SEO
7 Biggest Causes Of Stress For Digital Marketers
Working in digital marketing, stress is inevitable. It’s part of the job description.
You can’t be effective without pushing your personal limits from time to time.
But, if you’re always stressed out, then maybe it’s time to reevaluate the causes and tackle your biggest stressors head-on.
Below you will find seven of the biggest causes of stress for digital marketers and some tips on how to deal with them.
1. Measuring Metrics
The Stress
Measuring metrics in itself isn’t exactly stressful. The stressful part of metrics comes in two forms.
First, you have the result of metrics.
Say you’ve been working on a campaign for the past six months and you’ve put your whole marketing heart and soul into it.
You’ve devoted more than full-time hours to the campaign and have done everything you were supposed to, and then some.
Then the campaign comes to an end and the results are calculated. The metrics come back to inform you that unfortunately, despite your efforts and doing everything the pros suggested, goals weren’t met.
You’ve utilized the last of the budget and spent the past six months on a campaign that didn’t produce results. Insert sad sigh.
So, you take the data that you have from the campaign, and you say it wasn’t a complete loss because you’ve at least learned more about the user behavior or the targeting, or the ad copy, or the keywords.
Now, it’s time to go plead for more budget and try again. Insert stress.
The second part of metric stress is the part I see digital marketers struggle with the most. This is the part of having no metrics at all! Yes, it happens. Like a lot.
Take content metrics for example. Fully 81% of marketers integrate content into their marketing strategies, but 65% of marketers are struggling to measure the impact of their content marketing strategies.
That’s more than half who don’t understand (or are at the very least having a difficult time trying to figure out) what metrics they’re supposed to measure.
How To Deal
Set yourself up for success, and not stress, right away.
In the beginning stages of your strategy development, you need to be defining what is the most important part of this campaign.
Is it direct sales? Increase video views? Perhaps it’s as simple as doubling engagement and not tied directly to a dollar amount.
Either way, you need to define what the primary goal is, and then the secondary, the tertiary, and so on.
It’s important to go past just defining the main goal of the campaign because the primary goal isn’t always met, especially in the first round.
Plus, you want to have a few other metrics to measure in order to quantify some success or total failure, not just focusing on a primary or secondary.
2. Low-to-No Budgets
The Stress
Oh boy. Not having a budget or having an extremely low budget to work with makes a digital marketer’s job extra stressful.
Lots of times the low-to-no budgets are paired with extra-high expectations.
These expectations could be something like generating 10,000 new leads by making a homemade video on YouTube and having no advertising budget to promote the video. Talk about a stressful situation!
How To Deal
Not everyone is gifted with large or “experimental” budgets.
As digital marketers, though, we need to be prepared to work with both players, the big and the small.
By clarifying realistic expectations from the beginning, you’ll be able to inform your boss or client what they can expect to receive by spending X amount.
No, we can’t predict the future.
Yes, we certainly hope and work hard for the best, but by making it known from the get-go what can actually happen with a specific budget range you’re avoiding extreme amounts of disappointment and stress.
After the budget meeting, head back to your desk and run your own numbers on what you’ve seen as a result in the past.
Get an idea of how much it took for similar goals to be achieved and how long it took.
Then, prepare a report clarifying what has worked, under what conditions, and a prediction of what your boss or client should be able to expect to receive based on X budget.
3. Google Updates
The Stress
Oh, Google. We are constantly trying to stay on top of every update that you make.
We even try to prep before the updates and algorithm changes happen. Yet, you still cause us, digital marketers, an insane amount of stress with every new update, Google.
Within the blink of an eye, a major change could have just happened and our websites or our clients’ websites are affected by it. Most of the time they’re affecting negatively, too.
So, yes Google, you do occasionally bring on the stress.
How To Deal
One of the best ways to deal with the Google stress is to stay on top of anything and everything that happens within the industry, just as Google does.
Google takes note of things like user behavior, cyber bugs, spam, and a handful of other web issues.
You should, too. Doing so will help you better predict when changes are going to happen and what kind of changes are most likely to come next.
Subscribe to the top SEO blogs. These blog posts are written by the experts, some of which have great connections with Google and long-term histories giving them better chances of predicting, adapting, and sharing strategies with other marketers.
Take it a step further and follow SEO experts who not only know their stuff but are great sources for SEO predictions.
4. Wearing Too Many Hats
The Stress
Whether you work in-house, agency, or own your own business I can bet all of the money in my wallet ($4 and change) on the fact that you wear way more than just one hat.
In-house marketers are generally trying to do it all, acting as the SEO, UX designer, social media specialist, PPC expert, and content marketer.
At the agency, employees have their unique specialty that they focus on but often find themselves assisting other departments.
The business owner, well they know very well what it’s like to balance 50 different types of hats on their heads at once better than anyone else.
How To Deal
Zone in and truly focus on your area of expertise.
Yes, stay on top of the millions of updates happening in all realms of the digital marketing world, but put your primary focus and research toward perfecting the craft of your niche.
Prioritize what the main objectives are for your specific niche and then, if time allows, see how you can assist in other departments.
A good example of this is if you’re a social media marketer to subscribe to both overarching digital marketing podcasts like Edge of the Web and more focused podcasts like the Perpetual Traffic Podcast that focuses on just Facebook.
This will keep you informed of both the industry and your specific niche’s trends, updates, and strategies.
5. Lack Of Strategy Development
The Stress
The pressure is always on to hurry up and produce results.
Even though it’s become common knowledge now that digital marketing takes T-I-M-E, we all still want results to happen yesterday.
This is why so many budgets are wasted because we go headfirst into trying to produce results and forget about first developing a strategy that will get us to those results.
How To Deal
Define your goals, what your needs are, and then define a strategy that should be able to get you there. Don’t work backward.
A new project or campaign flow should look like the following:
- Define the audience: Who is this campaign going to be for? Who are you trying to reach?
- Define the goal: What do you need to accomplish with this campaign? What’re the primary and secondary objectives?
- Define the budget: How much can you afford to spend on this campaign? How much do you think it will take for you to achieve the goal?
- Define the strategy: What is the best method to get there? What kind of marketing will help you accomplish the goal? Do you need ads? What kind of content do you need?
- Implement the strategy: Put one to four together and give the chosen method a shot.
- Define the results: Were any results produced? Did you collect any data? How close or how far did you align with the goal?
- Do it again.
6. Not Generating Conversions
The Stress
You finally found the sweet spot with your PPC campaign and were able to drop the cost per click by 40%. Clicks are flying in and they’re coming from exactly where you want them to come from.
Yet, no one is buying. Traffic is at an all-time high and still, no one is converting on the website. Why?!
How To Deal
Usually, when it comes to gaining clicks and no conversions there is something wrong with the actual landing page or website.
Check the following to see if you can diagnose what’s causing people to leave without converting:
- Page Speed: How fast is the page loading? If it’s taking too long to load, people aren’t going to wait and you’re going to gain the click without the conversion. Former Googler Maile Ohye says, “Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half-second.”
- Design: Is it overwhelming coming to your site? When I land on a website, I’ll leave it without even digesting the content if it’s too overwhelming. What I mean by too overwhelming is a pop-up box that takes 3/4 of the page and isn’t clear how I can close it, a site that is 90% of text and no clear path on what text box to read first, and videos that play automatically only to freeze within the first two to three seconds. If you think your design is great and still aren’t receiving conversions, send the site to 10 different people (a variety of people) and gather feedback.
- Content: Is what they clicked on what they’re actually going to get from the landing page/website? If you promise a 50% off coupon and send users to your “New Shoes” category page, then you can’t be too shocked when you receive a ton of clicks and zero conversions. Have your message actually match the page content.
7. Grammar Errors
The Stress
The to-do list is piling up and we need to get that piece of content published, like yesterday. So, we scram together and add the final pieces, give it a little branding flair and then send it off.
Within about 24.5 seconds, your phone goes off with a Twitter notification mentioning the brand and a screenshot of the subject line spelled, “How to Tackle Technical SEO on a Low Budget.” Your heart sinks, but you’re not the only one.
“Oopsie” subject lines, social media post corrections, and ad headline mistakes happen all of the time.
How To Deal
Slow down!
I promise you, it takes a lot less time to just re-read your copy before you publish or ask a colleague to check it over than it does to send out an apology social media post, an oopsie email newsletter, and restart the campaign.
Don’t pride yourself on being perfect. We’re all human and mistakes happen, but fewer mistakes will happen if you take an extra minute and double-check your work before publishing.
Conclusion
Did you notice that most of the “how to deal” tips in this article are ways to improve the organization or set clearer expectations?
Working in digital marketing can be incredibly stressful, so you need to think about how to remove or reduce the parts that don’t spark joy.
Whether it’s fine-tailoring processes or learning to let go and delegate, whatever works best for you, just be sure to stick with it.
More Resources:
Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
if( typeof sopp !== “undefined” && sopp === ‘yes’ ){
fbq(‘dataProcessingOptions’, [‘LDU’], 1, 1000);
}else{
fbq(‘dataProcessingOptions’, []);
}
fbq(‘init’, ‘1321385257908563’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
fbq(‘trackSingle’, ‘1321385257908563’, ‘ViewContent’, {
content_name: ‘stressors-digital-marketers’,
content_category: ‘careers-education strategy-digital ‘
});
SEO
The Lean Guide (With Template)

A competitive analysis (or market competitive analysis) is a process where you collect information about competitors to gain an edge over them and get more customers.
However, the problem is that “traditional” competitive analysis is overkill for most businesses — it requires impractical data and takes too long to complete (and it’s very expensive if you choose to outsource).
A solution to that is a lean approach to the process — and that’s what this guide is about.
In other words, we’ll focus on the most important data you need to answer the question: “Why would people choose them over you?”. No boring theory, outtakes from marketing history, or spending hours digging up nice-to-have information.
In this guide, you will find:
- A real-life competitive analysis example.
- Templates: one for input data and one for a slide deck to present your analysis to others.
- Step-by-step instructions.
Our template consists of two documents: a slide deck and a spreadsheet.
The Slide deck is the output document. It will help you present the analysis to your boss or your teammates.
The spreadsheet is the input document. You will find tables that act as the data source for the charts from the slide deck, as well as a prompt to use in ChatGPT to help you with user review research.


We didn’t focus on aesthetics here; every marketer likes to do slide decks their own way, so feel free to edit everything you’ll find there.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the process. The template consists of these six tasks:
- Identify your direct competitors.
- Compare share of voice.
- Compare pricing and features.
- Find strong and weak points based on reviews.
- Compare purchasing convenience.
- Present conclusions.
Going forward, we’ll explain why these steps matter and show how to complete them.
Direct competitors are businesses that offer a similar solution to the same audience.
They matter a lot more than indirect competitors (i.e. businesses with different products but targeting the same audience as you) because you’ll be compared with them often (e.g. in product reviews and rankings). Plus, your audience is more likely to gravitate towards them when considering different options.
You probably have a few direct competitors in mind already, but here are a few ways to find others based on organic search and paid search ads.
Our basis for the analysis was Landingi, a SaaS for building landing pages (we chose that company randomly). So in our case, we found these 3 direct competitors.


Look at keyword overlap
Keyword overlap uncovers sites that target the same organic keywords as you. Some sites will compete with you for traffic but not for customers (e.g. G2 may share some keywords with Landingi but they’re a different business). However, in many cases, you will find direct competitors just by looking at this marketing channel.
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and enter your site’s address.
- Scroll down to Organic competitors.
- Visit the URLs to pick 3 – 5 direct competitors.


To double-check the choice of competitors, we also looked at who was bidding for search ads on Google.
See who’s advertising
If someone is spending money to show ads for keywords related to what you do, that’s a strong indication they are a direct competitor.
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
- Type in a few broad keywords related to your niche, like “landing page builder” or “landing page tool”.
- Go to the Ads history report.
- Visit the sites that have a high presence of ads in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).


Once you’re done checking both reports, write down competitors in the deck.
You can also take screenshots of the reports and add them to your deck to show the supporting data for your argument.


Share of voice is a measure of your reach in any given channel compared to competitors.
A bigger share of voice (SOV) means that your competitors are more likely to reach your audience. In other words, they may be promoting more effectively than you.
In our example, we found that Landingi’s SOV was the lowest in both of these channels.
Organic:


And social media:


Here’s how we got that data using Ahrefs and Brand24.
Organic share of voice
Before we start, make sure you have a project set up in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker.


Now:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis and enter your and your competitors’s sites as shown below.


- On the next screen, set the country with the most important market for your business and set the filters like this:


- Select keywords that sound most relevant to your business (even if you don’t rank for them yet) and Add them to Rank Tracker.


- Go to Rank Tracker, open your project, and look for Competitors/Overview. This report will uncover automatically calculated Share of Voice.


- Add the numbers in corresponding cells inside the sheet and paste the graph inside the slide deck.


It’s normal that the numbers don’t add up to 100%. SOV is calculated by including sites that compete with you in traffic but are not your direct competitors, e.g. blogs.
Social share of voice
We can also measure our share of voice across social media channels using Brand24.
- Go to Brand24.
- Start a New project for your brand and each competitor. Use the competitors’ brand name as the keyword to monitor.
- Go to the Comparison report and compare your project with competitors.


- Take a screenshot of the SOV charts and paste them into the slide deck. Make sure the charts are set to “social media”.


Consumers often choose solutions that offer the best value for money — simple as that. And that typically comes down to two things:
- Whether you have the features they care about. We’ll use all features available across all plans to see how likely the product is to satisfy user needs.
- How much they will need to pay. Thing is, the topic of pricing is tricky: a) when assessing affordability, people often focus on the least expensive option available and use it as a benchmark, b) businesses in the SaaS niche offer custom plans. So to make things more practical, we’ll compare the cheapest plans, but feel free to run this analysis across all pricing tiers.
After comparing our example company to competitors, we found that it goes head-to-head with Unbounce as the most feature-rich solution on the market.


Here’s how we got that data.
- Note down your and your competitors’ product features. One of the best places to get this information is pricing pages. Some brands even publish their own competitor comparisons — you may find them helpful too.
- While making the list, place a “1” in the cell corresponding to the brand that offers the solution.


- Enter the price of the cheapest plan (excluding free plans).


- Once finished, copy the chart and paste it inside the deck.
User reviews can show incredibly valuable insight into your competitors’ strong and weak points. Here’s why this matters:
- Improving on what your competitors’ customers appreciate could help you attract similar customers and possibly win some over.
- Dissatisfaction with competitors is a huge opportunity. Some businesses are built solely to fix what other companies can’t fix.
Here’s a sample from our analysis:


And here’s how we collated the data using ChatGPT. Important: repeat the process for each competitor.
- Open ChatGPT and enter the prompt from the template.


- Go to G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot and find a competitor’s reviews with ratings from 2 – 4 (i.e. one rating above the lowest and one below the highest possible). Reason:
businesses sometimes solicit five-star reviews, whereas dissatisfied customers tend to leave one-star reviews in a moment of frustration. The most actionable feedback usually comes in between.
- Copy and paste the content of the reviews into ChatGPT (don’t hit enter yet).
- Once you’re done pasting all reviews, hit enter in ChatGPT to run the analysis.


- Paste the graphs into the deck. If you want the graphs to look different, don’t hesitate to ask the AI.
There’s a faster alternative, but it’s a bit more advanced.
Instead of copy-pasting, you can use a scraping tool like this one to get all reviews at once. The downside here is that not all review sources will a have scraping tool available.
Lastly, we’ll see how easy it is to actually buy your products, and compare the experience to your competitors.
This is a chance to simplify your checkout process, and even learn from any good habits your competitors have adopted.
For example, we found that our sample company had probably nothing to worry about in this area — they ticked almost all of the boxes.


Here’s how to complete this step:
- Place a “1” if you or any of your competitors offer convenience features listed in the template.
- Once done, copy the chart and paste it into the deck.
This is the part of the presentation where you sum up all of your findings and suggest a course of action.
Here are two examples:
- Landingi had the lowest SOV in the niche, and that is never good. So the conclusion might be to go a level deeper and do an SEO competitive analysis, and to increase social media presence by creating more share-worthy content like industry surveys, design/CRO tips, or in-house data studies.
- Although the brand had a very high purchasing convenience score, during the analysis we found that there was a $850 gap between the monthly full plan and the previous tier. The conclusion here might be to offer a custom plan (like competitors do) to fill that gap.
We encourage you to take your time here and think about what would make the most sense for your business.
Tip
It’s good to be specific in your conclusions, but don’t go too deep. Competitive analysis concerns many aspects of the business, so it’s best to give other departments a chance to chime in. Just because your competitors have a few unique features doesn’t necessarily mean you need to build them too.
Final thoughts
A competitive analysis is one of the most fruitful exercises in marketing. It can show you areas for improvement, give ideas for new features, and help you discover gaps in your strategy. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it’s fundamental to running a successful business.
Just don’t forget to balance “spying” on your competitors with innovation. After all, you probably don’t want to become an exact copy of someone else’s brand.
In other words, use competitive analysis to keep up with your competitors, but don’t let that erase what’s unique about your brand or make you forget your big vision.
Got comments or questions? Ping me on X.
SEO
Critical WordPress Form Plugin Vulnerability Affects Up To +200,000 Installs

Security researchers at Wordfence detailed a critical security flaw in the MW WP Form plugin, affecting versions 5.0.1 and earlier. The vulnerability allows unauthenticated threat actors to exploit the plugin by uploading arbitrary files, including potentially malicious PHP backdoors, with the ability to execute these files on the server.
MW WP Form Plugin
The MW WP Form plugin helps to simplify form creation on WordPress websites using a shortcode builder.
It makes it easy for users to create and customize forms with various fields and options.
The plugin has many features, including one that allows file uploads using the [mwform_file name=”file”] shortcode for the purpose of data collection. It is this specific feature that is exploitable in this vulnerability.
Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability
An Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability is a security issue that allows hackers to upload potentially harmful files to a website. Unauthenticated means that the attacker does not need to be registered with the website or need any kind of permission level that comes with a user permission level.
These kinds of vulnerabilities can lead to remote code execution, where the uploaded files are executed on the server, with the potential to allow the attackers to exploit the website and site visitors.
The Wordfence advisory noted that the plugin has a check for unexpected filetypes but that it doesn’t function as it should.
According to the security researchers:
“Unfortunately, although the file type check function works perfectly and returns false for dangerous file types, it throws a runtime exception in the try block if a disallowed file type is uploaded, which will be caught and handled by the catch block.
…even if the dangerous file type is checked and detected, it is only logged, while the function continues to run and the file is uploaded.
This means that attackers could upload arbitrary PHP files and then access those files to trigger their execution on the server, achieving remote code execution.”
There Are Conditions For A Successful Attack
The severity of this threat depends on the requirement that the “Saving inquiry data in database” option in the form settings is required to be enabled in order for this security gap to be exploited.
The security advisory notes that the vulnerability is rated critical with a score of 9.8 out of 10.
Actions To Take
Wordfence strongly advises users of the MW WP Form plugin to update their versions of the plugin.
The vulnerability is patched in the lutes version of the plugin, version 5.0.2.
The severity of the threat is particularly critical for users who have enabled the “Saving inquiry data in database” option in the form settings and that is compounded by the fact that no permission levels are needed to execute this attack.
Read the Wordfence advisory:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Alexander_P
SEO
How SEOs Make the Web Better

SEOs catch flak for ruining the web, but they play a crucial role in the search ecosystem, and actually make the internet better for everyone.
Let’s get the criticism out of the way. There are bad actors in SEO, people who seek to extract money from the internet regardless of the cost to others. There are still scams and snake oil, posers and plagiarists. Many parts of the web have become extremely commercialized, with paid advertising and big brands displacing organic and user-generated content.
But while there are situations where SEOs have made things worse, to fixate on them is to ignore the colossal elephant in the room: in the ways that really matter, the web is the best it’s ever been:
- It’s the easiest it has ever been to find information on the internet. Searchers have a staggering array of tutorials, teardowns, and tips at their fingertips, containing information that is generally accurate and helpful—and this was not always the case.
- Bad actors have a smaller influence over search. Search is less of a Wild West than it used to be. Once-scam-ridden topics are subject to significant scrutiny, and the problems and loopholes in search that need fixing today—like big brands and generic content receiving undue prominence—are smaller and less painful than the problems of the past.
- More people use search to their benefit. Online content is the most accessible it has ever been, and it’s easier than ever to grow a local business or expand into international markets on the back of search.
SEOs have played a crucial role in these improvements, poking and prodding, building and—sometimes—breaking. They are Google power users: the people who push the system to extremes, but in doing so, catalyze the change needed to make search better for everyone.
Let’s explore how.
SEOs are much-needed intermediaries between Google and the rest of the world, helping non-technical people acquire and benefit from search engine traffic.
There is a huge amount of valuable information locked up in the heads of people who have no idea how to build a website or index a blog post. A carpet fitter with a bricks-and-mortar business might have decades of experience solving costly problems with uneven subfloors or poor moisture management, but no understanding of how to share that information online.
SEOs provide little nudges towards topics that people care about and writing that’s accessible to people and robots. They help solve technical problems that would hinder or completely block a site from appearing in search results. They identify opportunities for companies to be rewarded for creating great content.
It’s a win-win: businesses are rewarded with traffic, searchers have their intent satisfied, and the world is made a little richer for the newfound knowledge it contains.
SEOs do many things to actively make the web a better place, tending to their own plot of the Google garden to make sure it flourishes.
Take, for example, the myriad standards and guidelines designed to make the web a more accessible place for users. The implementation of these standards—turning theoretical guidelines into real, concrete parts of the web—often happens because of the SEO team.
Technical SEOs play a big part in adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a set of principles designed to ensure online content is “perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust” for every user. Every SEO’s fixation with Core Web Vitals fuels a faster, more efficient web. Content teams translate Google’s helpful content guidelines into useful words and images on a page.
(Case in point: check out Aleyda Solis’ Content Helpfulness Analyzer.)


There is a lot of overlap between “things that help users” and “things that improve search performance.” Even if the motive behind these changes is as simple as generating more traffic, a well-optimized website is, generally speaking, one that is also great for real human beings trying to engage with it.
The biggest criticism leveled at SEOs is that they break things. And they do! But that breakage acts as a type of pressure testing that strengthens the system as a whole.
Abuse of spintax and keyword stuffing forced Google to develop a better understanding of on-page content. Today, that loophole is closed, but more importantly, Google is much better at understanding the contents of a page and its relationship to a website as a whole.
Hacks like hiding keywords with white text on a white background (or moving them beyond the visible bounds of the screen) forced Google to expand its understanding of page styling and CSS, and how on-page information interacts with the environment that contains it.
Even today’s deluge of borderline-plagiarised AI content is not without benefit: it creates a very clear incentive for Google to get better at rewarding information gain and prioritizing publishers with solid EEAT credentials. These improvements will make tomorrow’s version of search much better.
This isn’t just Google fixing what SEOs broke: these changes usually leave lasting benefits that extend beyond any single spam tactic and make search better for all of its users.


This is not to argue that blackhat SEO is desirable. It would be better to make these improvements without incurring pain along the way. But Search is huge and complicated, and Google has little incentive to spend money proactively fixing problems and loopholes.
If we can’t solve every issue before it causes pain, we should be grateful for a correction mechanism that prevents it—and more extreme abuse—from happening in the future. SEOs break the system, and in doing so, make future breakages a lot less severe.
Some SEOs take advantage of the loopholes they discover—but many don’t. They choose to raise these issues in public spaces, encourage discussion, and seek out a fix, acting like a proxy quality assurance team.
At the small end of the spectrum, SEOs often flag bugs with Google systems, like a recent error in Search Console reporting flagged independently by three separate people, or Tom Anthony famously catching an oversight in Google’s Manual Actions database. While these types of problems don’t always impact the average user’s experience using Google, they help keep search systems working as intended.
At the other end of the scale, this feedback can extend as far as the overarching quality of the search experience, like AJ Kohn writing about Google’s propensity to reward big brands over small brands, or Lily Ray calling out an uptick in spam content in Google Discover.
SEOs are Google’s most passionate users. They interact with it at a scale far beyond the average user, and they can identify trends and changes at a macroscopic level. As a result, they are usually the first to discover problems—but also the people who hold Google to the highest standard. They are a crucial part of the feedback loop that fuels improvements.
Lastly, SEOs act as a check-and-balance, gathering firsthand evidence of how search systems operate, letting us differentiate between useful advice, snake oil, and Google’s PR bluster.
Google shares lots of useful guidance, but it’s important to recognize the limits of their advice. They are a profit-seeking company, and Search requires opacity to work—if everyone understood how it worked, everyone would game it, and it would stop working. Mixed in with the good advice is a healthy portion of omission and misdirection.
Google Search plays a vital role in controlling the flow of the web’s information—it is simply too important for us to leave its mechanics, biases, and imperfections unexplored. We need people who can interrogate the systems just enough to separate fact from fiction and understand how the pieces fit together.
We need people like Mic King, and his insanely detailed write-up of SGE and RAG; Britney Muller and her demystification of LLMs; the late Bill Slawki’s unfaltering patent analysis; or our own Patrick Stox’s efforts in piecing together how search works.


Final thoughts
The web has problems. We can and should expect more from Google Search. But the problems we need to solve today are far less severe and painful than the problems that needed solving in the past; and the people who have the highest expectations, and will be most vocal in shaping that positive future, are—you guessed it—SEOs.
To SEOs: the cause of (and solution to) all of the web’s problems.
-
SOCIAL6 days ago
Musk regrets controversial post but won’t bow to advertiser ‘blackmail’
-
SEO7 days ago
SEO Salary Survey 2023 [Industry Research]
-
PPC6 days ago
5 Quick Tips to Increase Referral Traffic
-
MARKETING7 days ago
Revolutionizing Auto Retail: The Game-Changing Partnership Between Amazon and Hyundai
-
SEO4 days ago
GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays
-
SEO6 days ago
A Year Of AI Developments From OpenAI
-
SOCIAL5 days ago
Is this X’s (formerly Twitter) final goodbye to big advertisers? It looks like it
-
SEARCHENGINES4 days ago
Google Core Update Done Followed By Intense Search Volatility, New Structured Data, Google Ads Head Steps Down & 20 Years Covering Search
You must be logged in to post a comment Login