Seth Godin Says SEO Is Useless, And It Pisses Me Off

Seth Godin said something about SEO that set me off.

In a Q&A session about his book The Dip, he talked about how the Top 100 websites clearly didn't win with SEO.

As a quick refresher, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's what you can do to a website or web page to make it rank higher on search engines by optimizing it with keywords. SEO can get complex. There are a lot of tactics and techniques.

If you look at the top websites in the world or in the country, most of them are there because they provided incredible value to users.

• Quora is there because it helps people find what they're looking for.
• Facebook connects the world socially and instantly.
• YouTube provides the visual information or entertainment you're looking for.

There's no SEO there because there's no need... right? They are driving truly organic traffic because of the incredible value. Wrong! These are all user-generated content platforms that have hit. People like them, and use them. But you'll be a damn fool to think that there aren't thousands of people on each of these platforms benefiting enormously by helping guide search algorithms to valuable content by researching and including the right keywords.

This situation reminds me of studying billionaires. All the crap that millionaires give advice on confuse the heck out of you until you study billionaires. Some millionaires are unethical. Others cheat and lie. Others recommend jumping on the next social media band wagon. Others give the exact opposite advice: avoid social media and use weird, magical rubbing oils and fifty productivity apps.

But when you get to the billionaires, there's more consistency at that height. What actually should be done becomes clearer. Some of them barely use email. Some keep their calendars deadly simple. The noise and bad advice gets cleared away when you focus on the best.

Yes, focus on the fundamentals and bringing incredible value to people delivers results. But to think SEO is useless is a fool's idea. Yes, there are people in my company who don't believe in SEO or think it's valuable in any way -- and have told me plainly. But the majority know it's value because we've helped countless clients over the years generate more sales and/or prospects through SEO.

But let's get off the high horse, and consider something deeper. Value. Real SEO is about delivering value. The old-school ways of stuffing a page with keywords doesn't work as well anymore. I'm talking about re-vamping an entire blog post to make it 10x better than what's ranking #1 -- that new school SEO.

Strangely enough, I was watching an interview of Mark Zuckerberg right after, and he said something similar. He said focus on the fundamentals when you start a business. Facebook was, at its core, focused on extending the primal human need of being more social. Facebook helped us stay in touch and connect socially with more than the 150 people we typically had in our lives.

Mark said that most people who start businesses are focused on all these advanced techniques or specific, niche ways of helping others. But you can do much better sometimes by focusing on the fundamentals.

He said there's a company that could probably also succeed by focusing on human's desire to meet new people. It isn't Facebook's main purpose to do that, so they haven't. But there's tremendous opportunity there.

Now, this interview was in 2012. As of 2016, I would say the big players who have succeeded at this recently are Tinder, Meetup.com, and maybe Eventbrite.

But even then, there's a lot of opportunity.

Tinder is looked at as a joke by many girls. They don't take it seriously. And it's been coined as the "hook up" app. Meetup.com is still fairly clunky and slow. The groups on there are small or dead, especially in smaller towns.

But there are a TON of people who are meeting new people on there in all sorts of areas from Salsa-dance lovers to Board game addicts. But there's room for improvement. I think there's huge potential here since people of almost any interest can meet like-minded people.

Eventbrite is similar to Meetup.com but it's gotten spammy with marketers and it's more focused on ticket-based paid events. And the quality and quantity on there isn't that great.

There's room for improvement and I'm excited to see where that will lead when there's a need.

Before the Internet, the average human wouldn't get beyond 100 miles of where he or she was born. If you wanted to meet people, you had to move around town yourself and look for cool restaurants, studios, and events.

You could have easily missed a self-development meet-up group nearby even if it was a perfect fit for you. You could have easily missed the best restaurant you could have ever visited. You could have easily missed your dream husband or wife.

But that's what great businesses, at the end of the day, seem to help fix: a problem.

Behind all the fancy technology, it's truly a way of helping people meet others that they wouldn't have ever had.

It's a service to help people meet new people at its social primal core.

I find that incredibly fascinating. Things don't have to be super complicated.

If you look at social media at its core, it's not a bunch of fancy technology and advanced business marketing. It's a way for us to be more social.

It allows us to spread the purest form of what we want to say faster and to more people.

Before it existed, your only alternative to reach that many people is to go through the bureaucratic world of television, movies, books, or radio.

Now, Sally can reach 500 of her classmates instantly. She can chat with her best friendly instantly and get a reply instantly even if they live 1,000 miles away. 

Kanye West can now instantly say what he wants and reach hundreds of thousands of fans.

It's not complicated. Social media is truly about just helping humans communicate with other humans better in every way. And because businesses are made up of human interactions, it helps businesses communicate better too. And everything else that comes with a business: movie directors, actors, celebrities, or even nonprofit organizations.

Finally, take a look Neil Patel.

Neil is one of the best in the world at SEO. His strategy focuses on fundamentals and long-term strategy.

There's tens of thousands of millionaires, websites, and businesses below Neil that focus on SEO tactics and strategies to game the system. They'll do what they can do get links, stuff keywords, or churn out content to get more traffic from search engines like Google.

Some of them will even succeed and make a couple million dollars. Some will get some extra traffic.

But Neil thinks this is short-sighted. He realizes that Google is focused on providing the best possible content to match with what people search for. Google is trying to help people get the best, most relevant information they can. 

Therefore, in the short-term, tactics work.

But in the long-term, search engines will move more and more towards successfully finding and delivering the best information out there.

And they can afford to do so. They're paying millions to the top engineers in the world to get closer and closer to doing this.

So 100 years from now. 50 years from now... And 10 years from now..... Even 2 years from now........

There's no chance your crappy trickery will work. Short-term tactic-based SEO is really just marketing a crappy product no one wants to buy. 

And when's the last time you have heard someone make billions of dollars from selling ice to Eskimos? They don't want ice. They'd rather have an iPhone.

Maybe you could make a couple million by scamming people into buying something they don't want by getting traffic you don't deserve to a product that sucks...

But you're not going to change the world, become one of the richest people in the world, or really make a valuable impact by doing so.

Rather than doing this, Neil focuses on providing the absolute, best content on the web on a topic.

By doing so, there's no scams anymore:

• You're not trying to peddle a Salsa dance studio that's no different from all the other Salsa studios out there.
• You're not trying to keyword stuff and churn out daily viral content and pray that you get extra traffic to your sub-par article.
• You're not trying to write a dating article that's no better in credibility, reasoning, or proof than everything else out there.

You're actually providing the best value. And everything will come organically in the long run from doing so. People will find you. People will link to you. You'll naturally get a higher ranking. And so on.

I don't think most people focus on the fundamentals or long-term. There's plenty of mid to large-sized websites that are still focusing on the short-term tactics and it's clear. Some are doing moderately well because of it... for now.

I'm just going to focus on what I mentioned here even though most people won't. Hopefully, I will get ahead because of it.

That said, don't ignore the short- and mid-term benefits of SEO. You can have the best science-backed article out there, but if no ones linking to you, you could be dwarfed by a generic viral crappy article from a higher authority content mill. Use SEO to guide search engines to content that objectively deserves to rank higher.

Right now, Google is focused on viewer experience. If you can provide that, it seems to help. This involves people spending more time on your site and tons of people linking to you.

In the long run, I have faith that the fundamentals will win out.