04 Mar 2025

5 things I learnt in my 6th year as a professional SEO

Filed under: SEO | AI | tech

Today marks the sixth anniversary of me becoming a digital marketer (you can read about my first year, second year, third year, fourth year, and fifth year to follow my journey).

I have to warn you: this one isn’t as cheerful as previous years which I’ll go into with each point but you have to take the sun with the clouds… or something. And it’s shorter. Short and unsweetened.

1. I’m more bored of AI than last year

A big one straight out of the gate. I started getting into AI a few years ago. I found it fascinating how you could take a dataset and train a model with it to create something personalised for all kinds of tasks. Generative AI seemed cool and new and shiny at the start but as time has gone on and with the widespread issues that this tech has, I’ve not only lost interest in a general sense but I’ve also grown bored of it.

Companies keep giving big tech corps money and brute forcing the technology into their services where it doesn’t belong. Chatbots are fallible, prone to confabulations, could be harmful in so many ways, their underlying tech is bad for the environment. The list goes on. I’, happy to give professional opinions on AI when asked as that’s my job but my personal interest has diminished significantly. My only interest lies in NLP and specific machine learning techniques like embeddings and how they can be used for certain tasks. I still love using RALTS and I actually use a local LLM from time to time when I want to do lower-level things like emails when I’m anxious and can’t think of the words to say or nickname ideas for Pokémon and I don’t use any of the outputs verbatim (see: AI as a tool to lower the inertia of getting started)

2. I’m still learning and relearning technical SEO and its importance

It’s been 3.5 years since I officially became a technical SEO and despite being a senior now, I’m still learning and relearning about the discipline. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt over time is that not everything in tech is “important” based on certain criteria. Does a small site need to prioritise tech health? Not really, but it might if the foundations are shaky or there are early plans to expand. Big sites definitely need to keep on top of it but they often come with 6–12 month turnaround times for (relatively) small changes and you have to figure out a way to demonstrate importance with or without a business case.

Audits aren’t just checklists of any and every issue found in an auditing tool. This isn’t new information and, in fact, a lot of tech SEOs will tell you this (if they haven’t already written a blog post about it on their websites). Sometimes, a site just doesn’t need a tech view and that should be okay to say. It’s all about showing what will make a difference and how, if any. Then you have to try and measure it as best you can which comes with its own issues. A lot of common fixes won’t affect ranking but may affect visibility but content and links affect both. How can you show your technical work did something when there are other contributing factors with unknown weights behind them all? Are there conclusive tests for this with strong methodologies? These are the questions I’ve tried to explore this year when I’ve had the time.

3. I still love web performance and I still think it’s more a CRO/UX thing than an SEO thing

While I’m still doing plenty of Core Web Vitals audits and pushing back where site speed isn’t a priority, I have started advocating for more involvement with CRO because web performance affects user experience and sessions more than visibility and ranking. I’ve yet to see enough convincing arguments to the contrary so the shift makes sense to me. Plus, it’s easier to measure using UX metrics. Web performance doesn’t do the heavy lifting when it comes to the SERP to site journey but it does in the site to conversion journey and that should be the focus.

4. But reading about SEO or web performance outside of work hours gives me anxiety

This is a weird one but it’s real. For some reason, whenever I see stuff about SEO outside of work, I get really anxious. I think it reminds me of how I feel like I’m “behind” everyone else because I’m not front and centre with my opinions or reading everything about everything. It’s a very opinionated and expert-y space and I hate that a lot. If all that hot air was used to demystify the industry and make everything more accessible, that’d be fine. But it’s still so snarky and corporate and I have no time for it. So I try to focus on what I think matters and filter everything else out.

5. I don’t feel like I’m doing meaningful work

And the biggest one for last. I wrote about this a few weeks ago but I don’t feel like I’m making as positive a difference to the world as I’d like. I can’t ignore what’s happening out there right now and while SEO isn’t there to change that (at least on its own), I don’t always see the real changes I make for whoever I make them for. I’m not an expert or some kind of figurehead for anything so I won’t know if I’ve inspired anyone from a professional perspective. So the disillusionment grows. Still got some thinking to do there.

Shout outs

Thank you to anyone who has helped me on my journey this year. No specific names again as not to miss anyone out but if we’ve talked, you know who you are.