Why SEO is now a waste of time for small businesses

If you run a small business, you’re short on time and long on tasks. I’m suggesting that SEO is simply not worth worrying about…

If you are tired of London, you are tired of life. 

So said Samuel Johnson in 1777 (if this odd post is anything to go by). 

In 2024, if I am tired (to my bones) of SEO, does that mean I am tired of the Internet?

Nope. I do still love the online world, but I am indeed done with SEO (search engine optimisation).

For a long time, I’ve been wondering about the usefulness of the various strategies that are recommended to make people find my WordPress-based website. Keywords, image optimisation, tags, the technical structure of my site, the Yoast plugin … on and on it goes. Every now and then I sit up straight at my desk and try to up my site traffic with one or all of these things – to no avail.

My site remains miniscule, my content remains unfound.

It might of course be that I am terrible at SEO. But I have done a course in the subject (at GetSmarter, some years ago), I do a lot of reading about SEO and I do have some technical skills. I’ve paid people to add keywords to every single post on my site; I’ve attended webinars. I’m not saying I’m a guru but I know enough to make a difference… surely?

On the other hand, maybe it’s not me – it’s them?

This is where I get off

In the course of my ongoing reading, I clicked on a July 12, 2024 headline that read: The rise of forums: Why Google prefers them and how to adapt 

Now, I ran a forum in the very old days of the Internet, on a big parenting website, so I know a thing or two about them. Hmmm, I thought, what’s this about?

According to the article’s author, Steve Liu, it appears that Google has admitted defeat in the face of the AI content flood. Its algorithm these days looks for E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). But the author writes that what’s happening now is this: “hundreds of unscrupulous publishers are scraping my original content, using AI to rewrite it and publishing it as their own – perhaps even using others’ content to improve on it”. 

In those circumstances, he says, “we’re entering a world where ‘expertise’ and ‘experience,’… will be so commoditized that it’ll be practically impossible for Google to discern them independently.”

What that means, he says, is that Google has been forced to place greater emphasis on “authority” and “trust” – which means it is now surfacing sites like Reddit or Quora. “It all goes down to a new ‘A’ word: authenticity. For all their flaws, when you go to a site like Reddit, you know you’re seeing real conversations from real people.”

So far, so unrevolutionary. None of this is surprising or new. The impact of AI-generated content on search is well-documented.

But the suggestion to deal with this conundrum floored me. “Here’s the advice I give to every brand, large and small, that wants to be competitive in five years: Start your own discussion board or forum focused specifically on your industry niche.”

As I said, I once ran a forum. I know how much work it is, and I know what makes a forum a real community and what doesn’t. Spoiler alert: daily care, thoughtful moderation and personal involvement.

It is absurd to suggest that the owner of every small website can attract Google’s attention by starting a forum.

And it this absurdity that lays bare the truth: the Internet is now so large, the content on it is now so chaotic and the efforts of commercially driven search engines to provide search results that matter to people are now so desperate that it makes more sense for small businesses to abandon efforts to implement SEO strategies. There is no way we can win in this fight.

(Note: I do know that the “get yourself a forum” idea is one person’s idea, and that there are lots of other ways to do SEO. But I have read soooo many of those, with no real result. This post was the straw that broke the camel’s back.)

What to do instead?

If you strip it to its essentials, the goal of SEO is to boost a particular site (more personally: your own site) so that traffic will come to it so that money can be made in various ways.

If the ultimate goal is making your business known to people so that you can make money then I go back to the conclusion I came to in an exploration of content marketing:

When I did a survey of all my marketing efforts over the last eight years, I found that all my good work (the well paid jobs, with people I like working with) came from the network of people I established when I worked full-time in journalism. The human connection has proved to be my key marketing channel.

My son tells me he found a job by going on Google Maps, finding all the small businesses in our area and emailing them to ask them if they needed help. That’s what you need, he said: direct approaches. Internet marketing may be dodgy as hell now – but we can still talk to each other.

In addition to accepting that we may be selling our services in much smaller markets, I think we also need to accept that we won’t be Internet millionaires any time soon – or at least not by waving some magic SEO wand.

Making a decent living by using decent, human ways of connection with others ought to be possible though.

And no – I won’t be starting a forum any time soon.

Main picture: Kenny Eliason, Unsplash

READ MORE

Simple SEO for journalists

How to get away from Google search

Being a creator in the AI swamp – a way forward

ChatGPT has killed content, and that’s a good thing

How to reach me

Contact me if you would like to chat about how I can help with all your communication needs (writing, editing, coaching and training, social media). 

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