Back in 2015, Adam Conover, a comedian and writer for CollegeHumor, launched a new show on TruTV called Adam Ruins Everything.
True to its name, Adam Ruins Everything set out to “ruin” things we think are good by showing us exactly how they’re bad or doing harm. The show was about shattering illusions — investigative journalism you can laugh about.
A few years removed from college, Adam Ruins Everything was a revelation, not just opening my eyes to new ideas, but giving me a new perspective on topics I thought I already knew a lot about.
That’s all to say, when Conover covers a topic, especially one that hits as close to home as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I’m here to listen!
Yesterday, while scrolling Threads, I came across a new video from Adam on “how Google RUINED the internet.” If you’ve got 20 minutes (which I’m sure you do if you found yourself here) it’s worth the watch.
If you’re a content marketer or anyone who cares about SEO, it’s a must watch.
Google is broken and so is SEO
As Conover points out in his video, Google has created a vicious cycle that’s quickly destroyed the open web.
The idea here goes like this:
Google started as a search engine.
Its market insight/advantage was showing you relevant websites based on how those websites linked to one another.
Once Google cornered the market, they turned into an advertiser (that’s what all those sponsored links are and why you get product/flight results directly in search).
To organically compete with ads that take up most of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you’ll need to rank in the top 10 of search results. In the past, ranking lower than 10 would put you on an entirely separate page, but that was before Google adopted the infinite scroll.
Google, understanding this incentive, puts out guidelines on how to optimize your content for its search engine.
This leads to a ton of bad behavior from those trying to game the system and has directly led to the spammy, crap-tastic search results we see today.
Now, add in artificial intelligence and you not only accelerate the vicious cycle, but you effectively break the internet. Because, if people can’t find your website on the most popular search engine that has effectively monopolized the market, does it even really exist?
Black hat vs white hat SEO in content marketing
As a consumer of the world wide web, watching Adam’s video enraged me as I hope it would anyone who relies on the internet for information.
As a content marketer, it’s frustrating to watch to say the least.
Whether we like it or not, SEO is a part of what we do as content marketers — a necessary evil.
In order to grow brand awareness and top-of-funnel pipeline, you need people to know who you are. There are other ways to do that, yes, like social and earned media. But if you’re responsible for organic traffic, you can’t afford to turn your back on Google. This is how monopolies work.
That said, there are two paths to travel here. To steal a term from my more technical friends, you can either deploy black hat or white hat tactics.
Black hat SEO
If you want to end up in the sequel to Conover’s video essay above, black hat SEO is the path for you.
Like a drug, black hat SEO offers potentially cheap highs … but be wary of the come down, because rock bottom is a lot further than you think.
Ok, enough of the metaphor.
Black hat SEO is about hacking Google’s algorithm in order to game SERPs for valuable keywords. Black hat SEO is typically tied to some sort of short-term financial incentive. To borrow the example Conover covers in his video: affiliate links where third-party websites get paid to send traffic to ecommerce sites.
Black hat SEO is the reason it is so difficult to find reliable product reviews and why we’ve seen a proliferation of junk in SERPs.
Generative AI makes it easier than ever to turn Google’s SEO guidelines into a template for crap, which makes it even more difficult for good content to break through.
Gaming Google’s algorithm can skyrocket you to the top of SERPs and lead to a flood of traffic, but there’s consequences attached to this.
First and foremost, you’re now engaged in a game of cat and mouse with Google who is constantly updating its algorithm not only to close the holes you’ve exploited, but to actively punish you for it.
Furthermore, black hat SEO isn’t concerned with relevant traffic, but rather traffic for traffic’s sake. Black hat SEOs will always look to expand your content scope, sometimes far outside of what’s relevant to your readers, in order to capture adjacent keywords with high search volume.
Black hat SEO might work in the short term to boost traffic, but these tactics will ultimately lead to higher bounce rates, lower time on page, and far less engagement — three signals that will have Google decreasing your authority in search and eventually down ranking your site until it’s invisible.
White hat SEO
Not all SEO is about smoke and mirrors and not every content marketer is here to contribute to the downfall of the web.
Quite the contrary.
In a perfect world, content marketers are a key contributor of quality content to the internet. Our goals should be to help our readers learn how to do their jobs better, understand their market and space more clearly, or gain new perspectives on topics important to them and/or their business, to name just a few.
Notice how SEO is absent from each of those editorial visions? That’s because in white hat SEO, the data we have about keywords and search queries is there to support and amplify our strategy, it is not the be all, end all.
The way I like to think about it is that SEO never dictates what you write or how you write it, but it should inform each piece of content you touch.
Just as we should never create content for the sake of creating content, we shouldn’t create content because the keyword data says we might be able to capture a few hundred searches a month by doing so.
Rather, white hat SEO is about taking the important topic you just wrote about for your readers and making sure it’s as visible as possible for them in SERPs.
Technical SEO is a great example of an area where white hat SEOs can shine by ensuring you have a concise and relevant SEO headline, making sure the meta description matches the content on the page, making the slug easy to read, and adding alt texts to all of your images.
All of these are SEO best practices that help make it easier to find what you write, without compromising the quality of the content that your readers will consume.
The issue with white hat SEO is that it can be a slow build. Identifying and writing quality content that your readers care about takes time and sometimes the most engaging content only appeals to a small sliver of your target audience.
But where white hat SEO lacks in speed it makes up for tenfold in sustainability. White hat SEO is the best way to consistently attract quality traffic to your website that not just feeds top of funnel, but makes it through to close.
In many ways, the struggle between white and black hat SEO is the struggle between quality vs quantity, and speed vs sustainability.
Learn more about leveraging SEO in your content marketing strategy
As long as Google exists, there will be a need to optimize your content for search results.
But “being first on Google” is not a content marketing strategy.
If you’re serious about content marketing, deepening connections with your customers, and building sustainable organic traffic for your website, the only path forward is white hat SEO.
Learn more and ask questions about leveraging SEO in your content marketing strategy by dropping me a line, today!
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