SEO: the end of an era
It’s easy to forget how truly jaw-dropping Google’s search engine was when it first started gaining traction in the early 2000s.
Back then, the web was a chaotic sprawl of cluttered search engines. Google’s stark simplicity—a single input box and two buttons—felt like Zen in a digital madhouse.
Type “Apple” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”? Bam. Straight to Apple’s website.
Opt for “Search,” and there it was again: Apple at the top, followed by millions of other links tangentially related to apples. Everything delivered in the blink of an eye, complete with a little boast about the split-second it took to index the entire internet. It was like magic, and for its competitors, it might as well have been witchcraft.
The secret? A proprietary algorithm that quickly crushed the opposition and made Google the undisputed king of search.
Soon, “Google” wasn’t just a noun—it was a verb.
By 2006, it was the word of the year; by 2009, the word of the decade.
But with great success came inevitable exploitation. Webmasters figured out they could hack the system. Stuff your site with keywords, and voilà—your backroom business suddenly outranked Fortune 500 giants.
And so, a marketing urban legend was born, and given the unassuming title of Search Engine Optimisation.
Google’s homepage in 2024 is mostly unchanged. Though, far less important (and visited) since Google Search was built-in to the URL address bars of the major web browsers.
The Rise of the SEO-Industrial Complex
SEO became an obsession. A game-changing, white-hot business revolution that was going to make or break you. At conferences and workshops around the globe, thought leaders prophesied the promised land. Whole boutique businesses and self-styled gurus popped up offering their brand of SEO magic available for purchase.
Software was developed to attempt to identify SEO opportunities, and automate the creation of meta content to “effortlessly” make webpages more Google-friendly.
And of course, then came the spam. Business inboxes became flooded with unsolicited emails from (what typically turned out to be) off-shore consultants who had personally reviewed your website and could provide SEO services for rupees on the dollar. Consultants, by the way, who never seemed to be able get themselves listed in Google at all. Funny, that.
Analytics Strikes Back
To combat all this, Google was quick to make alterations to their algorithm. The arms race was on, and continues to this day. Entire industries lived in fear of the next big change, knowing that one tweak could obliterate their visibility overnight.
As soon as new SEO techniques are conceived, Google speedily counteracts them by developing even more sophisticated usage data to better rank every webpage’s actual value.
However… Google also tapped into a very valuable source of information that let its users do all the heavy lifting for them.
When people search for, say, “luxury handbags,” they don’t stick around long on shady knock-off websites. They click away almost immediately, a behaviour Google can track; because when you use Google you agree to letting it monitor your every mouse click. So, by analysing “time on page” Google quietly adjusts rankings, pushing low-quality sites further down the list.
Time on page, by the way, would become Google’s key metric. Because almost as soon as it began, Google realised there was a fortune to be made by acting as a middleman between advertisers and its very granular audience groups that it had collected all the data on.
Today, Google is only ostensibly a search company. It makes all its revenue from advertising and media spend. It started being an incredibly fast portal to the entirety of the internet, but it has increasingly become a business that needs you to stay within its universe for as long as it can possibly hold you. The longer you stay, the more money it can make. For Google, time on page is everything,
Your business should consider time on page equally as important. Certainly one of only a few metrics you should focus on.
Google have never revealed how their algorithm works. In fact, Google never really let on much about anything. And when it comes to genuinely useful SEO advice, they are not going to tell you a great deal either. Unless you pay very close attention.
The (largely unwritten) Rules of SEO
So, what’s the secret? What are Google’s rules for success?
If you search for something like Google SEO Advice, you will quickly find Google’s own Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Starter Guide. They have to use that term so you will find their page, but they then proceed to never really mention SEO again, because:
There is no real way to optimise search results on Google*
That last statement comes with an asterisk that we will now discuss.
Sure, there are very bad things you can do with your website that will ensure you do not rank highly on Google search results. And Google goes to great lengths to tell you what those things are… things that you should definitely avoid doing. (Perhaps ironically, many of the same things that so-called SEO experts will typically tell you to do.) But this is more dis-optimisation advice.
* Of course, there actually is one reliable way to optimise your website for Google. If you pay them a lot of money every month, you can ignore all these recommendations, as Google will simply rig their algorithm to favour your website, no matter how bad it is.
And this is where the rubber meets the road, because the enduring promise of search engine optimisation is the (alleged) ability to organise your website data in such a way that Google will favourably rank your website without you having to pay them any money at all.
Excuse me while I re-compose myself.
Google therefore find themselves in a bind. They want to share genuine advice to webmasters, but they also have an advertising industry to monopolise. So instead, they share their data. (well, at least, some of it.)
The whole SEO illusion is perpetuated by providing the (ridiculously complicated) Google Analytics service which requires businesses to hire Content Management Specialists to pore over every possible statistical detail of every user’s interaction with your website’s content; and provide endless charts and graphs that tantalisingly report how your content is tracking.
Google Analytics not only provides an increasingly large cohort of nerds a first class ticket on the marketing department gravy train; it is also a way of embedding Google into the very structure of your business. To make it a must-have business utility, alongside photocopiers, PCs and paperclips.
Google Analytics smartly plays into the hands of businesses where the quantity of processes and procedures have become the focus, rather than the quality of production.
With all that said, there’s still a problem. Google Analytics is like a doctor who can effectively diagnose an illness, but has no idea how to cure it.
Blink and You’ll Miss It.
There is a cure, however. And it lives back over on Google’s SEO Starter Guide, where a few, all-important what-to-dos are padded-out into one very short paragraph of points that you really should be focussing on.
These points should be headline sized, red-coloured and flashing so they can’t be missed. In any case, here they are, summarised:
• Make your site interesting, useful and unique.
• Ensure the content is helpful, reliable, and people-first.
• Make the content easy-to-read, well organised and up-to-date.
If there ever was ways to “optimise search engines”, these three points are it.
And this is all the real SEO advice you’re going to get from Google.
It reminds me of the bit about learning how to walk a tightrope.
1/. stretch a rope across a chasm
2/. walk across the rope
3/. try not to fall
Google’s SEO advice is equally ludicrously simplistic and at the same time, incredibly profound.
Because what Google are actually saying is:
Good quality content is everything. In fact, it’s the only thing.
Not content with content
I personally hate the term content. It particularly grinds my gears because it enables the thing that describes the most important component of any web page to be neatly partitioned, minimised, then dismissed.
“We provide the infrastructure, all you have to provide is the content”.
That’s the gist of hundreds of thousands of terms and conditions and consultancy contracts since the commercial internet took off. Partnership promises to build the infrastructure while your company “provides the content” is essentially a modern day update of the Stone Soup fable. (And of course, if you don’t know what that is, Google it.)
Just as Google are forced to use the term SEO, I am forced to use the term Content. These days I have to describe myself as a content creator, so others can get a quick idea of some of the services I provide.
So let’s proceed with the term content, but let’s redefine it as this: “Anything real people find interesting and useful”. Or as Google would define it: “Anything that actually optimises your search ranking”. That’s what content is… or at least, should be.
Which means this:
• Content requires ideas, from people who know what they are doing. It’s not a job for juniors.
• Content is time-consuming, with high up-front costs.
• Content is not easy. If it were, everybody would be doing it.
In my opinion, it would be far better to spend all your money making compelling content and be unsure who is looking at it, than to instead spend all your money on analytics to know for sure that nobody is looking at it.
But the great SEO urban myth prevails, with job ad after job ad spending a line or two on the requirement to “craft compelling content”; followed by lists of tracking and surveillance software, where fluency is a must: Google Analytics, HubSpot, SemRush, and a host of other reporting tools. As said, tools that can only report what’s wrong, but never show you how to fix it.
Where To From Here
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted”
This brilliant quote from playwright Arthur Miller cleverly identifies that entire eras are built on the foundation of illusions.
SEO is part truth, mostly myth. And surely, the SEO era should be at an end.
Look… trends and fads come and go. It’s perfectly human to be caught up and carried along by them. There’s no shame in admitting you were part of something that didn’t live up to its own promises or your expectations. We all do it.
SEO is simply just another thing that can be added to a long list of big deals that amounted to not much at all. (The current iteration of LLMs/AI will also, one day, join it.)
It’s time to get back to basics. It’s time to focus on creating quality content that real people find informative, useful, and dare I say, entertaining. This is how actual engagement and real value is built today.
Great content isn’t just the best way forward. It’s the only way forward.
If you search, Google will tell you.
