and others) are continuing to reinvent what a “search” is, and they’re continuing to change the relationship between searches and publishers in the process. As the internet fills up with near-infinite amounts of derivative, generated content (thanks, SEO industry), Google is understandably becoming pickier about what they crawl, index, and show to users.
It’s no longer enough to produce content, get links, and have a strong technical foundation; that’s not even going to get you indexed in many verticals. And if you do get indexed, there’s no guarantee that your content will turn up on any of Google’s surfaces. or send any traffic to your website. Ouch.
So, what do we do? As a discipline which essentially produces content (which Google no longer wants or needs), chases coverage (as the traditional PR industry outperforms us as the role of websites and links diminishes), and improves websites (which play an increasingly passive role in Search), what do we become?
I think we have a few practical options before we cast ourselves into irrelevance. We can evaluate our content marketing machines with a more critical eye (using surveying, gathering feedback, and speaking with our users) to validate that they’re actually helping audiences, and not just trying to sell to solution-aware buyers. We can invest our link-building budgets in training our call centre staff, improving user experience, and ensuring that our websites are accessible. We can make sure that our senior execs are media trained, on hand to give interviews and quotes to the media, and that they’re producing short-form video that shares and showcases their expertise. We can give away our best resources for free, to win hearts and minds higher up the funnel. We can spend our energy on actually improving the products or services that we’re responsible for the success of, instead of just trying to artificially promote them.
We can choose to stop being a discipline whose job is to produce content, get links, and improve websites. Nobody’s imposed those constraints on us, except for ourselves. We can be an industry that improves how helpful businesses are to their audiences. We can use our unique breadth of domain expertise to authentically and legitimately improve the web, one website at a time; in a way that’s probably easier, and more impactful, than trying to get yet more derivative, generic articles ranking. Search doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game.
