You've Been Thinking About SEO Backwards Your Whole Career

I want you to imagine two restaurants.

The first restaurant obsesses over Yelp. They study the algorithm. They beg customers for reviews. They respond to every comment with corporate precision. They've hired a consultant who specializes in "Yelp optimization." Their menu is designed around what performs well in search. They have a person whose entire job is managing their online reputation.

The second restaurant makes incredible food. The chef is obsessed, but not with Yelp. With the food. With sourcing. With technique. With making every single plate leave the kitchen in a state that borders on religious experience. They don't think about reviews because they're too busy thinking about the sear on the steak, the emulsification of the sauce, the temperature of the plate. Jiro doesn't check Yelp.

Which restaurant has better Yelp reviews?

You already know the answer. You've always known the answer. The second restaurant has better reviews because the second restaurant is actually better, and no amount of optimization can fake that at scale over time. The first restaurant might game their way to a 4.2 for a while. The second restaurant sits at 4.8 and they barely know their password to log in.

This is the entire lesson of SEO, compressed into a parable. And almost nobody learns it.

The Seduction of Tactics

Here's why we get it backwards: tactics are seductive because they're concrete, because they're actionable, because they make you feel like you're doing something, and you can tell yourself stories about productivity like "I optimized my title tags today" and "I built three backlinks this week" and "I improved my page speed by 200 milliseconds" and "I added schema markup to seventeen pages" and "I created a content calendar" and "I did a technical audit" and "I fixed my canonical tags."

These activities feel productive because they are measurable, because you can point to them in meetings, because you can put them in reports, because you can convince yourself and others that progress is being made because look at all this activity, look at all these checkboxes getting checked. But here's the uncomfortable question: did any of it make your site deserve to rank? Not "did it help your site rank better," because that's the wrong question, but whether your site became more deserving, whether you created something more valuable, whether you moved closer to being the obvious best answer or just got better at asking to be treated like you are, because these are wildly different things and the confusion between them is the source of almost all SEO failure.

The Permission Mindset vs. The Inevitability Mindset

Most people approach SEO like they're asking Google for permission, saying things like "please rank me" and "I've done everything you asked" and "I've followed your guidelines" and "I've made my site fast" and "I've written quality content, whatever that means" and "I've earned some links" and "now please, please let me into the top ten." This is begging, this is supplication, this is treating Google like a capricious god who must be appeased through ritual and sacrifice, and look, I get why people do it because Google does kind of act like a capricious god sometimes, but approaching SEO this way puts you in a psychological position that almost guarantees failure because when you're begging for permission you're implicitly accepting that you don't inherently deserve what you're asking for, saying essentially "I know I'm not obviously the best, so I need to convince you through optimization that I'm worthy of consideration," trying to close a gap that exists in reality through persuasion rather than substance.

The inevitability mindset is the opposite, saying instead: I am going to become so obviously, undeniably, embarrassingly the best answer to this question that ranking me becomes the only option that doesn't make Google look stupid, and I'm not going to ask for permission because I'm going to make not ranking me a problem for them rather than for me. This sounds arrogant, and it is arrogant, but it's also the only approach that actually works at scale over time.

What Google Actually Wants (No, Really)

Let me tell you what Google wants, not what they say in their guidelines, not what their PR people claim in blog posts, not what Danny Sullivan tweets, but what they actually want: Google wants to return results so good that users never think about using anything else, and that's the whole game, every other consideration subordinate to this one, wanting the search results to feel like magic, like Google read your mind, like of course this is what you were looking for.

When Google fails to do this, bad things happen, because users get frustrated, and some users actually try Bing, and users go directly to Reddit or TikTok to search instead, and users lose faith in the product, and advertisers notice that users are losing faith in the product, and revenue gets threatened, and Sundar has a bad day. So Google is desperately, existentially motivated to surface the best results, not the most optimized results, not the results that followed the guidelines most carefully, but the actually best results that make users feel like Google is still magic, and this is great news if you're actually the best while being terrible news if you're hoping to fake it.

The Uncomfortable Math of Competition

Here's something SEO people don't talk about enough: most websites don't deserve to rank, and I know that sounds harsh but think about it mathematically, because for any given query there are ten spots on page one, sometimes fewer now with all the SERP features, but there might be hundreds or thousands of websites trying to rank for that query, and basic math says that most of them will not make it to page one, that most of them cannot make it to page one because there isn't room.

So the question isn't whether you can do enough SEO to rank, because the question is whether you can be better than everyone else who's trying to rank, better rather than more optimized, actually, substantively, meaningfully better, and if you're the 47th best resource on a topic then no amount of technical SEO is going to get you to position one, because you might get to position 47 or probably not even that because the sites above you are also doing SEO, and you're bringing optimization to an optimization fight while being substantively worse than your competition, which is a losing strategy. The winning strategy is to stop being the 47th best resource and to become the first best resource, and that has almost nothing to do with what we traditionally call SEO.

The Content Quality Delusion

I need to address something here because I can already hear the objection: "But Amos, I AM creating quality content, I'm following all the advice, I'm writing comprehensive guides, I'm including original research, I'm making sure my content is helpful and valuable." Okay, but is it the best? Not good, not comprehensive, not valuable, but the best, because Google doesn't need to rank good content, Google needs to rank the best content, and there's unlimited good content on the internet while there's only one best answer to each query.

Most "quality content" is just competent regurgitation that says the same things everyone else says, in roughly the same way, with roughly the same depth, and it's fine and professional and helpful and completely interchangeable with a hundred other pieces covering the same topic. When everything is quality, nothing is quality, and the hedonic treadmill applies to search rankings too, and quality becomes table stakes, the minimum requirement to be considered at all rather than the thing that makes you win.

What makes you win is being genuinely, substantively different and better, having insights nobody else has, presenting information in ways nobody else thought of, going deeper than anyone was willing to go, taking perspectives nobody else was brave enough to take, adding value that cannot be replicated by someone with access to the same sources and a similar skill level, and most people aren't doing this, most people are producing competent mediocrity and calling it quality content and wondering why it's not ranking.

The Brand Paradox

Here's a weird thing I've noticed over 20+ years: the companies that rank best are usually the ones that think about SEO the least, not because they're doing SEO accidentally, not because they've somehow stumbled into optimization through luck, but because they're focused on something bigger than SEO and that bigger focus produces SEO results as a byproduct.

Think about the sites that dominate their niches: Wikipedia doesn't have an SEO team, not really, because they have people obsessed with building the best encyclopedia in human history; Amazon doesn't rank because of their meta descriptions but because they're Amazon; the New York Times doesn't show up in news results because of their schema markup but because they're the paper of record and have been for a century. These entities became inevitable, so synonymous with their categories that not ranking them would be absurd, and Google would look broken if Wikipedia didn't rank for factual queries, the search results would seem wrong.

Now I can hear you saying that you're not Wikipedia or Amazon or the New York Times, that you're a smaller company trying to compete in a crowded market, and fair enough, but the principle scales down: in your niche, for your audience, for your specific topic area, are you becoming inevitable, are you becoming the name that people think of when they think of your space, are you building the kind of presence and reputation and body of work that makes ranking you seem obvious, or are you just optimizing title tags and hoping for the best?

The Actual Work

Let me be specific about what the actual work looks like, because I've been fairly philosophical so far and I want to get practical: the actual work is not optimizing your website, the actual work is becoming the best.

For a content site, this means creating things that make people stop and think "holy shit, this is the best thing I've ever read on this topic," not good, not helpful, but the best, the thing people bookmark, the thing people send to colleagues, the thing people reference in their own work because they can't not reference it. For a product site, this means building a product so good that people search for it by name, that generates word of mouth, that creates fans who write about it without being asked, that becomes the answer people give when asked for recommendations in your category. For a service business, this means developing a reputation so strong that when people search for what you do not finding you would seem strange, that gets you cited in industry publications, that makes you the obvious expert that journalists call for quotes.

All of this is harder than SEO and takes longer than SEO and is less measurable than SEO, and all of this is what actually works.

The Heresy of Not Caring About Rankings

I'm going to say something that would get me kicked out of most SEO conferences: you should probably think about rankings less, not because rankings don't matter since they do and traffic from search is valuable, but because obsessing over rankings pulls your focus away from the thing that actually produces rankings, which is being genuinely excellent.

Every hour you spend checking your position tracking is an hour you didn't spend making your content better, and every day you spend worrying about an algorithm update is a day you didn't spend building your reputation, and every week you spend on technical optimizations that might move the needle by 3% is a week you didn't spend on creating something so good that the needle moves by 300%, and the opportunity cost of SEO obsession is the excellence that would actually solve your problem.

I've seen this pattern so many times it's become predictable: Company A obsesses over SEO, hires consultants, buys tools, tracks everything, optimizes constantly, makes modest incremental progress that frequently gets wiped out by algorithm updates; Company B ignores SEO almost entirely, focuses on their product and their content and their reputation, builds something people love, and then one day checks their analytics and realizes they're getting massive search traffic and they don't even know where it came from. Company B's approach looks like negligence but it's actually the highest form of SEO strategy.

The Time Horizon Problem

Part of why people get this backwards is the time horizon mismatch, because SEO tactics show results in weeks or months while becoming genuinely excellent takes years, and if you're being evaluated on quarterly performance you're going to gravitate toward tactics while if you're building for the long term you should gravitate toward excellence.

Most SEO is done by people with short time horizons, agencies that need to show results to keep clients, in-house teams that need to justify their existence each quarter, consultants who get paid for activity rather than outcomes, and everyone has incentives to do the short term thing, but the short term thing doesn't compound, it's a treadmill where you do the tactics and get the small gains and then the algorithm shifts and you lose the gains and do more tactics, round and round forever, and the only people who win on the treadmill are the people selling treadmill memberships.

Excellence compounds: a great piece of content published in 2020 is still earning links and traffic in 2025, a strong reputation built over years provides durable ranking power that survives algorithm updates, a brand that people search for by name has a moat that no amount of competitor optimization can breach. The long game looks like losing for a while, because you're investing in things that don't pay off immediately, and your competitors who are doing aggressive tactics might outrank you for a year or two (though studying their strategy can accelerate your learning), but when your investments start compounding and their tactics start failing the gap becomes permanent.

A Confession

I'm going to be honest about something: I've spent a lot of my career doing SEO the wrong way, obsessing over rankings and chasing algorithm updates and spending hours on technical optimizations that didn't matter, creating content calendars that prioritized quantity over quality, doing all the things I'm telling you not to do, because Sisyphus had a content calendar too.

And some of it worked, in the short term a lot of it worked, but I've watched enough of those gains evaporate over time to understand that I was treating symptoms instead of causes, optimizing my way out of problems that optimization couldn't solve. The stuff that actually lasted, the rankings that actually stuck, the traffic that actually kept coming, came from the times I forgot about SEO and just made something great, the times I got obsessed with a topic and went deeper than anyone else, the times I published something because I genuinely wanted it to exist rather than because I was trying to rank for a keyword. That's the pattern: the stuff you make because you're trying to rank rarely does, while the stuff you make because you care about it ranks despite your intentions.

The Inversion

So here's the inversion I'm proposing: instead of asking "how do I rank better," ask "how do I deserve to rank better," and instead of thinking about what Google wants to see, think about what would make your site the obvious best answer, and instead of optimizing what you have, create something that doesn't need optimization because its quality is self evident. This is harder and it takes longer and it's less measurable and it's not what your boss wants to hear or what your client wants to pay for, but it's the only thing that actually works.

The entire SEO industry exists because people want a shortcut to deserving, want to skip the hard work of excellence and go straight to the rewards, want tactics to substitute for quality, want optimization to substitute for value, but it doesn't work that way and it has never worked that way, and every SEO trick eventually stops working because Google keeps getting better at identifying who actually deserves to rank versus who is just pretending. The only durable strategy is to stop pretending, to actually become the thing you're trying to rank for, to make not ranking you seem ridiculous.

That's thinking about SEO the right way around, becoming inevitable instead of begging for permission, making ranking you the obvious choice instead of trying to convince Google through optimization (and for the tactical version of this philosophy, see the SEO playbook nobody will sell you). It's not what you'll learn at SEO conferences, not what the tools will tell you, not what the industry wants to admit, but it's the truth, and now you know it.