I asked a business owner to show me his SEO strategy. He sent back a fourteen-tab spreadsheet, a content calendar mapped out to March, and a list of 340 keywords sorted by search volume. It was genuinely impressive work.
It was also keyword stuffing with better intentions.
SEO — search engine optimization, the work of getting your business to show up when someone searches for what you sell — has become far more sophisticated in its vocabulary than in its thinking. The tactics got a new wardrobe. The underlying belief never changed: that ranking is a function of how many times, and how many clever ways, you can say the thing you want to rank for.
That belief was wrong in 2009. It is expensive now.
The Tell: You Are Optimizing for the Words, Not the Question
The old version was obvious. You wanted to rank for "Tampa divorce lawyer," so you wrote "Tampa divorce lawyer" forty times, added it to the footer, and hid a few in white text at the bottom of the page.
The modern version is harder to spot because it looks like strategy. Write 2,000 words. Add an FAQ block. Work in related terms and synonyms. Put the phrase in every heading. Publish every Tuesday without fail.
Every one of those instructions is about the string of words. Not one of them is about the person typing it.
Here is the test I use, and it takes about ten seconds. Open your content plan and point to any row. Ask: who is the person searching this, and what are they trying to stop worrying about?
If the answer is "people searching for roof repair," that is not an answer. That is the keyword read back to you in a full sentence. If you cannot describe the moment that person is in — standing in an attic with a flashlight, at 11pm, after the second storm this month — then you do not have a strategy. You have a stuffing plan with a project manager attached.
Five Pieces of SEO Advice That Are Just Stuffing in a Better Suit
None of the advice below is stupid. All of it is downstream of a measurement problem: these things are easy to count, and the thing that actually matters is not.
| What the advice sounds like | What it is really optimizing for | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| "Aim for 2,000 words per page" | Length, because length is countable | Answer the question completely, then stop writing |
| "Add an FAQ section to every page" | Looking like the pages that already rank | Answer only the questions customers actually ask you on the phone |
| "Work in related terms and synonyms" | Vocabulary coverage | Cover the decisions a buyer has to make before they can say yes |
| "Get the keyword into every heading" | Repetition, politely spaced out | Make each heading a real question, in the words a customer would use |
| "Publish weekly — consistency wins" | Volume, because volume is a schedule | Publish when you have something only you could have written |
The Tampa Law Firm That Ranked for Everything Except Clients
A family law attorney in Tampa came to me last year with a problem she could not make sense of. Her previous agency had built her sixty-three blog posts over two years. She ranked in the top five for "family law attorney Tampa." Her site pulled roughly 3,400 visits a month.
She was getting two consultation requests a month from all of it.
The audit took an afternoon. Her pages answered questions like "What is family law?" and "Understanding the divorce process." Those get traffic. They get traffic from paralegal students, from people three years away from doing anything, and from other law firms checking on her.
Nobody hiring a divorce attorney searches "what is family law." They search "can I keep the house in a Florida divorce," "how long does an uncontested divorce take in Florida," and "what does a 50/50 custody schedule actually look like during the school year."
She had zero pages for any of it. Meanwhile she was answering those exact three questions on every intake call, for free, four times a week.
We rewrote nine pages around the questions from her own call notes, and we put her name and her cases into them — twenty years of Hillsborough County filings, what judges there actually tend to do, the mistakes she watches clients make in week one. Things no agency writer could have invented.
Fourteen weeks later her traffic was down about 11%. The students stopped coming. Consultation requests went from two a month to eleven.
That is the number I care about. Traffic is a vanity metric wearing a lab coat.
If your traffic looks healthy but your phone does not ring, that gap is the whole problem — and it is fixable. Tell me what you are seeing and I will tell you honestly whether it is worth working on.
What Google Actually Rewards: Experience, Depth, and Matching Intent
Google publishes its own shorthand for this: E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Strip the acronym and it means one question. Does this read like it was written by someone who has actually done the thing?
Three things move that needle, and none of them are countable in a spreadsheet.
Experience is the detail an outsider would not know to include. The attorney's page about custody schedules mentions that Hillsborough County judges dislike mid-week overnight swaps during the school year. A writer in a content mill cannot produce that sentence. A search engine trying to work out who deserves to rank can tell the difference, and so can a reader who is scared and comparing three firms.
Depth is the follow-up question. Most pages answer the question and stop. Real depth answers what the reader asks next — the "okay, but what if…" that comes twenty seconds later. That is why your intake calls are the best content brief you will ever get.
Intent matching is deciding which of three people you are writing for. Someone learning, someone comparing options, someone ready to hire. Those need three different pages. A single page that tries to serve all three serves none of them, which is how a site ends up ranking well and converting badly.
That work is slower than filling in a content calendar. It is also the reason the results last, and it is most of what I do on an SEO engagement. When a business needs traffic faster than that timeline allows, I would rather put them on Google Ads for a quarter and be honest about it than pretend content can move that fast.
How to Audit Your Own Pages This Week
You do not need a tool or a consultant for this. Set aside ninety minutes.
If you want the longer version of how I work through this, it is written up on my process page, and the questions I get asked most often are answered on the FAQ.
The Bottom Line
Good SEO is not a more sophisticated way of repeating yourself — it is the discipline of answering the questions your customers are actually asking, with detail only you could provide. Counting words, headings and publishing dates feels like strategy because those things are easy to measure, but the only number that settles the argument is how many people contacted you.
If you have a site full of content that ranks and still does not bring you work, let's talk about it. I will look at your pages and tell you which ones are earning their place.