Why I don't like SEO! Sure, I don't

Why don't I like SEO?

Did the title surprise you? Did it make you think that it is clickbait? Did you think that I do not mean what I said in the title?

I don't like SEO. Absolutely. Or rather, people's obsession with it. And the people who feed off of those businesses that want to rank higher in Google or Bing and other search engines.

What if I told you that I had burnt my fingers and my wallets in the so-called SEO efforts?

Not so surprising, right? When I was young and naive, I made mistakes.

You may have your reservations about SEO. You may be in favour of SEO as a business strategy. You may also be making living with SEO. This is nothing personal and I do not have anything against you.

This is just me. And you may call me opinionated.

But hear me out.

When it comes to SEO, businesses think that they can game the system or the algorithms of search engines to bring more qualified traffic that they can convert to paying customers.

I thought so and ended up losing my hard-earned money. Not because SEO did not work for me. But the way the SEO service providers treated me.

I am all in for the efforts of businesses to be found by potential customers and consumers. I mean, how else would a business grow without such promotional efforts?

However, marketing is all about finding customers and potential business. But is that all?

Of course, not!

It is about establishing your brand as a credible entity by ensuring value addition to consumers. It is also about bringing solutions to the problems of people.

Most of the time, people are in the dark and do not know such a solution even exists.

When you solve the problem for a customer and leave them delighted, they talk about you. They put in the right word with many other people.

Others take notice. They come for your help.

There is nothing more powerful than good word of mouth by the customers. I have seen it over the course of my professional experience.

To compare, let's take SEO itself as an example.    

Before starting an SEO campaign, what do we do first? We create a secondary email address. Many, I suppose.

One designed to help you get listed on Directories

Another to comment on comment sections of websites for link building.

Yet another to create forum posts on a range of community forums online.

Then you go on a streak to create secondary social media handles to get into social media communities and groups. This lets you promote your page in such groups.

From what I have understood, the external link structure is supposed to improve the authority of the targeted domain.

Commenting across the web using a variety of keywords with hyperlinks to lead to the targeted website is supposed to help a business improve its domain authority so that it ranks better.

If this is not gaming the system, I would not know what is.

And it gives me trust issues with the entire strategy.

Google has planned links in a different context. Other websites are supposed to link your website in an organic way because you have exceptional content on the website. These links would suggest to the search engines that you have an impeccable post on your website.

If you have a lot of such inbound links, it means that your website is something special.

And the search engine bots will pick up these signals and rank your website higher so that people looking to find such posts would come to you naturally.

Instead, what are we doing? We go on a comment-spam spree commenting on websites to unnaturally create a school of links that is supposed to impress the search engines.

I mean, I am yet to find something more manipulative and deceptive than link building using such tricks.

Then there is fake review posting.

If we have a customer who reviews us low on any review platform who is genuinely dissatisfied with the service, we have a backup plan to post fake reviews written by someone we hire.

For me, it is just another form of deception.

It is detrimental to the business itself because we are not trying to improve the quality of the services that we provide; not trying to ensure that customers leave your business satisfied; not trying to create a customer support system that can address the problems that the customers faced when they approached us.

What we really must have instead is a strategy to improve our service, customer care, and overall service deliverance.

But we go on publishing fake reviews which will lead more unassuming clients to our website and be dissatisfied.

This severely disheartens me. I have a domain that is 20+ years old. It ranks pretty high in the search engine because there is awesome content on it. When there was page ranking on Google, it had a rank of 5 or 6.

I have never resorted to any kind of SEO strategies that manipulate the web and search engine algorithms to gain unfair advantages over the competition.

Of course, I understand that there are SEO strategies that rely more on creating awesome content that brings value to the customers and customers resolve their concerns.

But most SEO efforts seem unethical to me.

When a business concentrates more on SEO than on providing better services to the users, it creates an urgency in the eyes of the business to rank higher. But not necessarily to create better service offerings.

This can create a problem for the business as it can push the business to run solely on SEO and not on genuine customer service. That can make the business dependent on questionable SEO methods such as comment spamming, fake reviews, etc. to grow.

And soon, there is no escape. You stop your SEO efforts; your traffic can crumple down. You may even go out of business.

You start to survive at the mercy of the people doing SEO for you.

I have interviewed many SEO professionals over the years, and I felt so disappointed to find that none of them have ever read the Google SEO Guidelines. 

Not even once.

They tell me that they know there are these guidelines and algorithms Google works on.

But when I ask them, “Have you read it at least once?” They frown and say, “No, I don’t think there is any need”.

I think there is nothing more damaging than that.

One of the SEO professionals asked me, "How do you manage to get higher search engine rankings without any SEO?"

I said, “Well, you tell me!"

He replied, "You must have excellent services and original content that people really love”.

There you go!

Thanks for your time - Please take care on your clients they are your SEO (other than technicals)