When we were young, we all wanted to sit at the adult’s table. But we couldn’t, often, because of our behavior.
Growing up, we often thought we were cool, but we weren’t. Look back at your past. There are probably photos or things you did that you find questionable today.
This is exactly how we SEOs should be looking at our work. SEO has grown up a lot; we SEOs didn’t.
Our mindset is a problem when tackling challenges like needing a strong brand or satisfying users the most.
❌ What we do:
Faking first-hand experience and looking for things we can leave out “because Google cannot measure that.”
Buying (terrible) links (no one clicks), a practice that will be sketchy.
This is the wrong approach.
✅ What we should be doing:
Proving our experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Creating the best content possible that is worth linking to or mentioning.
To finally grow up, we have to look into the mirror. We have to change.
If you are pressed on time, here’s a quick rundown of what I suggest you should start doing today:
Embrace change as an opportunity to grow by making yourself familiar with it and turn obstacles on their head.
Do what is rational, logical and repeatable, study the Search Quality Rater Guidelines (SQRG) to understand what Google wants and invest in preparation, not prediction.
Stop cheating or manipulating and start building something extraordinary. Start taking responsibility for your actions and stop blaming others for your failures. Save your energy to fight for positive outcomes, instead of wasting your energy on a negative candy rush.
Communicate, understand and execute SEO the right way: As a growth engine, leading to limitless growth, not marginal improvements. Favor building over optimizing and fixing. Find your real competitive advantage and don’t buy into snake oil, cookie-cutter strategies or get-rich-quick schemes.
Disclaimer: This is not a purely tactical guide. My goal is to make you think. Motivate you to ask yourself tough questions and provide you with the necessary mindset to fill out the shoes of adolescence. If you get one good thought from this I’m more than happy.
Let’s get into the trenches: This is how we grow up!
Embrace change as an opportunity to grow
When we were children, we didn’t want to accept that change was inevitable. As we grow up, we realize it’s much easier to accept the world for what it is than to strive for what it should be.
“You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.”
– Oliver Burkeman, “Four Thousand Weeks”
The same should apply to our SEO mindset.
Change can be old tactics no longer working (like putting white text on a white background; I only mention this because some website owners still do this today) or new things appearing on the horizon, like generative AI.
Many of our SEO playbooks are outdated, and forces are pulling on us to change. Here are two examples:
We often don’t have a crawl budget problem, but an indexing problem
Indexing is becoming harder.
From what we know, the size of Google’s index seems to be more or less static (about 400 billion documents). Due to AI, we are:
Producing more (good and bad) content.
The bar for content quality has a new, higher baseline.
More content of a higher quality baseline vs. same index size = it’s harder to get indexed.
Google is allergic to technical issues and low-quality content.
Google’s fierce changes in ecommerce searches
Google is under pressure to become a shopping engine.
As a result, Google renovated the SERPs for commercial queries.
In 2023, Google started to push a new feature: product grids.
Categorized as “Merchant Listings,” these grids appear in commercial searches at Position 1 more and more often.
Based on my research for German SERPs, depending on the industry, product grids appear in position 1 between 15-45% of the time.
Thanks to some research done by Kevin Indig for the U.S., we know Google changed the rate of them appearing in Position 1 more often than in Position 3 around March 2024.
If your domain doesn’t play a role in product grids but your competitors do, you are in for a tough time.
The solution: Reframing problems as opportunities
Problems are what make life worth living. A problem can be reframed as a challenge or an opportunity. The cards are shuffled again, doors are opening up, and we are all new to these things.
Here’s a practical reframing example from a talk by Carrie Rose I heard this year:
😐 You are an ecommerce shop and lack authority in your niche
😒 The ranking domains are strong digital publishers, duh
🤯 Instead of putting your head into the sand, you can put the obstacle on its head
💡 Don’t try to beat them, join them
🤔 How? By giving them content they don’t have that is worth linking to
🔎 Example: Internal searches showed an extreme increase in searches for White Vans
📣 They figured out faster than everyone else it was due to the series Squid Game on Netflix and pitched an article to news outlets
🤑 Result: High-quality backlinks, traffic and additional revenue
Main takeaways:
Embrace change, make yourself familiar with new developments, tools and technology (start with an hour a week).
Strive to deliver “best in the world content,” not just “fine content.”
Reframe problems into opportunities.
Double down on things that never change
On the one hand, we don’t want to change our behavior. On the other hand, our brain craves novelty, constantly looking for a dopamine hit.
I know it’s very easy to be sucked in. New trends like AI chatbots, AI phones, AI toothbrushes. All good. But you have to avoid the shiny toy syndrome and embrace what will always matter.
If you focus on the things that never change, you can predict the future.
There lies great power in what you can’t measure
It will always pay off to do what is logical and rational.
Google of 2004 is not Google of 2024. Just because Google cannot measure something right now doesn’t mean it cannot in the future. One example is having author bios and pages.
Due to the leak, we have our answers now, but having author bios and pages just because Google “wants” them didn’t make sense.
Things that cannot be measured are often underestimated and easily ignored. Fun fact: A metric is often more useful if it is harder to measure.
Prefer the repeatability in the present over the luck of the past
Luck is something positive that is not predictable. Repeatable means puzzle pieces falling into place like they used to. They are not the same.
In SEO, we love to look at what others did and you should. But focus on what is repeatable, not what was lucky.
You cannot follow in the footsteps of Amazon or HubSpot, as their operating conditions fundamentally changed. However, there are things worth learning from them.
You can learn from HubSpot that it’s worth investing strategically in new channels/formats.
You can learn from Amazon that it’s worth investing in what customers will always value: Good prices and fast delivery.
Do what is repeatable; don’t try to emulate what was lucky.
Some more things that will never change
To draw on the Amazon example, Google will always need users to be satisfied with their search product. At least as long as this is their biggest revenue source.
One of your goals, in this case, should always be to have “best in the world content,” not good content.
In the SQRG, Google tells us exactly what they want. They have been doing so for years:
Have author pages when it makes sense for your target audience.
Don’t just copy the content of others, as high content quality is signaled by effort and originality.
Auto-generated content (think AI or any programmatic plays) has more obstacles in its way to being rated Highest in terms of page quality.
Make no mistake: The next update is coming. The next disruption of the SERPs you operate in is coming as well.
It’s much better to invest in preparation over prediction. What we can’t see coming hits us the hardest.
Main takeaways:
Do what is rational and logical, even if you or Google can’t measure it (yet).
Copy what is repeatable today, not what was lucky yesterday.
Study the SQRG to see what Google wants.
Invest in preparation, not prediction.
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Stop manipulating, start taking responsibility
Do you remember that when you were a kid, you often tried to manipulate and cheat in games?
In Germany, there is a game called “Mensch ärger dich nicht,” which roughly translates to “man, don’t be angry.”
I took chances to roll the dice again because someone “distracted me,” for example. This also happens often in golf and is known as a “mulligan,” so you get a pass and can take another shot.
At times, SEOs are like children who don’t want to accept the rules, cheat when no one is looking and love to blame others for our failures.
Examples of SEO manipulation practices
SEO is a breeding ground for manipulative tactics, and everyone knows the good old tales. Here are a few classics and recent ones:
Terminated agencies updating the disallow file, so the work of the new agency gets tanked
Content stealing, like the SEO heist
Purely AI-generated content is neither a competitive advantage nor a strategy. Even if it does work short-term, it is not something you can rely on in the future. We advocate investing in a long-term channel, but we are so greedy and in a hurry that we fall for get-rich-quick schemes like Gollum in his pursuit of his precious.
Link buying, which sounds like exchanging drugs on a backyard
In some countries this is not just against Google’s official guidelines, but even problematic due to the law (in Germany we have the “Wettbewerbsrecht” for example).
Affiliate link spam
Someone created thousands of domains, all just containing affiliate links to all kinds of ecommerce sites in Germany to earn a quick affiliate buck. This is literally a resource waste which makes the internet a huge garbage hole. Please stop.
Here’s an example domain that got spammed with these affiliate domains:
If you want to be taken seriously in SEO, don’t take shortcuts. Like Sonia Simone said, they take too long.
Why Google can’t tell us the truth
It’s easy to point fingers at Google. To call them liars and whatnot. Anyone with a clear mind has to understand that they cannot tell us exactly what is going on behind the curtain. If they did, at least a small group of SEO goblins would do everything in their power to ruin the game for everyone else.
SEO is the perfect example of the tragedy of commons.
“Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”
– Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”
Some of us just can’t behave properly and break the system for everyone else.
Yet here we are, proud of engaging in our questionable get-rich-quick schemes, which no one would publicly endorse as employees of a real brand or big company.