The Best SEO Is Not Needing SEO
The companies that win at SEO are the ones that would succeed without it. Build something people search for by name and the rankings follow.
I've done SEO for 20+ years, and here's the most counterintuitive thing I've learned in all that time, the thing that took me the longest to accept because it seemed to undermine the very foundation of my profession: the best SEO strategy is building something so good you don't need SEO.
The Winners Don't Optimize
Look at the companies dominating search results - Stripe, Notion, Figma, Zapier, Airtable - and you'll notice something strange: their content ranks, they get millions of organic visits, but if you ask their teams about SEO strategy you'll mostly get blank stares, because they're not optimizing for keywords, they're not building backlinks, they're not worrying about E-E-A-T or Core Web Vitals or any of the things that SEO consultants obsess over.
They built products so useful that people search for them by name, and everything else - the rankings, the traffic, the authority - follows from that single fact.
The Brand Search Advantage
When people search for your brand name, Google notices - it's the ultimate authority signal, the one signal that can't be gamed or faked or bought, because it represents genuine demand from real humans who have heard of you and want to find you specifically.
"Notion templates" tells Google that Notion matters for templates. "Stripe documentation" tells Google that Stripe is authoritative for payment docs. These branded searches pull up non-branded rankings too, because Google connects the dots: if people trust this brand for X, they probably trust them for related topics, and that trust compounds over time in ways that no tactical optimization can replicate.
You can't fake branded search volume, you can't buy it, you can't manufacture it with clever SEO tricks - you have to earn it by building something people actually want, which is harder than any SEO tactic but also more durable than any SEO tactic could ever be.
The Link Magnet Effect
Companies with great products don't do link building - they don't need to, because the links come to them: developers link to Stripe docs because they're the best payment docs, designers link to Figma tutorials because Figma is what they use, writers link to Notion templates because they actually use them. Real utility creates real links, no outreach required, no guest posting, no buying placements, no begging bloggers for a mention.
If you're doing link building - if you're spending hours sending outreach emails and negotiating guest post placements and all the rest of it - ask yourself this uncomfortable question: why aren't people linking naturally? That's the real problem, and no amount of link building can fix a fundamental lack of link-worthiness.
Content That Ranks By Accident
The best-ranking content is usually created for reasons other than ranking - documentation written to help users, blog posts written to share genuine insights, resources created because customers needed them - and this content ranks not because someone optimized it for keywords or hit the right keyword density or crafted the perfect meta description, but because it's actually good, because it genuinely helps people, because it would be worth creating even if search engines didn't exist.
When you create content to rank, you create content for Google, and Google can tell, and users can tell, and everyone can tell. When you create content to help, you create content for humans, and Google is trying to find content for humans, which means you're finally aligned with what Google actually wants instead of trying to game signals that are supposed to be proxies for quality.
The SEO Paradox
Here's the paradox that took me years to fully understand: the more you focus on SEO, the worse your SEO gets.
SEO-focused content is optimized, formulaic, and forgettable - it checks all the boxes, it hits all the signals, it does everything the guides tell you to do, and it ranks briefly, gets no engagement, and fades into the endless wasteland of content that nobody wants to read.
Product-focused content is useful, original, and shareable - it exists because someone had something worth saying, and it ranks and stays because people actually want it, because it solves a real problem, because it would be worth reading even if it never ranked for anything.
The companies winning at SEO aren't playing the SEO game at all - they're playing the "build something genuinely useful" game, and SEO is just a side effect, a natural consequence of being good at the thing that actually matters. (That's the playbook nobody will sell you.)
What This Means For You
Stop asking "how do we rank for this keyword?" and start asking "what can we create that people will search for by name?" - because the first question leads you down a path of tactical optimization that never ends, while the second question leads you toward building something that makes the first question irrelevant.
Build the product, create the resource, write the thing that's so good people have to share it - and do the SEO basics, don't break anything, have decent technical hygiene - but spend 90% of your energy on being worth finding rather than on being findable, because if you're worth finding the findability tends to take care of itself.
The best SEO is having something so good that Google would look stupid not ranking it. Everything else is just tactics.
Build something worth finding. The rankings will follow.