SEO Is Simpler Than We Make It

SEO has become one of those things where you can spend an absurd amount of time learning about it and somehow end up doing less actual SEO.

There is always something new to worry about. Google released another update. Someone discovered a new ranking factor. Someone else announced that listicles are dead. Then Reddit starts showing up everywhere and suddenly there are 47 posts explaining what Reddit citations in ChatGPT mean for your SEO strategy. Your DR is too low. AI content is finished. Actually, AI content is the future. Google changed something again.

You can spend an entire afternoon reading about all of this and, by the end of it, have learned absolutely nothing that helps the website you're working on.

The funny thing is that the fundamentals are much less exciting.

And they haven't changed nearly as much as the SEO industry would have you believe.

You need relevant content. You need backlinks. You need a website or product that is actually useful. You need to pay attention to what is happening, test things, make adjustments, and keep doing the work.

That's most of it.

Start with the content.

If you sell accounting software, you should probably have useful pages about the things people searching for accounting software actually want to know. If you run a plumbing business, you should probably have pages that answer the questions people ask before they call a plumber.

This sounds painfully obvious, which is probably why people keep finding ways to make it complicated.

The goal isn't to publish 200 articles because a keyword tool found 200 keywords. It is to build pages that deserve to exist. Pages that answer something properly. Pages that are relevant to the business and useful to the person who searched.

Then there are links.

You can dress this up with whatever terminology you like, but other websites linking to your website still matters. A relevant link from a website that people actually use is useful in ways that a spreadsheet of 400 random referring domains isn't.

You don't need to turn every backlink into a philosophical discussion about authority.

Build good links. Build relevant links. Keep building them.

And then there is the part that gets strangely neglected in SEO discussions: actually having something worth ranking.

You can spend six months obsessing over keywords and backlinks, finally get someone onto the first page, and then send them to a website that looks like it was assembled during a lunch break in 2014.

The SEO did its job. The website didn't.

If someone reaches your site and immediately wonders why they should trust you, buy from you, contact you, or even stay there for another thirty seconds, your ranking isn't the biggest problem you have.

Make the product good. Make the website useful. Make it easy for people to find what they need. Give them a reason to stick around.

SEO can get someone through the door. It cannot make a bad business interesting.

The other thing you need is a willingness to test things instead of treating every SEO opinion as a law of nature.

Try something.

Track what happens.

Look at rankings, organic traffic, clicks, enquiries, sales, whatever actually matters to the business. If something improves, figure out why. If it doesn't, change it.

This sounds obvious too, but a surprising amount of SEO is built around repeating things because somebody once said they work.

You don't need to believe me. Test it yourself.

That is one of the better habits you can develop in SEO. Stop asking whether some tactic is supposed to work and start looking at what happens when you use it on your own site.

And then there is the final ingredient, which is probably the least exciting one of all.

Consistency.

This is where most people eventually disappear.

SEO is not particularly difficult because every individual task is complicated. It is difficult because there are a lot of relatively ordinary things that need to be done repeatedly.

You publish the page.

You improve the pages that aren't performing.

You build some links.

You look at the data.

You find another opportunity.

You fix something that is broken.

Then you do it again next week.

And the week after that.

There is no shortage of things that can distract you from this. Google will release another update. Someone will announce that a particular type of content is dead. An SEO tool will introduce another metric. A new platform will become the place everyone insists you need to be.

You can chase all of it if you want.

Or you can keep working on the things that were already moving the website forward.

That doesn't mean Google updates don't matter. They obviously can. And new tactics are worth testing. But there is a difference between paying attention to changes and building your entire SEO strategy around whatever the internet is talking about this week.

The sites that tend to survive aren't necessarily the ones whose owners predicted every Google update correctly.

They're the ones that kept building useful things, earning links, improving the website, watching the numbers and adjusting when something stopped working.

SEO is not quite as mysterious as we make it.

Relevant content.

Good links.

A useful website or product.

Testing and measurement.

Consistency.

The annoying part is that none of this is particularly exciting.

You just have to keep doing it.

And that's probably why it works.