Ignore The Noise: SEO Doesn’t Have to Be Spammy to Work

If SEO has you feeling like damned if you do, damned if you don’t, you’re in the right place! I got into SEO because I was a confused business owner. Nobody asked for it but now I’m screaming into the void doing my best to DE-tech-bro-guru it. Because it’s really not that deep.

Let’s agree here and now that SEO feels like a chaos monster.

There are approximately thousands of posts titled ‘Is SEO dead’ and each one of them says something different (while the answer is always no).

Get on LinkedIn for 20 minutes and you’ll see 3 posts contradicting each other. Clause adds a watermark and LinkedIn adds an AI slop button and that damned if you do, damned if you don’t feeling is back again.

SEO feels impossible so you push it from your mind — and the marketing budget. Again. And yet, here you are because you know it’s important.

The Big Point: Can You Rank Without Shady SEO Techniques?

Yes, of course!

And you don’t need to compromise your values or mission either. SEO often gets watered down to a couple of things: SEO titles, meta descriptions, headers, URL slugs, keywords.

But it’s much broader and vaguer than that. While there absolutely is expertise, guidance and critical thinking, rarely is there one right answer or strategy. Which is what makes it feel made up or like a black hole.

With this watered down definition of SEO, it’s a slippery slope into spammy SEO. If you only have one eye on the surface, there’s a whole ocean of information getting looked over.

There Are Two Kinds of Spammy SEO

I’ve sat down to write this blog many times before, but I’ve always gotten stuck. This time however, as I sat down to try again (and while I’m on vacation), I realized the confusion exists because there are two different versions of ‘SEO spam’ out there.

Spam to google/search engines: This is what’s dominating the think-spaces. If you’ve tried to look it up, you’ve probably found content along these lines.

• Keyword stuffing
• Buying backlinks
• AI content mills
• Low-quality content generation
• Hidden text in the background
• Orphaned pages with no internal links trying to sneak in content and keywords.

But the spam that you’re probably thinking of is this: clickbait headlines, keywords that don’t make sense for your business, misleading pages, pages that ‘don’t have any SEO value’ therefore they are ignored, orphaned pages that provide a horrible user experience.

SEO as a science is watching for Google-spam to ensure your site doesn’t get flagged. SEO as a creative marketing field is looking for the spammy SEO that can silently cost you customers.

So here’s how those of us who are doing both are creating a unique SEO strategy for your brand layer by layer.

Practically each one of these is its own sub-industry of SEO. But each individual piece goes into creating an overall ethical and intentional strategy that works for you and your goals.

1. The Layer That Forms The Strategy

Before a single SEO title is rewritten, before a page is added, before content is brainstormed or a word is written, we research.

• Realistic Competitor Research: Looking at who’s taking up similar space as you, we don’t copy, but we look to see what’s working and what we’re missing. Think of this as looking for inspo.
• Site Structure Evaluation: We look at what your customers are looking for and how they’re looking. Then we look at your site to determine if you have the right pages, enough pages, too many pages.

I was working with an e-commerce client recently on Foundational SEO. Before I even started keyword research, I noticed her site had multiple product variants, each with its own product URL. Each product had 5 variants, which meant 5 separate pages for what was really one product. Not only was this creating a ton of unnecessary work for her, it was essentially creating 5 duplicate pages for every single product.
Combining them into one page with variant selectors did three things at once. It stopped Google from seeing five duplicate versions of the same product, which on its own should help each one perform better instead of quietly competing with itself. It cut her workload down. And it gave her customers a single, clear page to choose from instead of five nearly identical listings that all said the same thing in slightly different words.

• Intentional Keyword Research: NOW we can begin the keyword research. Keyword research is not just looking for words with high volume and throwing them in a spreadsheet. We’re looking for words and phrases that are actually going to work with your brand.
  • Does the keyword have enough volume to bring traffic that matters?
  • Is the difficulty of the keyword attainable for your site?
  • Does the intention of the keyword match your brand?

2. The Human Layer: Who Is This All For

Nothing matters if a person lands on your site/a page and doesn’t understand what’s happening. Could they figure it out? Sure, but they shouldn’t have to.

You’re on a road trip and you stop for gas. At first, it was a gas station, but once you park you see nothing’s clearly labeled, the prices aren’t visible, and paying takes multiple, separate attempts before someone points you to the back of the building. Could you figure it out? Sure. But if you don’t need gas this very second, you’re already back on the highway looking for the next one.
I hear this a lot with entrepreneurs. The closer you get to your site and the daily minutiae you forget who the product is for. Poor navigation drives 79% of visitors away. And 88% of people say they won’t come back after one bad experience. What this means is that people are leaving because they can’t tell what you do. Quickly.

• The UX: Hand in hand with what pages you have on the site, how usable is it? Is it intuitive, easy to use? Can people easily find what they’re looking for. This also includes website accessibility. Simple UX can lead up to 4x more conversions.
• The Copy: Words matter, people read, robots read. You are all up in your businesses business all day everyday. You cannot assume everyone knows as much as you do. They are not. The copy is your bridge to your customers.
  • It makes it human
  • It connects to the audience
  • It projects your brand
  • It educates
  • It informs
  • It sells
  • AND it put keywords in the right places to ensure it gets picked up but AI and Search Engines.
• The Copy Editing: This seems to be the path less traveled. At every step a person should be looking at the copy and making sure it’s doing all the things I mentioned above while never losing the goal of speaking to your customers.

We recently built a fact sheet for a client who’s deeply close to the brand. Nothing we wrote was aligning and I could tell they were feeling like we were pushing them towards words that didn’t align. Once we built the sheet, they told us they hadn’t realized just how much knowledge they were carrying in their head until they wrote it all down. We weren’t forcing their hand, we were approaching it without a decade of personal connection. We were seeing the business the way customers do, because we’re strangers to it too.

3. The Authority Layer: Proof You’re Real & A Real Authority

There’s more to a website than ‘it works’.

SEO bros will tell you an about page doesn’t really matter for SEO. And in the traditional sense of tracking and metrics and organic performance they’re not wrong. But they’re also not right.

Your site is the place everything else gets checked against. If someone searches for you and finds an about page, photos, a story that matches other ways they’ve heard about you, that consistency builds trust.

If they find a generic template with no names, no story, and contradictory information, that gap is exactly what makes people, and now AI systems, hesitate.

• Authority: With every change and iteration every year your authority becomes more important. Beyond backlinks and PR, match Name/Address/Phone (NAP) and critical information across all platforms.
• The Content Engine: The point of blogging is not just to publish content. It’s about showing what makes you (or your brand) the expert, helping people find you at all stages of their journey, contributing something original (a data point, a hot or cold take, a human experience) that is unique to you.
• AI As A Trust Signal: AI systems are like search engines in that they’re looking for information across the internet. The more they can find from you, the more it matches, the more your voice stands out the more reason they have to treat you as a real, authoritative source.

4. The ‘Does It Work’ Layer

I realize I literally just said there’s more to a site than ‘it works’ BUT it does need to work! There’s a whole sub-industry of technical SEO and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert or understand most of it. But I can put it into context.

Website Builders & Custom Sites: The Squarespace’s, the Shopify’s, the WordPresses, etc. At its most simplest, you’re using a tool that handles the technical stuff.

Custom Coded Site: A custom website begins from scratch for everything including SEO. There are no built-in tools, automations or features so it requires more more hands on work and knowledge. Which is why this takes up so much room online.

Enterprise Sites: This is the publishers, the massive product catalogs, the sites with tens of thousands of pages. The technical challenge is managing scale without breaking everything.

The majority of us live in #1 but most of the advice is written for 2 & 3. So the technical SEO that we’re looking at is much more manageable.

• Technical: Can AI systems/Search crawlers reach and read your site. This ensures it loads fast, links/buttons work when they’re supposed to, it’s secure, and works for everyone (screen readers, accessibility).
• Measurement: And of course, use data instead of guessing. You don’t need to start with fancy software or dashboards, Google Analytics and Search Console are free. Just start because otherwise you’re making big decisions off vibes which can only get you so far.

5. The AI Layer: AEO & GEO

I know we make fun of it a lot but AI search is a very real thing. It’s just much less ** gestures wildly ** than the Tech-Bro-Gurus make it seem.

I really like this quote from Search Engine Journal. I think it perfectly captures how we’re all feeling.

“…there is a small but loud group of pro-GEO/AEO agencies and individuals who have very little experience with SEO pushing solutions that are, at best, just SEO and, at worst, spammy tactics.”

My approach to SEO, and now AEO and GEO is the same. I optimize for best practices, but the work should blend into your brand so completely that if any of them disappeared tomorrow, nothing would break.

While anything disappearing is unlikely to happen, that mindset is how we avoid the Tech-Bro-Guru crash-out every time something updates.

And if you’re still confused by AEO and GEO, same girl, same. This is my job and I still had to research them to write this. 😎

• Schema: Schema is just a little bit of code that goes into the back of the site to tell the crawlers in a more concise way what’s on the page. Think of it like putting labels on moving boxes so the movers know where to take the stuff.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Building high-quality content that AI systems turn to to site. It’s less about trying to rank and more about authority and trust.
• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Designed to help your content appear in short, direct results. Snippets, People Also Ask, Voice Assistant.

And to reiterate, good SEO has always included GEO and AEO techniques. It’s just not we can separate them a little bit more and dive a little deeper.

You Already Know More Than You Think

I know this was a lot. I hope it makes spammy SEO feel a little further off in the distance, a little less mysterious.

A lot of this was probably stuff you already knew, right?

Bits and pieces collected over the years. That’s SEO. Taking alllllll of that and piecing it together into something that works, and even more, piecing it together into a strategy that’s thoughtful/intentional/ethical instead of accidental.

And that’s really the whole difference. Spam isn’t some separate, sinister category for the most part.

Without brushing off the real stuff, yes, some bad agencies are 100% hiding what they’re doing and you can usually sus that out.

But most spammy SEO isn’t a conspiracy. It’s what happens when any of these layers gets missed or dismissed. I think a lot of it comes down to incompetence over malice. Someone cutting corners, time, budget or humans over doing it the long, but right way.

And perhaps most importantly of all, you don’t need to do this alone. You don’t even need to do it all at once.

That’s the point of a strategy, not to burn it all down, but to build on what you already have. You’ve gotten this far, you’ve clearly been doing something right. Now it’s time to take it to the next level.