When you work with enough clients, you learn that a lot of good SEO work starts with un-fucking bad SEO work that happened in the past (pardon my French).
Internally, we refer to it as plumbing.
Growth (of revenue usually) is the main goal and it’s what we sell; but you often need to unblock some pipes first.
A friend of mine whose family runs a large real estate company told me a story once of a family who continued to, despite their chiding, deposit all of their chicken bones in the garbage disposal. While convenient for the family, it really messed up those pipes (and cost quite a bit to repair them).
It can be tempting to take shortcuts. But thus far, I’ve encountered very little free lunch.
Steroids are bad for your heart. Plagiarism or falsifying data can destroy your professional career and reputation. Doordash fees add up (among other concerns). AI comments on LinkedIn posts don’t make you look as smart as you think they do.
Look, I love clever solutions. After all, I read Growth Hacker Marketing in 2014 and subsequently BECAME a growth hacker (we don’t call it that anymore, but still…)
Part of good SEO is not only making Chart Go Up, but also making sure Chart doesn’t precipitously fall and leave the client / company holding the bag.
Sugar high; sugar crash
You probably already know the story of the SEO Heist and the subsequent downfall:
The gist is the guy scraped a sitemap of a competitor and used AI to mass produce a bunch of weak content (thus, “heist”), bragged about it on LinkedIn, and tanked the site. Textbook Icarus story.
Which is fun, because a lot of people got to feel Schadenfreude and moral superiority. But I’m not writing this to gloat. If this type of thing worked and was low risk, I would certainly do it, too.
Thing is, most of the time we just see the chart go up because that’s when the case study is written. And sometimes people get away with it for a long time. But many times, the cost supersedes the short term benefits and the crash leaves you worse off than when you had started.
Everyone reading this is in the business of driving growth for real companies with real money invested in them and real risk. And we have to be mindful of risk and downside potential, not just upside. Doing the equivalent of YOLO’ing a bunch of money into penny stocks and meme coins is fun if you’re a degenerate gambler; not if you’re running a fund of other people’s money.
John-Henry Scherck shared another one recently on X. A bit more innocuous, but essentially an over-optimized site and an overplayed hand:
And I’m not throwing rocks; I know about this stuff first hand. Here’s my personal website – before, during, and after I wrote a bunch of affiliate-link listicles using a ton of AI in the creation process:
What to Do Instead: Marketing as Investing
Am I indignant that my personal site lost so much traffic? No, though I do miss the passive affiliate income.
I’m happy, in a sense, that I tested this in what is essentially a riskless sandbox – the equivalent of taking 2% of your net worth and trying some really crazy stuff just to see “what if.” Some call it gambling. I call it experimentation B)
So how do you avoid an SEO sugar crash?
You know the obvious stuff like cheap spammy backlinks, content mills, and most tactics cooked up by info-product marketers.
But also, anytime you get that “too good to be true” feeling, at least take a step back and work to understand the risk involved. Also, define your own risk threshold.
Remember also that LinkedIn is almost like Instagram for business. People naturally showcase more wins than losses, and no one is writing about the boring, inconclusive or marginally successful stuff (which is what happens most of the time). If you’re not careful, you can start to feel anxious, like everyone else is driving millions of monthly visits (though they never talk about revenue) with these 5 Easy Steps.
Above all, think of your SEO program, and really, your broader go-to-market strategy, as a portfolio of bets and investments, some aggressive and risky, some safe and slow. Everyone has their own risk threshold. Figure out what yours is.
Some shortcuts are fine and effective, some incur debt that needs to later be repaid, and some are risky at the level of going bust.
Risk is always a factor in decision making, and there’s no such thing as 100% certainty. But a good rule of thumb is Ray Dalio’s quote here: “Make sure that the probability of the unacceptable (i.e., the risk of ruin) is nil.” So don’t play Russian Roulette, no matter how lucrative the prize may be.
There’s a reason we named our podcast The Long Game, and why one of our company principles is “play long term games with long term people.” It’s a constant reminder to ourselves and to those we work with not to get tilted by FOMO, enticed by instant gratification, or to be swayed.
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