@tjrobertson52

I've been doing SEO for 16 years, and there's this one misconception that keeps coming up, and I think I finally figured out how to articulate what the issue is. There's this idea that SEO is a product. People often talk about it like it's a commodity that you can get from one vendor or another.

And maybe this one does it a little bit better, and this one charges a little bit less, but it's essentially the same thing. And as any SEO can tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. There are a few things that'll be consistent with any SEO campaign.

They're pretty much all gonna do some kind of keyword research. They're gonna optimize your page titles. But aside from the basics, if you were to compare the SEO campaign from 10 different agencies, they would look like 10 completely different projects.

And that's not because some agencies know what they're doing and some don't. There's just a wide array of SEO strategies, and it's almost never obvious which one's gonna be best. Now, I think this is weird for a lot of people outside of SEO, because they think of SEO as a science.

And in theory, it is a science. Google and these other search engines have an algorithm, which means there is some deterministic process in determining which website ranks above another. And therefore, there are things you can do that work better or worse to improve your rankings.

The thing Is the algorithms really complex? There's no human in the world that fully understands it, even the people working on it. Also, Google keeps it in a black box and it's constantly changing.

Now, of course, us S. E. O's do have to understand it to some extent.

The point is that S. E. O.

Will never be solved. No one will ever truly know the best thing to do to rank higher in search. All we have is our limited understanding, our intuition from past experience, and whatever set of processes we've developed that seem to work reliably.

But in practice, it actually functions more like an art than a science. Every S. E.

O. Really has their own style. Some S.

E. O's are super technical, some are super creative. Some focus almost entirely on off page, while others focus almost entirely on on page.

Some of them pay a lot of attention to Google's advice, some of them completely ignore Google. And across all these spectrums, there's examples of good and bad S. E.

O's. There is, however, one distinction that I think does matter. Pretty much all of the top S.

E. O's are reasoning from first principles. By that I mean they have some kind of working theory that they've developed that allows them to take in information about Google updates or a specific website and then confidently recommend some kind of strategy that they know is likely to have a big impact and all Other S.

E. O's have essentially Learned the process of one of these successful S. E.

O's. A lot of S. E.

O's are treating it like a job. They were hired by some agency with limited knowledge and were trained on one specific process. This is how you do S.

E. O. Now, a lot of times these S.

E. 0 s can deliver good results for a while. However, when all you understand is a process and you aren't reasoning from first principles, you're gonna end up doing a lot of things that just don't make sense.

And long term, as Google's algorithm changes, the processes are gonna stop working. This is super common, especially in larger agencies that can't pivot as quickly. So if you're hiring a consultant or you're hiring an agency, my advice is to make sure whoever's in charge of your strategy is reasoning from first principles.

They have their own theory on how Google works and that's where the strategy is coming from. Not from some pre built S. O.

P. That defines what processes they should use for every single company.