SEO needs to die.

You know what doesn’t work? SEO. It’s bullshit. Flat out. Sorry, guys. But the entire idea that you will sell more/get more customers/readers/etc. by upping your ranking on a damn search engine is broken at the core and meaningless when you look at it.

We can start with the fact that 99% of all SEO is designed to push bullshit sites up the ranks. Now I’ve even recently seen people blaming Google for this. “There are people in the field who misuse it and Google should be stopping them.” Nope. Google’s job isn’t to police your industry. It’s a sign that the industry itself is badly broken.

The problem is in the core concept though.

SEO is a short-cut. Short-cuts don’t work. They might give you a fictional bump, a rise in hits that seems like it helps, a ranking that says “Hey look I show up faster” but it isn’t growing your business, no matter what that business is. If you want to build a successful business it takes work and time and selling something people want more than they want that other thing.

But, you think, how will people find out? Not, I point out, by search engines.

Remember when we used phone books and companies would name themselves AAAmazing Cleaners so they would land at the top of the listing for cleaners? They thought it would help and yet that just isn’t how most people work.

The people who do work that way are one-offs, small time fluff that might end up in business but generally take up your time. They’re people who threw a dart and will waste your time with nonsense more often than not. That is in detriment to your business, not help for it.

Instead people ask friends. They think of places they’ve heard of, through their community. People try to use places with a reputation for doing good work. Those are the places that survive. And they aren’t the ones screaming to find shortcuts to the golden land.

So you build your name in the community. You do good work, you talk to people, engage them and be a part of things. You put in the work. Good writing on a website, clear information, follow-through and great customer service. And yes shady folk will skim content from you and use SEO and end up on top of rankings. Great! Let them get the chaff! Takes it off your hands. You want to spend your time with the people who are serious and will come back and will talk about you and enhance your standing in the world – not the yapping fish that swim away more often than not.

Stop chasing short cuts to success, even when they look like they’re working they will be short term and hopefully any business you want to build should be long term. Put in the work, it’s harder but it pays off over the long term and is the only thing that matters.