Most B2B marketers won’t tell you this but SEO is dead. The world’s biggest sites and businesses were first built on the idea that if they worship Google’s algorithms enough, it will help them be discovered. The idea was that the internet is so cluttered and teaming with entropy that digital sales cannot happen if you don’t ever get discovered.
Here’s what that playbook looks like.
Figure out (guess) what people are searching for -> build pages that serve those keywords → people click and discover your business → people buy because you showed up in their search results → repeat.
Thus, began the most expensive war in the history of marketing. Every year, brands burn more than $41 billion in just paying the fee of SEO agencies that clutter the internet more than meme boards. Every year. In vain, mostly.
B2B companies running around to find the best SEO writers and technical specialists must now realize that they’re fighting a losing battle. No amount of money or effort can help them build a digital revenue funnel that’s sustainable. Why? Because SEO is easy and hence, lends itself to being gamed by even the college kids next door with time on their hands.
It’s time we called the time of death for SEO. Any and all attempts to exhume the dead are likely to result in disappointment, fatigue, and regret of burning the green bills. Not convinced? Let me explain.
Discovery is no longer equal to business - With the exception of e-commerce sites or very niche and local businesses, discovery on the internet is not a sufficient condition for generating revenue. B2B companies, especially, face this every day when they see millions of visits to their company pages and blogs mass manufactured by a content agency and wonder where is the corresponding revenue.
Marketers say that this is an attribution problem but it’s really an interesting-ness problem. SEO solves for predictability and keyword-stuffing on pages turns predictability into annoyance. Consumers want to be surprised and they like to stumble upon something off-beat than being told what are the five trending SaaS products this summer.
SEO can make the user experience worse! SEO has been oversold as a panacea for marketing while it gives zero hoots to people’s satisfaction from the page, changes in their buying intent after visiting the page, changes in their level of awareness, the utility of the site, functions of the site - is it a brochure masquerading as an impartial blog? Or is it an actually good piece of writing just surrounded by hideous aggregated links and banners that could throw someone off?
SEO as a process is unpredictable. You can decide the objectives but you cannot predict the outcomes. - pageviews will be determined by market trends and user behavior. A company that advertises on Google with the same keywords will see its SEO rankings improve even if its pages aren’t the most informative. It’s impractical to play a game that requires you to burn the candle at both ends - you spend money on SEO and then spend money on search ads - just spend on ads directly!
Search trends are cyclical - Be it technology firms or electronics manufacturers, all businesses with a decent enough SEO effort know that page views tend to drop and rise on their own depending on the month of the year. During holidays, eCommerce sites become active while all B2B businesses suffer. Hence, no amount of SEO can generate a delta when the consumers just aren’t looking.
The playbook remains the same - Most companies derive competitive advantage by doing things differently. SEO is the opposite. It forces everyone to follow the same playbook and results in copycat behavior and complacency. A good example of this is to just look up ‘section 80c’ and you’ll notice how everyone - from a digital payment company to a health insurance mammoth has written the same 600 words explaining the income-tax deductions.
If you consider the above example, imagine yourself looking for an explanation of the tax laws and reading SEO blogs published by payment firms, insurance companies, banks, mutual funds, and other random sites. How likely are you to buy any of those products or services just because they explained section 80c to you? Stupid, right? You buy insurance when you need it not because it’s outdoing Wikipedia on search results.
There are about a dozen more reasons why SEO is an expensive distraction for B2B firms. The caveat here is that it’s not necessarily a negative strategy if you have enough time, money, and patience. But prioritizing it as the cornerstone of your marketing strategy is usually a good way to look busy while playing and losing other people’s games.
Do let me know what you think. If I get enough interest, I will publish my own playbook on how B2B businesses can refuse the temptation to invest in SEO and generate 80% of the gains by doing 2% of what I call defensive SEO.