In defense of SEO

Welcome to Spark, a weekly newsletter from Vivace Content. We compile news signals from across the business, financial, and cultural landscape, and spark ideas to help you and your business jump on something new to talk about. Send tips and feedback to [email protected].

Hey everyone,

As we mentioned last week, we’re making some changes to Spark, including starting to publish guest essays, thinking, and POV’s from some of the brilliant people in our network. Vivace in its current form is not a big agency. It’s more of a network of experts, a community of like-minded creatives and strategists, a group of people who enjoy nerding out with each other about ideas, and a string of Slack and WhatsApp chats. Almost like a collective.

This week’s Spark features first-time contributor, long-time Spark reader, and friend of Vivace, Josh Mendelowitz. Josh developed a reputation for being something of an SEO and digital wunderkind at Thomson Reuters, Refinitiv and LSEG before moving on to his current role leading Marketing Analytics & Operations at Marqeta. He is also an absolute mensch.

While he may have grown beyond his SEO roots, he still has some provocative insight to share about the value of SEO and its contributions to the internet we know and love (or love to hate) today.

So, if you’ve ever scratched your head or had your eyes glazed over at the thought of having to “do SEO,” – this one’s for you. And if you take away one thing from this piece, remember that what SEO actually stands for is ‘Making Your Websites Make Sense’.

-joel

Guest essay by:

JOSH MENDELOWITZ
Sr. Marketing Manager at Marqueta

That’s how Amanda Chicago Lewis referred to those working in the SEO industry in her provocative piece for the Verge, lambasting the practice of ‘Search Engine Optimization’. She told a compelling, if unoriginal, tale of dastardly “nerds” who tried and failed to rig the internet and modern-day pirates looking to make a quick buck.

Her overall thesis that SEO ruined the internet is as misguided as it is outdated. Like any industry, it’s had its share of bad actors, but the SEO profession of 2024 is, for the most part, one of the unsung heroes working to make the internet a better place.

1. The beginning

As with any good internet story, it is best to start at the beginning – of the internet that is, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee ingeniously thought to combine hypertext (the ability to connect documents through links) with the internet (a protocol that connects computers worldwide) allowing the world’s information to be linked together via the World Wide Web.

As the web gained traction an existential question immediately surfaced – how do we make sense of all of this? There was an obvious need for a gateway to finding things online. Yahoo came close to solving it with its expansive index and hierarchical directory, but it was Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s algorithmic search engine “BackRub” which ultimately found the winning formula, eventually becoming the Google that we know today.

Google rapidly gained market share, dominating half of all search engine traffic by the mid-2000’s, by which time inquisitive webmasters were beginning to wonder just what ranking factors were powering these powerful algorithmic search engines? A couple of key factors began to emerge: links and keywords. A website with inbound links from other reputable websites and a web page brimming with keywords would rank for relevant search terms.

And thus, the SEO industry was born. While many of the SEO pioneers were surely well-meaning webmasters, more nefarious agents immediately jumped into the fray. They realized that spamming sites with links and keywords was a surefire way to the top of the results and ultimately, more traffic. This resulted in clickbaity content, ugly websites and a marred internet experience for everyone.

2. The Pivot

Over time, Google got smarter. They updated their algorithm, closed loopholes, and made the entire practice of gaming the system entirely pointless or, at the very least, extremely arduous. Unsavory ‘Black Hat’ SEO tactics, as they became known, were almost guaranteed to land you a serious penalty and more often than not, time spent in Google jail (yes, a real thing!).

Instead of wasting time trying to outwit the algorithm, most SEO practitioners changed tactics. They sought to genuinely understand what Google was after and spend their effort working towards a common goal. Google, for their part, eventually invested in improving transparency for the webmaster and SEO community by building out training resources and hiring well-respected members to explain how to build Google-friendly websites.

What the Google algorithm was after was relatively simple: high-performing, easy-to-understand websites with high-quality, trustworthy, fresh content that was engaging and relevant for the users searching. Simple! Well – maybe not. It turns out creating fast websites and churning out high-quality, relevant content is actually much harder than it looks – especially when everyone else is following the same playbook.

3. What SEO became

Inherent in Google’s ‘simple’ mandate are countless tasks and actions that need to be taken, regularly and swiftly.

Any good SEO strategy starts with a fast website, which means working with your web developers to understand everything that needs to load and how to do it most efficiently. And if you want Google to crawl and understand your content, then your site needs to be built simply and elegantly with a sitemap that makes it easy for Google’s crawlers to know where to start – and that’s just the technical side of SEO.

Creating high-quality, trustworthy content is even trickier. It means finding the keywords you think your target audience might be searching for and weaving them into the copy – of course, don’t overdo it or you might be penalized. And don’t compete with yourself by creating too many pages on the same topic, that risks a penalty too. Don’t forget relevant images and videos as well! But be careful, it can slow your website down which is a no-no.

And what about those pesky links, you might ask? Figuring out how to get relevant, authoritative websites to link back to your pages can be more art than science. Many have resorted to shady methods of acquiring links out of desperation. Yet, for the most part, link building has given way to ‘Digital PR’ which aims to find organic ways to create viral, engaging content that entices links back to your site.

So, to summarize, to achieve great SEO performance, you need to be technical, analytically minded, performance-driven, creative, and collaborative. You can’t cut corners and you can’t skip steps.

4. The magic of SEO

Some who are not necessarily critical of SEO are still skeptical; you often hear people referring to SEO as a “magic” or a “black box.” And I get it – other elements of digital marketing can be easier to wrap your head around.

The beauty of SEO is that, at its broadest, it’s about enabling your target market to discover your business online through a series of tireless tactics actioned regularly and consistently. It might feel like magic at times – but the best marketing always does. What you’re left with is an industry filled not with fraudsters but earnest, well-meaning people trying to make the internet a better place for users and get relevant content to its target audience.

There is perhaps no better example of the well-intentioned SEO community than Rand Fishkin. Fishkin is the original founder of Moz, an SEO platform, and one of the early pioneers of trying to understand what Google was after, not to game the system, but to help businesses grow online. While Fishkin no longer works directly in SEO, he just this week released groundbreaking information on how Google’s algorithm works. In his concluding paragraph, Fishkin noted that it “isn’t just about helping the search industry—it’s about helping the whole world.” Grandiose as it may sound, no one can doubt his intentions.

As search engines give way to generative AI, I expect more SEO post-mortems to be written and published. Like Fishkin, I no longer work in SEO directly but I do hope that when they tell the story of SEO, people remember the positive impact the industry has had on the marketing world and the internet as a whole.

Josh Mendelowitz is a London-based Senior Marketing Manager at Marqueta, leading the Marketing Analytics & Operations practice. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

📡 ON THE RADAR

• If you want to learn more about Google’s influence on the Internet, check out this great episode of PJ Vogt’s excellent podcast, Search Engine: How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)

• Who is the true fintech capital of the world? Marqeta CEO Simon Khalaf believes London and the UK are going to see a further boost in innovation and funding, creating ‘a lot of new winners.’

• Are you looking for a man in finance? ICYMI, this TikTok meme continues to grow and grow. Whoever organized the London flashmob of finance bro dancers, I tip my hat to you.

Please let me know if you enjoyed this issue by emailing [email protected] or commenting on LinkedIn. Also if you’d like to see your name added to the illustrious and growing roster of Spark contributors – commentary, opinions, analysis and think-pieces are always welcome 😁 

Spark is a production of Vivace Content, where we help our clients around the world navigate what to say and how to say it every single day. Get in touch if you’d like to have a no-hassle consultation about how we can help you too. Have a great week ahead, and see you next week.