For good SEO, you must “see the forest for the trees.”
- We love internal linking, yet many find it spammy.
- Using exact keyword phrases, or too much keyword-focused content, will ruin good writing.
- No one likes an ugly site just because it passes Core Web Vitals.
- Backlinks for their own sake may not generate quality traffic and could even harm the website by association.
- Searchers don’t care about keywords in content… they want solutions! Perhaps they need to buy quickly. This may or may not involve reading.
- Fixing technical issues like broken pages may be foundational but will barely drive organic growth.
- Revenue grows companies, not organic clicks & keyword rankings.
If great UX/UI is an indirect ranking factor, since users quickly click back to search results when unsatisfied, does this mean an SEO can update layouts? Of course not! Yet, a good designer is needed to compete organically.
As such, SEOs thrive when integrated within multi-functional marketing teams that include design, product, content, development/engineering & business intelligence/analytics/data science.
How many of these roles beyond SEO though understand structured data, canonical tags, JS best practices, psychology, and a near-endless list of ranking factors?
SEO brings a deep knowledge base that will otherwise be neglected, harming organic traffic growth!