Why I have a love-hate relationship with SEO

Just some background on me before I get into the article. I’ve been around SEO for 15 years and I guess I was around when it all began. In 2006 I became SEO manager for Betfair, in 2010 became head of search marketing for Unibet and in 2012 I set up 90 Digital, an SEO agency. In 2015 I launched Oshi casino, which has grown to the point where I give it my sole attention.

I’ve always found SEO intriguing. It’s that hard discipline where great SEO’ers can add up all of the hearsay, discriminate between probable and improbable to then draw up a plan of action to rank on Google. It’s also a multimodal discipline. What do I mean? There are technical disciplines which involve understanding how a website is put together, so you can then optimise it for Google and there are human disciplines which one needs to persuade webmasters to give you a link.

If you have ever heard of context switching, SEO is full of this. The catch with context switching is it’s inefficient. We’ve all had it, where one moment we’re concentrating on a spreadsheet and then we’re asked to write an email about something. It’s very hard to flip between one thing and another easily. Imagine this on a huge scale with a whole profession.

SEO is also the ‘unwanted’. Being great at SEO means a site ranks really well, probably more than it should. Google wants sites that deserve to rank and if you’ve gamed your way to the top, you are their enemy. That’s why there’s a term called black hat SEO. If you’re ‘black hat’ you are Google enemy number one.

However, if you are ‘white hat’, you’re Google’s friend. You do what Google tells you and will do nothing to stimulate rankings in any way. As a pure white hat SEO, you will probably be pretty ineffective in egaming. If you ever wonder why SEO’ers are such a strong community, it’s because they have a unifying force they oppose: Google. So there you have it, my take on why this industry is the way it is.

Why I love SEO
I love the camaraderie and community. Reading this, you probably work in egaming. SEO and egaming have a couple of things in common in my view: people are fascinated and frightened by it and we deal with gamblers, which is not pretty sometimes.

Good SEO’ers deal with gaming systems and have to think in a contrarian/insightful way to be successful. Being at a dinner party and saying you work in SEO usually draws a blank expression or some kind of low-level disapproval when you explain you game search engines to rank websites.

Deep down I do like being an outlier, someone who is slightly anti-establishment. I think most people and egaming can resonate with that. SEO community has the same characteristics in my view, hence the vibrant industry communities in both sectors.

As I mentioned before, this discipline is all about pulling together the most ‘probably’ correct information. Google doesn’t tell you exactly what makes the site rank. They don’t want you to know its weaknesses, all they want you to do is follow their line. It’s one reason I dislike the term ’white hat’, because these people who advocate being white hat plainly don’t understand the true meaning and consequences of this badge.

Unlike some professions, there is no perfect way to do SEO. There is only what works best and that changes constantly. To handle this change, one has to be very creative, constantly researching and pulling different facts together to help draw conclusions on what is really going on. It’s an industry in constant flux and that does make it fascinating.

Why I hate SEO
I don’t really hate it. I’m just disenchanted sometimes. As a discipline it’s wonderful, as a business model it’s got some issues. What makes SEO wonderful is its ever-changing nature and the constant cat and mouse between Google and those who want to rank on it.

But, aſter a while it all gets a bit slow going. With this constant change comes the overhead of learning more stuff. This constant learning suits some people, but those people are costly and rare. In turn, it makes good SEO‘ers very expensive.

Where Google essentially hides information about what search query bought a user to a website, it means no one can definitively say that this traffic from this keyword produced this customer. Once upon a time, you could do this and SEO was treated as a profitable discipline, bringing in a lucrative form of traffic. Today you have to pay for traffic and accountability through AdWords.

As a result it’s meant SEO has become a less accountable discipline; a bit like PR. You know it does you some good when you do it right, but how much good and how much is it worth; who knows? It means brands aren’t prepared to invest so much into SEO and so obviously it means there is less money in it.

You might say SEO is getting bigger and bigger, and in a sense you’re right. LinkedIn describes SEO as one of the top 10 most desirable skill sets in the marketplace and obviously getting more mainstream.

However, the truth is SEO housekeeping is getting bigger and bigger, but the SEO where you can game the system and rank is diminishing. Lots of people will disagree with me by the way, telling me that link buying still works and black hat is as effective as ever. But how many serious brands want to do this now? I don’t.

Lack of scale
With all of this uncertainty surrounding SEO, it means real scaling is hard to do. That’s why there are no huge SEO agencies, unlike huge media buying agencies or whatever. It’s just a lot of work that has to be handled by people with real expertise. You can’t ‘factory process’ off-site SEO like you used to. In turn, all of this means a lot of friction to building a scaled business.

So what about me? Well, I founded an SEO agency and it’s done pretty well. I’m glad to say I’ve left it in very good hands as I now focus on my online casino. You may wonder why I set up an online casino? Well understanding the internet, egaming, online marketing, problem solving, product and building a business are pretty much common features.

The difference between the SEO agency I founded and this online casino is scalability. For the same amount of work, same size of team and the same probability of success, the casino could be 10-20 times more profitable.

I think back to the SEO community that I was so much a part of for years and I have the greatest of respect and admiration for them. I only wonder what these amazingly talented people could do if they weren’t in SEO. But, I do understand why they stay in SEO, because it is a remarkable discipline.