Last Updated on January 3, 2025
During World War II, remote Melanesian islanders observed Allied forces receiving goods—cargo—from planes. They didn’t understand the infrastructure or technology behind it, so they built imitation airstrips and performed rituals, hoping to summon more planes. Predictably, no cargo arrived.
This phenomenon, later termed “cargo cults,” is a fitting metaphor for what happens in marketing when companies mimic successful strategies without understanding their context or mechanics.
The Surface-Level GTM Trap
Years ago, a seed-stage startup building an AI-first conversational messaging tool (i.e. chatbot) approached us with a bold idea: compete directly with HubSpot, Intercom, and Drift by running a content-centric SEO strategy. They planned to target high-volume keywords and outrank these incumbents.
Makes sense, as there is a halo effect on successful companies, where outside observers and analysts tend to re-underwrite everything they do as brilliant because the outcome was successful.
But here’s why this was moronic, or more charitably, very naive and a heavenly waste of time and money for them: HubSpot started decades ago, has a mature product, a massive audience, and a well-oiled lifecycle marketing team, nurturing system, and sales team to extract value from the massive traffic and MQL volume they bring in.
Even if this startup could rank, they lacked the sales infrastructure to convert traffic into revenue.
In other words, they have none of the advantages (time, money, resources), yet still somehow think they can win by replicating the exact same SEO system. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
We turned them down and advised them to focus on strategies where they actually had a competitive edge, like influencer partnerships or founder branding.
The SEO Cargo Cult in Action
Even when SEO is the right channel, the cargo cult mindset persists. Teams often conduct content gap analyses, spot high-volume keywords their competitors rank for, and dive in headfirst without pausing to ask:
- Are these efforts driving meaningful revenue for competitors?
- Do we have the same competitive advantages to make this work?
Anyone with an Ahrefs account can do this in under 30 minutes:
And while this is still a valuable research input, it ignores several fundamental assumptions, the top one being that these organic competitors are doing things the right way in the first place.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: many SEO programs are underperforming. Blindly emulating their strategies is like copying someone’s homework without understanding the questions.
From Copying to Innovating
At the most granular level, cargo cult SEO manifests in the over-reliance on tools like Clearscope or Surfer to engineer ranking signals. These tools optimize for surface-level factors—keyword density, headings, word count—but they don’t capture the deeper elements that make content valuable.
This approach results in dull, copycat content that offers no unique insights or perspectives. It’s not only a poor experience for readers but also provides no reason for Google to reward it.
Imagine my dismay at seeing a whole slew of content marketers and copywriters on LinkedIn suddenly advising others to stop using the em dash.
Why? Because, apparently, generative AI uses the em dash quite a bit, and by using the em dash, you appear to be writing like AI.
Just sit for like 25 seconds and think about that.
Instead of, you know, focusing on creating awesome, valuable, entertaining, or useful content, we’re taking the most minute surface level keyboard character and fixating on it as a solution, or at least some facsimile of quality.
In other words, I emphatically agree with Erica – and I’ll use the em dash if I want to.
I’ve seen similar takes that humans will need to start deliberately producing typos and errors to signal their humanness.
Bruh. It’s not the typos that make people want to read what you write. It’s the fact that it’s really good and useful writing (and I never needed a deliberate checklist to make sure I leave a few typos, it’s just the nature of a caffeinated maniac like myself writing these with no editors reviewing them).
As you can see, this cargo cult thinking presents itself at the absolute highest levels of resource allocation, team structure, and GTM strategy, but also at the most minute and tactical levels of implementation.
It’s the most extreme example of missing the forest for the trees and expending your valuable attention and resources on the things that truly do not matter.
Why This No Longer Works
Realistically, SEOs could actually make this playbook work for them for much of the last decade. At least on paper.
But as I’ve written about in the past few newsletters, this is no longer the case.
Many of these traffic wins were illusory in the first place – either devoid of relevancy to their core product or with no discernible moat. And AI is eating away the top-of-the-funnel, making mediocre SEO no longer tenable or defensible.
It’s a seismic shift in the way we look at organic growth, and marketing leaders need to fundamentally rewire the way their teams think about resource allocation, KPIs, and strategy.
So what should you do instead?
Building from First Principles
To escape the cargo cult trap, start by asking the hard questions:
- Who is your audience, and what are their biggest pain points?
- How does your product uniquely address these challenges?
- What value can your content add that no one else can provide?
There is, of course, a place for best practices in SEO and in general. One doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel to know that lifting weights and eating 1g protein per pound of body weight, roughly, is a proximate cause of gaining muscle.
So we still use these tools and we still learn from what others are doing. But it’s always a layer on top of first principles thinking, leaning into distinct advantages, and the basis of a custom strategy.
Use content optimization tools to cover the basics—like matching search intent and including relevant FAQs. But beyond that, focus on creating content that’s irreplicable (or hard to fake): SME interviews, original research, and interactive elements that engage and inform. Quality isn’t just about ranking or on-page SEO semantic saturation—it’s about delivering something readers genuinely value.
What’s Easy to Copy is Visible and Probably Mostly Meaningless
We’ve seen competitors copy our messaging, even down to specific landing pages. Several have, post ZIRP era, shifted their messaging away from traditional content and SEO taglines like “driving traffic or rankings” into more growth and outcomes focused messaging. Many It’s mildly annoying, but mostly we chuckle.
Without understanding the deeper systems and expertise behind our strategy, their efforts rarely succeed.
Our founding team came from growth and analytics backgrounds, and we’ve explicitly hired for those with similar mindsets. Even our internal KPIs and accountability systems map towards client north star metrics, and our team is skilled in not only technical and editorial SEO, but B2B attribution and strategy. It’s hard to rebuild the fundamental DNA to match a new messaging framework.
So we’re never worried about this stuff. It’s like ascribing Amazon’s success to the fact that their “add to cart” button color is yellow.
It’s easy to copy what’s visible, but it’s the invisible systems—buyer research, ICP alignment, strategic vision—that drive real outcomes.
Start with a purpose. Solve problems in a way only you can. Then, use SEO and channel optimization as an opportunity sizer and amplifier.
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