Why Do Some People Say They Hate SEO?

Kurt from Sydney sent us this gem. Thanks for that. I hope that people don’t ‘hate’ SEO just misunderstand it because of some of the strange tactics and unprofessional people working in the field. As someone said today “oh no, another flea in the sandbox!”

In this video, Andrew Radics and Ian Hopkinson discuss some of the reasons why people say they hate seo.

 

 Transcript:

Ian: You a bit dehydrated there mate?

Andrew: Yes…sorry.

Ian: I’m not quite as dehydrated today.

Andrew: Kind of reminds me of the sample that we got months ago.

Ian: Couple of months ago the doctor.

Andrew: Oh dear, oh dear.

Ian: Well today we’re going to talk about a question that we got from Kurt in Sydney. He said “why do people hate SEO so much?” I love this question.

Andrew: Yes it’s a bit of an odd one.

Ian: Maybe we should firstly define  people. You all know what SEO is! Let’s define people.

Andrew: Oh dear.

Ian: I think by people he means people that are customers or clients who have had bad experiences with SEO or bad SEO that has been done for them or what they think is SEO. Is that where we’re going with this?

Andrew: Yeah look I haven’t actually met anybody who actually say they hate SEO. It’s a bit of a strange question, you know obviously SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation” but the actual definition of optimising or optimization is “simply to make as effective, perfect or useful as possible or to make the best of” and that’s exactly what we try to do with websites we try to make it perform to the best of it’s ability.

Ian: Yeah.

Andrew: And how can you hate that?

Ian: Yeah that’s a good point I think what’s happened is people have manipulated the system and google has spoken out about those people who have manipulated the system and google has changed their alpha rhythms to sort of get around that. Whatever the publicity is or the chatter around those issues has become a lot louder the the people who have always done  the right thing with SEO and used white hat tactics as opposed to black or grey hat tactics. So I think that’s fair enough that people have these moments where they’re like “I hate SEO” but my question is do they really understand what SEO is and is their hate sort of focussed in the right direction. Do they hate people who are bad professionals? Or do they actually hate SEO? Do you know what I mean?

Andrew: Yeah I think in this case… look to put it simply there’s an article that I looked up, actually you looked up, should I mention names?

Ian: Yeah why not? It’s a healthy discussion.

Andrew: It’s a website called business to community by a guy called Troy Hensen. Now it’s not a bad article of course but I think judging by this people will have a misunderstanding of what search engine optimisation is. He’s talking about it from a writer’s, a content writer’s point of view, saying things that a lot of content writer’s get asked for are for making an article based around a ridiculous keyboard like “best photographer nyc studio” rather than writing about “best new york city photography studios” which is fine totally understand that.

Ian: So slightly tweaking the way you express something deliberately.

Andrew: Yes and he’s also talking about people who have asked him and all content writer’s to stack as many keywords as possible into a 200-300 word article. Anyway the keywords they are looking for to target around about 200-300 words long anyway.

Ian: Okay.

Andrew: So you’ve got a 200-300 word article with 200 odd keywords in it or some ridiculous figure like that so that’s fine too I understand that. Then he’s talking about people ask for content writers to make a blurb on the website as easy to read as possible, random keywords thrown in and he’ saying that with our blurb that’s not very long obviously, to stuff as many keywords in there as possible lets not reader friendly. Obviously not our way however, this what he is describing here is not SEO.

Ian: You’re right.

Andrew: To create content you’re not talking about stuffing as many keywords as possible into even a 1000 word article.

Ian: That’s keyword stacking.

Andrew: That’s so 5 years ago. Good SEO companies or individuals don’t do this sort of stuff this is not something that an SEO company would do.  These are the sort of things you find on these freelancer sites. People going on there wanting the cheapest SEO done for them as possible, this is their requirements and this is what they understand SEO to be and they look for people to actually do that for them and believe me there’s ten of thousands of people on there who will.

Ian: Yeah it’s takes me back to what we were talking about earlier that if you say you hate SEO or why do people hate SEO, I think you just hate people who are unprofessional and actually don’t do a good job and deliver on something. So you could say I hate SEO, I hate content marketing, I hate social media, I hate website developers, I hate programmers, I hate thought leaders. You could say you hated anything like but what you really should be saying is I hate unprofessional people who give whatever the area is in this case SEO a bad name.

Andrew: Well yeah I think though to truly say you hate something, you dislike something, or you don’t approve of something, first off  you have to understand it. If you don’t understand it how can you hate it? How can you dislike it?

Ian: Ignorance is not bliss.

Andrew: Exactly so people who have decided they hate SEO they don’t understand it. They don’t understand  the benefit and they’ve only dealt with dodgy people before and gotten no results and spent a lot of money.

Ian: Yeah yeah and look there’s not anything wrong with learning the rules to something and delivering something in alignment with those rules. Why do people get up in arms about SEO people who know the rules and god forbid set up your website and optimise your brand to be found to be better found by the search engines? I mean hello isn’t that sort of the whole point? I mean if you were up on criminal charges and your attorney stood up in court and said a bunch of stuff that was not in alignment with an approach that has been taken before or whatever then everyone would look at him and say well you’re a crazy, what’re you doing there’s no precedence to this? How can you show me in the rules there that that’s even a thing? It’s just what you do you’re supposed to know your stuff and be prepared, professional and deliver. You know like we’ve discussed before, businesses aren’t in control of this stuff, Google is in control, they make the rules, they don’t tell what changes they’re going to make or necessarily what the rules are but they give “guidelines”. It’s an SEO’s job to stay on top of that. If they’re not staying on top of that and you get a bad result for something that’s unprofessionalism. That’s them not being the expert that they proclaim to be. So thank you very much Kurt for the question obviously it’s decided that we were a bit confused by the question but we were actually enjoying this discussion. Yeah so if you hate SEO or if you dislike SEO, I can understand why there’s lots of misconceptions out there I get that. We’ve talked about a lot of the tactics that have been used by cheap SEO companies which we’ve been talking about ‘til we’re blue in the face….but it’s not blue it’s yellow.

Andrew: It’s orange yesterday and now it’s yellow.

Ian: Americans would say you’re a bit pissed, no that’s not true and no that’s wouldn’t say that, that’s angry. Anyway off the topic… Why do people hate SEO so much? I don’t think they do I just think they don’t understand it or they hate unprofessionalism is probably the right way to sum it all up. Thank you very much Andrew and Ian, didn’t introduce ourselves at the beginning because we were too busy laughing at our urinated glasses. Speak soon! It’s always entertaining for us I don’t know whether it is for you guys but anyway we’ll keep trying. Questions, problems, issues, get in touch, website is “madscientistdigital.com” speak soon!