Favorite quote from the article, and a conclusion many of us have come to:<p>"What's the use of ranking high with content that doesn't engage visitors? If they feel like a bot wrote the content, it defeats the purpose.<p>If this is what it takes to rank on a search engine, then there's something wrong with the search engine itself."<p>I've run a marketing company with 7 figure monthly spend. SEO can be extremely important and impactful, particularly in emergent markets, niche products/services, or brand-heavy offers (whether defensive or offensive - think "Best Notion competitors 2023").<p>But, sadly, it's mostly a devolved game of cat-and-mouse, subject to the effervescent whims of Google, whose ultimate objective is to maximize their ability to serve ads. It's near impossible to get organic content to the first SERP for any remotely competitive keyphrase unless you or your referrers are shelling out cash to Google in some capacity.<p>I've been pitched by dozens of SEO freelancers and smaller agencies, and the majority of them do have some basis in somewhat provable metrics, but the cost is completely unreasonable relative to the long-term expected value from their results.<p>I generally don't recommend budgeting for SEO specifically unless you have around $10k+/mo in marketing spend. If you have quality content written and informed by a decent keyphrase strategy, you're usually better off with paid search ads that direct to such content; the expectation is that if your content is relevant and engaging (especially if it converts and you're passing confirmation of that conversion back to Google via GTM or GA) your quality score will increase, which inversely decreases your CPC. You'll tend to rank higher organically for the same keyphrases you're running paid search ads on if you play things well.<p>Despite making plenty of money from doing this effectively, I long for a future where discovery across the internet isn't beholden to a few corporate gatekeepers.