My Father Built Houses. I Build Rankings. Neither of Us Understands What the Other Does.

Thanksgiving dinner. My father is sitting across from me. He's seventy-four years old and he built houses for forty-two of those years - custom homes, the kind people hire an architect for, the kind with load-bearing walls that have to be calculated and foundations that have to be poured to a specific depth depending on the frost line, which in New Jersey is thirty-six inches, which I know because he told me once and it stuck in my brain the way things your father tells you stick in your brain, not because you need them but because he said them and he's your father and your brain keeps what he gives it whether you ask it to or not.

His hands are on the table, resting on either side of his plate. They look like the hands of a man who has spent forty-two years gripping things - hammers, two-by-fours, the steering wheels of trucks loaded with lumber, the necks of bottles at the end of long days, the hand of my mother when she was dying, which was five years ago now and which he never talks about but which left his right hand with a habit of closing around nothing when he's sitting still, a slow clench and release that he doesn't seem to be aware of, that I've never mentioned to him, that I watch from across the table with the particular attention of a son who has learned to read his father the way his father reads a blueprint - looking for the load-bearing parts, the structural elements, the places where the weight is concentrated.

He asks me what I did this week.

This is a question he asks every time we see each other, and it is a question I have never once answered in a way that satisfied either of us. Not because he doesn't care. He cares. That's not the issue. The issue is that what I do for a living exists in a realm so far removed from his experience that explaining it to him is like explaining color to a man who sees in black and white - not because he lacks the capacity but because the reference points don't exist in his world, because the vocabulary I need hasn't been invented yet in a version he can use, because the fundamental concepts that underlie my work are built on other concepts that are built on other concepts, and by the time you get down to the foundation, you're so far from the house that the house is invisible.

I say: "I helped a client recover from a Google algorithm update."

He nods. The nod. The specific nod that I have catalogued over twenty years of trying to explain my job to my father - the nod that means he heard the words, he registered that they were English, he understood them individually but not collectively, and he is being polite about it because he loves me, which is the same nod he gives when someone at a dinner party describes a flavor of wine, which is to say: without comprehension, without interest, but with love. A nod that contains an entire relationship.

"Did you fix it?" he asks.

"I'm working on it," I say.

"Good," he says, and goes back to his turkey, and the conversation moves to my sister's kids, or to the weather, or to the condition of the deck he built twenty years ago that still doesn't have a loose board, which he mentions every Thanksgiving, which is his version of a case study - proof of work, evidence of competence, a thing he can point at and say I built that and everyone at the table can look at it and see that he did.

I cannot point at anything. I have never been able to point at anything.

The First Attempt: 2005

The first time I tried to explain what I do to my father was in 2005, which was three years into my career, which was the year I stopped calling myself a "web marketer" and started calling myself an "SEO specialist," which was, in retrospect, a lateral move in terms of comprehensibility but felt like a promotion at the time.

I was home for dinner. My father had spent the day installing crown molding in a house in Princeton, which he described to me in detail - the wood species (poplar, paint-grade), the angles (the room had a bay window, which meant compound miters), the tools (his Bosch miter saw, which he'd had for sixteen years and which he spoke about with the tenderness that other men reserve for their dogs). He'd spent eight hours cutting and fitting and nailing crown molding, and at the end of those eight hours, the room had crown molding that wasn't there before. A visible, tangible transformation. Something you could photograph. Something you could run your hand along.

He asked me what I'd done that day.

I said: "I optimized a website so it would show up higher in Google search results."

He looked at me the way he looks at a wall that's not plumb. A slight tilt of the head. A narrowing of the eyes. The expression of a man who suspects that something is off but can't identify what.

"How do you do that?" he asked.

"Well," I said, and then I made the first of what would become twenty years of mistakes in trying to explain SEO to a man who builds houses: I tried to explain it technically. I talked about keywords. I talked about meta tags. I talked about link building and PageRank and the way Google's algorithm determines which websites appear first when you search for something. I talked for about four minutes. I used the word "algorithm" three times. I used the word "crawl" twice. I used the phrase "search engine results page" and immediately felt myself losing him, felt the conversation tilting into a territory where the words I was saying and the understanding he was receiving were diverging, rapidly, like two cars that left the same parking lot and took different exits.

He listened. He nodded (the nod). When I finished, he said: "So you help people get found on the computer?"

"Yes," I said, because that was close enough, because explaining the difference between "on the computer" and "on the internet" and "on Google specifically" felt like it would require another four minutes that neither of us wanted to spend, and because at a certain point, close enough is the best you can do.

"That sounds useful," he said. And that was the end of it. He went back to his dinner. I went back to mine. The crown molding in Princeton remained visible and tangible. My keyword optimization remained invisible and intangible. We ate in comfortable silence, which is the native language of fathers and sons in my family, and which communicates more than most conversations do anyway.

The Second Attempt: 2011

By 2011, I'd been doing SEO for nine years and had started my own consultancy, which meant I'd had to explain what I did not just to my father but to banks (for a business loan), to insurance companies (for liability coverage), to the IRS (for tax classification purposes, which involved a twenty-minute phone call during which I tried to explain to a government employee what "search engine optimization consulting" was and she eventually classified me under "advertising services," which is wrong but close enough, which is a phrase that comes up a lot in my life).

My father came to visit my office. I'd just signed a lease on a small space - two rooms, a bathroom, a kitchenette - in a building that also housed a dentist, an accountant, and a company that did something with medical billing that I never fully understood. My father walked around the office the way he walks around any structure, which is assessively. He checked the baseboards (adequate). He tested the door frame (solid). He looked at the ceiling tiles and made a sound that communicated everything he felt about ceiling tiles, which was: not much.

Then he sat in my client chair and looked at my desk, which had two monitors and a keyboard and a mouse and nothing else, because my work doesn't require physical materials. No wood. No nails. No saws. No levels. Just screens.

"So this is where you work," he said.

"This is where I work," I said.

"What do you do all day?" he asked. Not dismissively. Genuinely. He could not, looking at my office, deduce what work was performed here. In his office - his truck, really, and the houses he worked in - the work was self-evident. There were materials and tools and a thing being built. In my office, there was a man and two screens and, as far as he could tell, nothing happening.

I tried again. This time, I used an analogy. I said: "You know the Yellow Pages?" He knew the Yellow Pages. He'd advertised in the Yellow Pages for thirty years. "Imagine the Yellow Pages, but it's on the internet, and instead of paying for an ad, you have to convince the Yellow Pages company that your listing should be near the front. That's what I do. I convince the internet Yellow Pages to put my clients near the front."

He considered this. "How much does that cost?" he asked, because my father's first question about any enterprise is always about the economics, because he is a man who built things for money and understands work as a transaction between effort and payment, which is, I think, the purest and most honest understanding of work that exists.

I told him my retainer rates. His eyebrows went up. Not in the way that means he was impressed, but in the way that means he was calculating. He was doing the math - my rate times my clients, minus my overhead, divided by my hours - and arriving at a number that represented the value of my labor in terms he could understand: dollars per hour, the universal metric of work, the thing that lets a carpenter compare himself to a plumber, a plumber to an electrician, an electrician to the man who sits at a desk with two screens and does something with the internet Yellow Pages that somehow justifies a monthly retainer that is more than the carpenter charges for a week of crown molding.

"Good for you," he said, and there was something in the way he said it - a slight emphasis on the "for you" part - that I've thought about many times since. It was not sarcastic. It was not dismissive. It was genuine. But it contained, I think, a note of bewilderment that verged on philosophical. How does that generate that? How does sitting at a desk with two screens produce income? Where is the thing you built? Where is the crown molding?

He couldn't see it. And I couldn't show him. Because there was nothing to see. There was nothing to touch. There was nothing to run your hand along and feel the joint where two pieces of poplar meet at a compound miter angle.

The Third Attempt: 2016

By 2016, I'd refined my explanation through repeated failure into something approaching a working definition, the way a woodworker (and here I'm using my father's trade as a metaphor, which feels appropriate) sands a rough piece of lumber through increasingly fine grits until it's smooth enough to accept a finish, except in my case the finish never fully takes and the surface remains slightly rough to the touch.

We were at a barbecue. One of his friends - another contractor, a man named Eddie who did kitchen remodels and who had hands even more impressive than my father's, hands that looked like they'd been carved from the same hardwood he installed - asked me what I did for a living. My father, standing next to me, looked at me with an expression I can only describe as anticipatory embarrassment. He knew what was coming. He knew I was going to try to explain it. He knew that the explanation would fail in the specific way it always fails, which is not dramatically but gradually, like a boat taking on water - you don't notice it's sinking until you're standing in it.

"I do marketing for companies on the internet," I said. I'd learned, by this point, to lead with the simple version. Not the accurate version. The simple version. The version that uses words people already know in combinations they can parse without a glossary.

Eddie nodded. "Like Facebook and stuff?"

"More like Google. When you search for something on Google and the results come up, I help companies appear near the top."

"You work for Google?"

"No, I work for the companies that want to show up on Google."

"So you do their advertising."

"Not exactly. The ads are the paid part. I work on the unpaid part. The organic results."

"The what?"

I looked at my father. He was watching this exchange with the expression of a man who has seen this conversation before and knows how it ends, which is: not well. He gave me a small smile. The smile said: I know. I know you can't explain it. It's okay.

Eddie, to his credit, tried. "So you help them get on Google without paying for ads?"

"Yes."

"How?"

And there it was. The question. The two-word question that I have spent twenty years trying to answer and that I have never, not once, answered in a way that a person outside the industry found satisfying. How. How do you do it. What do you actually do. What does your day look like. What are your hands doing (nothing, my hands are doing nothing, my hands are on a keyboard, my hands are typing and clicking and scrolling and nothing about what my hands are doing tells you anything about what I'm producing).

I said something about content and links and technical optimization and I watched Eddie's eyes do the thing that everyone's eyes do when I explain my job, which is glaze over at approximately the forty-five-second mark, and I trailed off, and Eddie said "that's interesting," which is what people say when something is not interesting but they're polite, and my father put his hand on my shoulder and said "he's good at it, whatever it is," and everyone laughed, and we went back to the barbecue, and I stood there holding a hot dog and wondering if the explanation problem was mine or the industry's.

The Gap

Here is what my father built in his career: 217 houses. I know the number because he kept a list. A handwritten list, in a notebook, in his truck. Every house. The address. The year. The client's name. Some of them have notes - "bay window, tricky" or "finished early" or "the one with the dog." 217 houses that stand in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, that keep people warm in winter and dry in rain, that have roofs and walls and foundations and crown molding, that you can drive past and point at and say "that one, my father built that one."

Here is what I have built in my career: rankings. Positions in a list. Positions in a list maintained by a company in Mountain View, California, that could change the list tomorrow, that has changed the list, that changes the list constantly, that owes no one an explanation for the changes and gives none, that treats the list as proprietary property (which it is) and the positions in the list as temporary grants of visibility (which they are) that can be revoked at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

My father built things that last. I build things that last until the next algorithm update.

My father can drive his children and grandchildren past his work and say "I built that." I can open a browser and say "I ranked that" and then check back next week and maybe I still rank it and maybe I don't and the person I'm talking to wouldn't know the difference either way because they can't see a ranking the way they can see a house. A ranking is invisible. A ranking exists only as a position on a screen, and only on some screens and not others (because Google personalizes results, which means that what I see when I search and what you see when you search might be different, which means that a ranking isn't even a fixed thing, it's a probabilistic thing, it's a thing that approximately exists in an approximate position for approximately some users approximately some of the time).

How do you explain that to a man who pours foundations?

You don't. That's the answer I've arrived at after twenty years. You don't explain it. Not because he can't understand it - my father is one of the smartest people I've ever met, a man who can calculate load-bearing requirements in his head, who can look at a blueprint and see the finished house the way a chess player sees the board ten moves ahead, who once diagnosed a structural problem in a building by listening to the way the wind moved through it (I'm not making this up, he put his hand on a wall and said "this isn't right" and he was correct, the wall was not right, there was a support beam missing and the wall was flexing in the wind and he felt it through his fingertips like a doctor feeling for a pulse) - not because he can't understand it but because the explanation requires so much translation, so much abstraction, so much removal from the physical reality that he inhabits and that I left behind when I chose to work with screens instead of wood, that by the time you've finished explaining, you've described something that doesn't sound like work anymore.

It sounds like a game. A game played on computers, with rules that change, for stakes that are invisible, producing outcomes that can't be touched. That's what SEO sounds like when you strip away the jargon and the frameworks and the case studies and the revenue numbers. It sounds like a game. And my father respects games - he plays poker every Thursday - but he doesn't confuse games with work, and he doesn't understand why someone would pay another person $15,000 a month to play one.

The Industry's Problem

I used to think the explanation problem was personal. A failure of my communication skills. If I were a better communicator, I could make my father understand what I do. If I could find the right analogy, the right combination of words, the right level of abstraction - not too technical, not too simple - I could bridge the gap between his world and mine.

I no longer think that. I now think the explanation problem is the industry's problem, and it's not a communication problem - it's a credibility problem.

Consider: my father's trade doesn't have an explanation problem. Nobody asks a carpenter what he does and receives an incomprehensible answer. Nobody sits at a barbecue while a carpenter explains his work and feels their eyes glaze over. A carpenter builds things. You can see the things. The things exist in the world. There is no gap between the description and the reality. The work is the explanation.

Now consider: a doctor doesn't have an explanation problem. A lawyer doesn't have an explanation problem. An accountant doesn't have an explanation problem. A plumber, an electrician, a teacher, a chef - none of them have an explanation problem. They might have a complexity problem (a neurosurgeon does complex things that laypeople can't replicate) but they don't have an explanation problem. Everyone knows what a neurosurgeon does even if they can't do it themselves. The work is legible even when it's complex.

SEO has an explanation problem. And the explanation problem exists because the work is, at a fundamental level, hard to make legible. Not hard to do. Hard to make legible. Hard to point at. Hard to show. Hard to verify. Hard to distinguish, from the outside, from nothing at all.

A client pays me $15,000 a month. At the end of the month, I send them a report. The report says their organic traffic went up, or their rankings improved, or their visibility increased. The client looks at the report and... trusts me. That's it. They trust me. They can't verify independently whether my work caused the improvement or whether it would have happened anyway. They can't verify whether the rankings I'm showing them are real or cherry-picked. They can't verify whether the strategy I recommended was the best possible strategy or just a strategy. They can look at their revenue and see if it went up, but even that doesn't prove causation. Maybe revenue went up because of SEO. Maybe it went up because of seasonality, or a competitor's failure, or a change in the market, or luck.

The work is opaque. And opacity is a double-edged sword. On one side, opacity protects us. It allows consultants to charge premium rates for work that clients can't easily replicate or evaluate. It creates information asymmetry that favors the provider. It makes it hard for clients to comparison-shop, hard to hold us accountable, hard to know when they're getting excellent work and when they're getting maintenance disguised as strategy.

On the other side, opacity breeds distrust. It's the reason my father's nod contains bewilderment. It's the reason Eddie at the barbecue couldn't understand what I do. It's the reason that "SEO" as a profession still carries a faint whiff of snake oil, even among people who use SEO services, even among people who've seen it work. Because they can't see it. Because they can't verify it. Because the explanation sounds, if we're being honest, a little bit like we're making it up as we go along.

And the terrible, uncomfortable truth is: sometimes we are.

The Honest Version

If I were being completely honest with my father - and I mean completely, brutally, no-jargon, no-framework, no-professional-veneer honest - I would say something like this:

"There's a company called Google. It has a list of every website in the world, and when someone searches for something, it shows them the websites it thinks are most relevant and useful, in order. Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how it decides the order. It's a secret. The company that makes the list won't tell anyone how the list works. My job is to try to figure out how the list works by looking at what's on the list and making educated guesses, and then I change my clients' websites in ways that I think will make the list company put them higher on the list. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it works and then the list company changes the rules and it stops working. And then I try to figure out the new rules. And then those rules change too."

If I said that to my father - if I described my job as trying to reverse-engineer a secret list maintained by a company that won't tell me how the list works and that changes the rules whenever it wants - he would look at me with an expression that I can picture perfectly, because it's the expression he had when I told him I was leaving my job at the agency to start my own consultancy, the expression that combines concern and confusion and love in proportions that only a father's face can achieve, and he would say:

"And they pay you for this?"

Yes. They pay me for this. They pay me well. They pay me because the list matters. Because being near the top of the list is the difference between a business that customers can find and a business they can't. Because for all its opacity and unpredictability, the list is how millions of people discover businesses, products, information, hospitals, restaurants, lawyers, plumbers. The list is the Yellow Pages and the front page of the newspaper and the word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted friend, all rolled into one and controlled by a single company in California that processes 8.5 billion searches per day and charges nothing for the privilege of appearing in the results, which makes it either the greatest public utility in human history or the most elegant monopoly, depending on how you look at it and what day of the week it is.

The list matters. My work on the list matters. And I can't explain it to my father.

The Thanksgiving Pivot

Last Thanksgiving, something different happened. My father asked me what I'd done that week, and instead of trying to explain - instead of reaching for analogies and abstractions and the increasingly desperate vocabulary that I've deployed for two decades in a losing battle against incomprehension - I said: "I helped a company get more customers."

He looked at me. The tilt of the head. But different this time. Less confused, more curious.

"How many more?" he asked.

"About two hundred a month, compared to last year."

"That's good," he said. And he meant it. I could tell he meant it because his nod was different - not the polite nod, not the wine-tasting nod, but the nod he gives when he hears something he understands. Two hundred more customers. That's concrete. That's countable. That's not an algorithm or a ranking or a position on a secret list. That's two hundred people who found a business and gave it money and that business was able to pay its employees and keep its lights on because those two hundred people showed up.

"How?" he asked. And there it was again. The two-word question. How.

But this time, instead of explaining the mechanism, I explained the problem. "They had a website," I said, "and nobody could find it. Like if you built a beautiful house but it was on a road with no sign, and nobody knew it was there. I helped them put up the sign."

He smiled. A real smile. Not the polite smile. The smile of a man who has finally been given a piece of information he can hold in his hand and turn over and examine from all sides.

"You put up signs," he said.

"I put up signs."

"Good," he said. "Signs are important. I've seen plenty of good houses on bad roads. Nobody buys them."

And that was, after twenty years of trying, the closest we've ever come to understanding each other's work. Not through technical explanation. Not through analogy. Through outcome. I don't put up signs. What I do is nothing like putting up signs. The technical reality of my work has nothing in common with the physical act of installing signage. But the outcome - making something findable that wasn't findable before - that translates. That crosses the gap. That speaks a language my father understands because it's the language of all work, which is: someone had a problem, and I fixed it.

What He Builds, What I Build

My father retired three years ago. His last project was a colonial in Hopewell, New Jersey - four bedrooms, three baths, a wraparound porch that he spent two weeks on because the porch was curved and curved porches require bending the fascia, which requires steaming the wood, which requires a steam box, which he built himself out of a length of PVC pipe and a wallpaper steamer because he's the kind of man who builds the tool that builds the thing. The house stands there now, on a hill, with its curved porch and its steamed fascia, and it will stand there for a hundred years, and my father can drive past it whenever he wants and know that it exists because he made it exist.

I will not retire anytime soon. My work continues. My clients' rankings fluctuate. The algorithm changes. The list gets rewritten. Something I built last month gets demolished by an update this month and has to be rebuilt from different materials using different methods according to different rules. Nothing I have ever built in my career will stand for a hundred years. Nothing I have ever built will stand for ten. The average lifespan of a first-page ranking, in my experience, is about fourteen months before it requires maintenance or rework. Fourteen months. My father's deck has lasted twenty years and it still doesn't have a loose board.

This is the crisis of my profession, and I think it's a crisis most of us don't confront because confronting it is uncomfortable. We build ephemeral things. We build things that depend on the continued goodwill of a single company. We build things that can't be seen, can't be touched, can't be pointed at, can't be verified by anyone who doesn't already understand what we do. We build things that our fathers can't understand and that we struggle to explain and that we sometimes, in our most honest moments, wonder about ourselves.

Is it real work? I know it's real work. I know because I've seen the revenue it generates, the businesses it sustains, the jobs it supports. I know because I've sat across from clients who were failing and helped them succeed and watched the relief in their eyes when the numbers turned. I know because the companies that pay me keep paying me, and companies don't pay for nothing (or at least, they don't pay for nothing for very long).

But I also know that "real" means something different to my father than it does to me. Real, to my father, means physical. Means permanent. Means you can touch it and it pushes back. Rankings don't push back. Rankings exist as electrons arranged in a particular pattern on a server in a data center in Iowa or Oregon or wherever Google keeps its index these days, and those electrons can be rearranged at any moment by engineers my father has never met, who work for a company my father has never heard of (he knows what Google is, but he doesn't know what Google is, if you take my meaning), who make decisions about visibility and relevance and authority that affect my livelihood and my clients' livelihoods in ways that neither my father nor I can fully predict or control.

That's what I do. I build castles on rented land. And every time I try to explain this to my father, what I'm really explaining is the fundamental absurdity of an industry that charges premium rates to manipulate a list it doesn't control, using methods it can't fully explain, producing outcomes it can't guarantee, in a medium that the client can barely see and the client's father definitely can't.

The Thing He Said

Christmas this year. My father and I are in his garage, which is where he goes when there are too many people in the house, which at Christmas means anything more than four, which means always. The garage smells like sawdust even though he hasn't cut wood in three years. The smell is in the walls now. In the concrete. It will outlast him. Another thing he built that will last.

He's sitting on a stool and I'm leaning against his workbench, which is a piece of furniture so solid and well-made that it could survive a direct nuclear strike and emerge with its vise still functional, and we're drinking the beer that he drinks, which is Budweiser, because he has been drinking Budweiser since 1972 and he will drink Budweiser until he dies and if you try to give him a craft IPA he will look at you the way he looks at a wall that isn't plumb.

He says: "You know, I never did understand what you do."

"I know," I say.

"But people pay you for it."

"They do."

"And you're good at it."

"I think so. Most days."

He takes a drink of his Budweiser. He looks at the wall of his garage, where his tools hang in the order he hung them thirty years ago, each one in its place, each one a known quantity - a hammer is a hammer, a level is a level, a square is a square, there is no ambiguity in tools, no secret algorithm determining whether a saw cuts straight.

"I built houses," he says. "And people lived in them. That was the job. Build the house so people can live in it. Not complicated."

"Not complicated," I agree.

"What you do is complicated," he says. Not as a compliment. Not as a criticism. As an observation. The observation of a man who has spent forty-two years in a profession where the relationship between effort and outcome is direct and visible and permanent, looking at his son who has spent twenty years in a profession where the relationship between effort and outcome is indirect and invisible and temporary.

"It is," I say.

"But you like it."

"I do."

He nods. Not the polite nod. Not the wine nod. A different nod. The nod that means: I don't understand the thing you do, but I understand you, and you are my son, and you like the thing you do, and that is enough. That has always been enough. Understanding what your son does for a living is not a prerequisite for being proud of him, and I should have figured that out twenty years ago instead of spending twenty years trying to bridge a gap that didn't need bridging because the bridge was already there, made of something sturdier than explanations.

He finishes his beer. His right hand closes around nothing, then opens again.

"You should come look at the deck," he says. "Still not a loose board."

We walk out of the garage, into the cold, to look at a deck that a man built twenty years ago with his hands, that has survived twenty winters and twenty summers and twenty years of weather and use and time, that still doesn't have a loose board, that will outlast both of us.

I pull out my phone and check my client's rankings. Down three positions since last week. I'll fix it tomorrow. I'll fix it the way I always fix it - by sitting at a desk and typing and clicking and scrolling and doing the invisible work that produces the invisible result that my father will never see and that I can never show him and that will need to be fixed again next month.

He runs his hand along the railing. No wobble. No give. Solid.

"I built that," he says.

I know, Dad. I know you did.