Let’s Talk About SEO

A few months ago I left a stable job and started my own content marketing firm.

When you go out on your own and start a business, there’s immediate pressure. What can we do to get revenue in the door? How can we attract new clients?

And if you’re in content marketing, there’s one direction you can go that is consistently brimming with opportunity. Companies are ready to pay you to write SEO blog content. Write more, earn more. It’s a simple path to short-term growth and stability.?

It has been excruciating, but I’ve been turning down this work at just about every turn. When potential clients say they need help with SEO on discovery calls, I don’t take the easy money — I try to talk them out of it.

Here’s why.

The trouble with SEO

Every content marketer in the world has said some form of the following sentence:

“Yeah, we write SEO content, but we write it so that you don’t notice the keywords.”

Sure.

Here’s the fundamental problem. When you’re writing content for SEO, your target audience is an algorithm. For better or worse, you need keywords in your header and subheaders. No matter how hard you try, the goal of the piece is obvious — search results are the primary goal, persuading your reader is secondary. You’re aiming at a constantly moving target, and you’re fighting tooth and nail with dozens of competitors to try to reach the first page of search results.?

We’re already living and working in an overcrowded information environment. There is, objectively, too much content. And this is before the firehose of generative AI is fully unleashed — companies that could previously write two SEO blog posts in a day will now be able to write 10. They’re not going to be able to resist.

In this sea of garbage, brands need to stand out by focusing on the human audience. Write the creative subheader, keywords be damned. Do what it takes to keep people reading and take action. You may not reach as many people in total, but you will undoubtedly persuade more people to move forward in the sales cycle.

So you’ve ranked on Google, what happens next?

This is the question I always come back to: you’ve written the content that ranks on Google, but what happens next?

How many times have you posed a question to Google, clicked on one of the first five articles, and then realized that it doesn’t solve your problem? You read through to the first subheader, realize that it’s an SEO article, and then look elsewhere for a solution. Maybe you put the same search terms in but add “Reddit” — anything to get to real human discussion.

Every time this happens, SEO’s credibility issue deepens. We become less and less likely to use Google to answer our questions. We turn to people we can trust — contacts in our immediate network, or influencers sharing their opinions directly on social media. We need a real person at the center.

The future of content marketing

I’m not a content extremist. There are still pockets where SEO matters, and there are still moments when it can make sense to pay attention to keywords. If you’re selling ceiling fans and can get your content on the first page of results for “best ceiling fan,” then it’s still worth it for you to be chasing SEO. If you’re already writing a piece of thought leadership and think you can win a keyword without mangling the original content, then it’s probably worth taking that extra step.

But in the next five years, I’m willing to bet that SEO writing will no longer represent the majority of work for content marketing agencies. Instead, the money is going to flow to those writers and agencies that can help with the human element.

How can we tell your story in a way that keeps people reading and inspires them to take action?

How can we be more convincing to a smaller audience?

How can we be openly, painfully human in a content landscape that is openly, painfully automated?

These are the questions we need to answer. The future of content marketing depends on it.