It's cold here in Minnesota, and I'm certainly worried about my civil rights and the dismantling of the government, but that's not my gripe today! Today I'm not going to think about how my government wants to remove the keyword "women" from scientific research.

I am happy to hear all quibbles and squabbles with my opinions below. Please reply to this email if you'd like to discuss.

The ideals of optimization and the end of SEO

"It's very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time."

—Jia Tolentino, "Always Be Optimizing," Trick Mirror.

Search, for me, is about being discoverable when someone is actively seeking your content. Brands, from publishers to retail to B2B software, each have certain areas of expertise. Once a brand has accurately determined their product positioning and assessed the competitive landscape, strategic decisions are made on where exactly to focus optimization efforts so content can be discovered by its target audience.

Prominent SEO influencers and their content marketing acolytes, however, do not display the critical thinking skills to correctly read and understand data in any nuanced circumstance—at least not in public. In favor of rapidly pushing out content for a zero-click reader, they've forgotten that other fields, tactics, and ideas exist outside of the internet. Editorial judgment disappears in the face of rat-race content production.

For these online SEO thought leaders, visibility in and accuracy from Google is the endgame, instead of the business results that result from engaged audiences and brand advocates. For those who built careers outside social media settings, it appears that these thought leaders have a high follower count and lots of Search Console screenshots at the ready, but not business results. (Search Console is a leading indicator of organic discoverability but not representative of user growth or retention, both of which are key to SEO success.)

It's as if they look at Sweetgreen (to use one of Jia Tolentino's optimization examples), observe its rapid success, and think they can launch a fast casual restaurant chain after eating a few lunches. They do not consider what happened to the once rapidly scaling retail and restaurant businesses that are now empty storefronts in downtown middle America; they see the single growth exception as the rule. 

Ask about information architecture, and they'll insist that Google only looks at individual pages and has no sitewide ranking signals. Ask them about the regular audience of their clients' rapidly inflating blog posts or surface-level optimizations and they'll talk about how their current ranking strategy "works." Yes, it works, momentarily, until it doesn't.

Traffic to content has never been a means to an end on its own. There is a whole book about it, and as I've written before, many working in search have known pageviews on their own are meaningless. Businesses need a revenue generator — ad sales, product sales, subscriptions, etc. — to run a reliable content operation. Most digital content professionals understand this in 2025. 

Except the SEO influencer community.

Perpetuated primarily by startups hungry for users and the entrepreneurial agencies and thought leaders who serve them, bad data begets worse expectations. Rapid rocketship visibility graphs imply that business results will follow—almost never the case long-term. (Similarly, large social media followings do not correlate with enterprise business results... don't say I didn't warn you.)

All about fields: Professional standardization and peer review

I'm always immensely fascinated when words take a different meaning across industries. In software development, the word "field" indicates an open fillable area in the user interface. In the early years of my SEO career, optimization often meant completing all the fields in the content management system — meta titles, descriptions, taxonomy, what have you, that content teams missed or misunderstood.

In academia, "fields" indicate the cultures that develop around individual areas of study. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu considered fields not only as an academic or industrial area of interest, but also the political, economic, taste, and professional norms surrounding those fields. Many fields have developed standards around research, compensation, peer review, and content formats. The field of print journalism, for example, has different standards and norms than the field of comedy. 

SEO is a relatively new "field," in comparison with all the other fields it touches: information science, mass communications, public relations, software development, and publishing have all been around much longer, with their standards codified in the early to mid-20th century. More recently conceived fields like web development, user experience, and content strategy emerged in enterprise software operations and corporate communications beginning in the 1990s. Their standards are adapted from the well-established academic fields of library science (the predecessor to all keyword-based search systems) and industrial design.

Unlike fields based in academic tradition, SEO was developed as a subset of marketing and entrepreneurship, outside of higher educational institutions. The folks who developed SEO businesses rapidly scaled (because academia is molasses-slow), but mostly did so without the functions of academia that precede professionalization: discourse, peer review, authoring books with reputable academic publishers, and all those hoity-toity trappings of intellectual legitimacy.

In the 2000s, if you demonstrated success at SEO, regardless of how you got there, you could then speak with authority on it to other businesses. And if you kept up with the changes Google made as it developed more sophisticated algorithms, you could advise more businesses on how to appear at the top of Google results.

Careening into publishing and information science: When SEO meets its forbears

However, as I learned at the beginning of my SEO career, some "best practices" crashed into, or were either at odds with, more established disciplines. The measure of keyword density, for example, conflicted entirely with the idea of good writing that I learned while getting my English degree. The acquisition of backlinks from any willing source was at odds with both journalistic and corporate public relations standards—backlink acquisition still is, in most cases.

In my role, working for established enterprise businesses with fully fledged communications departments, SEO became less of a dictation of ranking factors to optimize and fields to fill. For me, search and discovery became, working with experts in information architecture and corporate comms, a perspective that needed to be interrogated. 

Did my clients really want to deprioritize a functional website navigation and readable text for a bunch of random pages added to the website because people were searching for them? No! They did not.

And guess what? Following our sitewide optimizations, their content performed better in search overall.

But unfortunately for the web and the freedom of information, everyone working in enterprise collaboration was generally under a non-disclosure agreement. After all, Fortune 500 companies don't exactly want to share their nuanced and easy-to-duplicate content strategies with others in their industry. Occasionally, a fraction of a project would make it to a conference presentation, but no one working in enterprise content was showing off their collaborative efforts on the SEO forums.

What enterprise consultants did, though, was corroborate with publicly available information online. If one of us wanted to pitch a strategy that incorporated the idea of entity search, we'd go to White Board Friday on Moz, for example, and look to see whether they were talking about the same ideas we were.

For the most part, though, it became clear that the "SEO experts" who published online weren't dealing in the most sophisticated content strategies. They were helping small businesses navigate a gold rush, but not much more.

The SEO information plateau: Entrepreneur and practitioner do not always mix

Unfortunately, the availability of useful information about search online has plateaued. When I log into common SEO tools, I see recommendations that encourage poorly categorized pillars and topic clusters. What passes for "intent analysis" is insultingly basic and doesn't remotely approach the nuance that makes enterprise content discoverable. Sometimes I wonder if anyone building the most popular SEO tools has ever spoken with a taxonomist.

These tools are aiming in general direction of enterprise-quality SEO, but if a website doesn't have strong navigation and high quality user experience to begin with, pillars and topic clusters will do absolutely no good.

Details that I consider to be common knowledge in the search world—that entity optimization is table stakes, that content needs to be discoverable on a website without Google search, that ranking data is only one piece of a much larger puzzle, that traffic alone is meaningless—do not appear to be well known from people who post about SEO. Many were recently flabbergasted at a significant content audit and reduction on Hubspot's blog, even though a merge-and-purge is a common website content strategy. It's as if they've never collaborated or looked outside the extremely narrow box of websites about SEO to understand what digital success looks like.

Because SEO never concerned itself with professional standardization, hundreds of online entrepreneurs and freelancers picked up dated tactics and worse reasoning skills, calling them "SEO." 

SEO entrepreneurs themselves never picked up the collaborative spirit of enterprise teams; instead of advancing their discipline, they were selling their businesses or focusing on their business endeavors. In some occasions they actively argued that optimizing for Expertise, Authority, and Trust were not important because they weren't direct ranking signals. In that immense venture capital-infused focus on rapidly getting to the top, they forgot to consider that other fields exist.

Many less experienced SEO teams inserted themselves as the last step before content publication—enabling them to tweak headlines and add keywords... without the approval of the content strategists that spent time thinking through the language and positioning to begin with. Content strategists and journalists were forced to compromise their professional norms and values in favor of "good SEO." A focus on shipping content versus building quality, trust, and an audience will ruin most businesses long-term.

That's one reason I'm not long on the future of SEO: unless the discipline integrates into and alongside the other fields it touches in an enterprise setting—UX, CX, editorial, development, and production—it can't advance as a practice. There are no common standards for what good SEO data looks like, so frequent posters grab whatever screenshots they can find and often manipulate them to tell a specific story. And if it's a discipline that only serves entrepreneurs, it doesn't have relevance for the behemoth of corporate America, where most of the work gets done.

The best qualifying question for an SEO team: What does Good look like to you?

In recent months I've been frustrated with the online SEOs complaining about Google's most recent updates. I have mixed feelings about both the Helpful Content Update and Site Reputation Abuse—but I see that the loudest SEO influencers have immense blinders on when it comes to identifying ideal content that should live at the top of search results. When you ask them about the best content on the internet is, they'll point you to a homegrown publication optimized for affiliate revenue, with nary an audience retention or editorial strategy to be seen.

"This website was optimized according to Google's guidelines," some say when complaining about post-algo update losses, without having researched or critically analyzed at what anyone else's guidelines for good content looks like. They haven't looked into publications that are creatively optimizing their digital presence, haven't researched the term "content strategy," and they certainly haven't considered the impact of language-based information architecture on their website structure. Common human-first design practices, easily accessible on UX powerhouse N/N Group are ignored. Editorial norms? Who needs 'em? They're, like, a century old anyway. 

Sometimes it's as if online content marketers and SEOs get 100% of their ideas from zero-click content and online communities—the blind leading the blind.

For optimization to work, we need to adjust our ideals. Much like the "ideal woman" that Tolentino describes — at its very best, the Barbie written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbauch and played by Margot Robbie, who is light years away from "normal" womanhood — the "ideal SEO website" requires massive reconsideration. 

An ideal website isn't optimized for landing pages and clicks; it's optimized for people to read, explore, and return to without having to access Google. And even though none of the online SEO folks have "proven" there's a sitewide ranking signal, my experience confirms that yeah, website and content experience matters.

Google has made plenty of decisions I don't agree with — I think late 2024's Site Reputation Abuse update was pretty ham-handed, although maybe I'll agree with its outcomes in the long term. But my experience has been: If you build good content that people want to return to, and optimize it for the subjects they want to find, that content will show up in search results. Yes, you may have to tweak it, optimize it technically, do some editorial surgery to meet your audiences' needs, but it'll be there. Unless you are trying to rank for "best credit cards" or "best gambling app."

As we optimize our content for AI, search professionals in enterprise settings are likely set up for success. Many have likely already collaborated with search professionals on their own internal search engines.

But those over-focused on Google or hyper-fixated on finding hacks to show up in AI overviews will hit a very hard wall when it comes to displaying meaningful results.

SEO myopia is everywhere. But if search professionals begin collaborating with content and information professionals from established fields (instead of imposing optimizations after the fact), we'll end up with a better web.

Content tech links of the week

The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.

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Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI

Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.

Anora was an absolute treat. Definitely my favorite Best Picture contender so far (haven't yet seen The Brutalist).