When business magnate Elon Musk offered to purchase Twitter in April 2022, many thought it was a late April Fool’s joke. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Several months and a brief lawsuit later, Musk is now the new owner of a social network—and also $44 billion poorer. 

Things seem to have gone downhill since then. Notable highlights include:

Quick question: what skill is the most crucial indicator of success in search engine optimization? 

You might think it’s critical thinking, that you need an analytical mind and the capacity to parse and understand search analytics. You may think communication and social skills are key, as a good SEO professional needs to be able to not only communicate the results of their work, but also use that work to generate compelling content. Alternatively, you might point to the fact that, as an inherently technical pursuit, a skilled SEO professional needs to be tech-savvy. 

The above skills and characteristics are all important, but none of them constitute the true foundation of SEO. Even a powerful tool like SEMrush or AHrefs is functionally useless if you don’t know how to perform efficient, effective research. This is doubly true if you’re combining optimization with content creation. 

We’ve all met at least one search engine optimization (SEO) snake oil salesman. You know the type. 

Grandiose and sweeping promises. Language bogged down with so much jargon it’s functionally meaningless. An endless barrage of gaslighting and cold opens. 

To hear these people talk, SEO is some sort of mystic art, and mastery means you’re guaranteed to dominate the search engine results page (SERP). 

Anyone who’s spent even a little time studying the craft knows this to be a blatant lie. SEO is valuable, indeed—it’s a powerful lead generation and marketing tool in the right hands. But it’s not some secret weapon, and it won’t allow you to seize control of Google’s algorithms. 

In order to leverage it effectively, you need to accept that—you need to understand the limitations of SEO.

A sales funnel—also known as a conversion funnel or a marketing funnel—is basically a visual representation of the different stages a prospect goes through before converting. Within the context of search engine optimization, converting could be anything from purchasing a product to signing up for a newsletter to simply accessing a specific page on your site. Most funnels consist of some version of the following stages: 

• Awareness. People at this stage may or may not know about your company. This is where the majority of your prospects start and where most will likely remain. 
• Interest. These prospects are intrigued but not necessarily hooked just yet. They’ve probably spent a bit of time on your website looking at what you have to offer. 
• Consideration. People at this stage are doing their research into both your company and its competitors in an effort to decide who to choose. 
• Decision. The tipping point. These prospects are on the verge of converting.
• Conversion. The people at this stage have done what you wanted them to do, but you aren’t finished yet. Now you need to put time and effort into nurturing a relationship with those customers in order to keep them loyal—and maybe inspire them to tell their friends and colleagues about your business, too. 

There was a time when search engine optimization(SEO) was all about gaming the algorithm. A time when keyword density and backlinks were the exclusive determining factors in where one appeared on the search engine results page(SERP). But that was decades ago. 

Modern SEO is different. It’s less algorithm-focused and more user-focused. Keywords are still important, certainly—but not more important than creating relevant, high-quality content. 

The problem is that too many so-called SEO agencies ignore this shift. They obsess over pointless metrics like what percentage of a blog post consists of primary and secondary keywords. And in the process, they ignore content quality. 

To say that search engine optimization (SEO) has changed a great deal over the past several years would be putting it lightly.  Today’s SEO landscape is nearly unrecognizable compared to what it looked like in 2018. And even now, it still continues to change. 

Here are a few tips to help you keep pace. 

Put the User Experience First

We’re just about rounding on the one-year anniversary of Google’s Core Web Vitals Update. Also known as the Google Page Experience Update, Core Web Vitals officially establish a website’s user experience as a ranking factor.  If you haven’t already started prioritizing things like interactivity, load time, and ease of use by now, it’s past time you do so.