Somewhere between 89-97% of internet users will not go past the first page of results when using a search engine. 

I’ve written that statistic in its various forms more times than I can morally count, in a multitude of different, and yet all too similar, articles preaching new and improved ways to get your small business’s blog to the top of the results. Perfecting your SEO is always the first thing on those lists. 

What Is SEO? 

For the uninitiated, SEO means search engine optimisation. At its most basic, it is the practice of peppering your web pages, podcasts, photos, videos, ads, meta descriptions, and micro-text with keywords or phrases. These keywords supposedly act to indicate to search engines what your site is about, so when an individual searches for one of your keywords or phrases, boom shake the room, your site is recommended above all others. It began about as harmlessly as the internet in general did. If someone tippy-typed into AOL in 2000 that they wanted to know facts about marine mammals, AOL fed them back a website lovingly curated by a retired marine biologist with no intention to spread anything but knowledge about dolphins.

However, there are a metric fuck ton of problems with the slightly-more-modern version of the SEO system, the most obvious being capitalism. It’s been harnessed and manipulated by businesses. Gone are the days of Dave’s Dolphins, replaced by Dave’s Top 10 Marine Mammal Attractions in the US (use my affiliate links for 10% off ticket prices at Sea World.) Other issues include that originality is dead and you’re almost certainly utilising the same keywords as 1000 other businesses before you. This leads to the overuse of keywords, a mad dash for the mythical and most likely non-existent high-volume low-competition keywords, and complete ignorance of what makes online content beneficial or enjoyable. However, the most heinous issue with SEO is that the algorithm of any given search engine is not truly a matter of public knowledge, unless you want to read through ten years of indecipherable updates. Boiled down, modern SEO is at best a stab in the darkness of the search for success, and at worst an internet-ruining phenomenon. 

SEO Eats Itself, and Then it Eats You 

Like most things under capitalism, SEO is about money. After all, if you’re running a blog in the 2020s, exposure in itself, while gratifying, is likely not the end goal. Exposure is important because the more visitors on your blog, the more ad revenue you receive, the more your affiliate links get pounded with clicks, and the more you can charge for sponsored posts. For businesses, the more people on your site, the more likely it is that they’ll be lured into a never-ending sales funnel. Ergo, the better your SEO, the more money you make. 

A blog post titled ‘The 27 Best Side Hustles’ is masked as a helpful tool for those struggling financially. In reality, this post is littered with relevant key phrases such as ‘best side hustles 2023’, ‘best side jobs’, ‘easy ways to make money’ etc. So, when you, in desperation to pay this month’s energy bill, turn to Google for assistance, you’re met with a list of almost entirely unhelpful 5 sentence summaries of why you should try online surveys that pay you in Amazon vouchers. But not to worry, because the very hustler who wrote this post is ready to offer you a surefire route to financial stability and independence, in the form of a free PDF or 18-part course when you sign up for a categorically not-free $19 a month subscription service. A hustler is a hustler is a hustler, I suppose. 

I must tread lightly here, as this post could very quickly devolve into a detraction of grind culture that ends with my ripping my hair out and screaming out the one Fauci quote that so beautifully summarises a majority of attitudes toward modern, Western existence; I DON’T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN TO YOU THAT YOU SHOULD CARE FOR OTHER PEOPLE. 

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a light way for me to tell you that these services are essentially emotionally manipulative scams that prey on your hopes and anxieties. The grinder, the hustler, the small businessman, the boss babe, the unlikely success story, the underdog, the one who’s been there, done that, made a million – well, they’re not out to help you, they’re out to take your money. Disgustingly, the best side hustle of them all would be to copy them, turn your back on others, and let yourself be sucked into the perpetually insatiable, SEO-shaped whirlpool that the internet has become. 

When You Call Into the Void, Your Keywords Call Back  

When you turn to the internet for help, SEO is the reason the first 10 pages of Google are the embodiment of Vulgaria’s child-catcher, luring you in with a promise of genuine human connection and assistance, and then stealing you away to a world of equally as unhelpful, but brilliantly marketed, information that now you must pay the price for. But it is not just the searcher who must suffer. 

Content creators who can’t yet pay for the ocean of SEO services that promise to optimise your pages and get results, in much the same way as ‘Carl’s kick-ass 24-step programme to financial independence’ does, are left to call into the void. It’s gotten to the point that if you don’t shut up and embrace SEO, genuinely eloquent and helpful content is lost to the trillion-strong junk heap of the internet. 

Even now, there is some temptation for me to title this post ‘5 Reasons Why SEO is Ruining Your Life’, or ‘8 Killer Ways to Use SEO to Your Advantage’, and structure the piece accordingly. Many of SEO’s strongest proponents would likely argue that that would constitute ‘better content’ than whatever the fuck this pointless rant is. But that’s just it; SEO has twisted and morphed our perceptions of good content to mean content that generates clicks and makes money. Both the speaker and the searcher lose out. 

The Utopic Internet that Doesn’t Exist 

But, full offence, the internet isn’t about making money. Or it wasn’t anyway. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the internet, or the World Wide Web at least, intended for it to be a democratic place. Google was created on the principle of search neutrality. But as Google grew into a corporation and captured the market, impartiality, neutrality, and democracy all but disappeared. 

To be clear, the people we have to blame for this are largely our own selves. But the binary hands of search engines are far from bloodless in the equation. The SEO meritocracy, like any other claimed meritocracy, is heavily skewed towards those already on top. The corporations who are already doing well enough to receive a majority of traffic are obviously those that are gifted a place in the top spots, while small businesses are left to fight for the remaining first-page places. If you’re searching for unusual gifts for your newborn daughter, yea sure, Elena’s Arizona-based glass blowing enterprise could offer you a one-of-a-kind statuette of mother and baby blown from sustainably sourced sand. But why would you pay for that when Amazon, the number one result on the search page, is offering you a tatty rattle for $7 made in a Chinese sweatshop?

When someone searches for the best home assistants using Google, why shouldn’t Google recommend first a page that espouses the countless benefits of Google Home? 

When a diabetic searches for ways to relieve their chronic pain, why shouldn’t they be directed to the website of some quack who paid a freelance writer to craft SEO diabetic-friendly recipes with no proven potential for treatment? Why shouldn’t that person be lured into paying for a poorly written, likely AI-generated, eBook that tells them what they’ve heard a million times before? 

When a young boy laments to the search bar his desire for belonging, why shouldn’t he be shown the uniting powers of a fascist political party that paid for widespread exposure to vulnerable targets such as he?

When I, trying desperately to find some sense of connection among the swathes of monetised content, search for weird and wonderful blog posts, why shouldn’t I be sent to a page that details ’14 Best Niche Blogs’ of which the first two results are The Huffington Post and Sky News? 

Why, if these easy, popular results keep people coming back, should search engines not plonk them at the tippy top?

Search engines have become the internet, and very few of them operate on a principle of neutrality. Berners-Lee is well aware of this fact, ‘devastated’ by the ways the internet has been harnessed for financial and positional gain. “For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” he told Vanity Fair in 2018. But concern is sort of pointless, even if it is ever-present. 

You Are Complicit

We’ve already covered the fact that SEO is about nothing but making money. It’s a marketing tactic, and under capitalism, this shouldn’t be surprising to you in the slightest. “Everything you look at in the course of the day is full of advertisements,” Professor Richard Wolff once stated. This includes the internet. In fact, the assault of advertising on the individual is majorly composed of the SEO pages that make up the modern net. 

Just as capitalism “pits each producer against each other, puts a pressure on them to sell more,” so too does the capitalist internet. Not only must you use SEO to be in with any chance of success, but you must also use it more and better than your competition. You must only collaborate with those who have more than you and you must only collaborate with the intention to further your interests. You must endure the soul-crushing ascent to a summit that is already populated with corporations whose success you couldn’t even attempt to replicate with your stupid little blog for single mums. You must be content with second place. 

One of the most striking things about SEO, given that there has never been any confirmation that these tactics work, is just how many techniques have been invented to conquer it. Individuals from around the world have poured hours upon hours into investigating what the best SEO practices are. Phrases like evergreen and bounce rate and click-through rate and conversion and content is king are thrown around as if they should be general vocabulary. In reality, this is SEO inventing more things for you to be worried about, more weapons for you to wield in the fight for success which all too often becomes a fight to the death. 

By now, all of us who sit in this constricting echo chamber of anti-capitalism are well aware of the fact that existence in a capitalist world makes the individual complicit in all sufferings created by that capitalism. In my case, I make a living writing the very SEO-driven content that this post was made to detract. If I didn’t offer SEO content, I’d get no orders, I’d make no money. If I turned this blog into an SEO haven, I’d get the chance to make a living, but I’d have to work twice as hard, consume myself with content that I don’t want to write, and put into practice those bullshit SEO techniques that may or may not work. You lose or you lose. But I don’t feel quite so bad. 

After all, you do not look past the first page of search engine results. I do not. Why would we? Why should we?

A World Without SEO

Do I think the internet would be some capitalism-free paradise if both creator and consumer weren’t at the mercy of whatever the fuck Google’s algorithm has decided to promote on any given day? Obviously not. 

The concept of SEO generates a means to an end – another burden anyone searching for success must carry, another task to add to the pile. But it does not constitute the entire problem. Instead, it highlights the main issues that plague the web of today and tomorrow. That, like so many other things in life, it is simply a vehicle for business, for marketing, for money-making. That the human instinct to reach out and connect through the wires must take a back seat to a scramble for survival at the bottom, and bottomless greed at the top. 

The worst part? The avalanche is in motion, and it will probably never be stopped. SEO has taken over content creation and consumption and there is very little we can do about it. If you want to use the indexed version of the net, you have no choice but to use search engines, and no choice but to take what they give you, what creators are forced to give you. The internet as we know it is dead, search engines broke its door down, and SEO is holding the gun. So, you better pull the trigger because it’s the only way you’re getting out of there alive. Soulless and sold out, but alive.   

How the fuck do I even end this post?

“I don’t want you to protest, I don’t want you to riot, I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about SEO and backlinks and algorithms and side hustle scams. All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say ‘I’m a human being God dammit, my desire for virtual connection has value!’”