Why SEO Can Undermine Your Unique Voice and Creativity
Yesterday I spent all day going through the past blog posts from this year and updating them so that they have better SEO rankings. Now, before I started doing more research on marketing a blog, I had briefly encountered SEO in my prior career.
It just wasn’t something that we talked about if and when we went to run ads because we were targeting a specific area or location.
But a friend of mine whose business was the cleanup from all my guys door knocking poured in hundreds of thousands, according to him, into improving his SEO rankings.
He wanted to rank #1 when someone searched “is solar in Oregon a scam” after one of my guys or another company knocked on their door and pitched solar. His business did almost all of its revenue off of SEO.
Me? I just knocked until my knuckles bled and told my guys to do the same.
Frankly, when he told me this, I had to look up what SEO meant.
It’s an acronym for search engine optimization, making it so a search engine like Google can find the website’s content first and foremost, and then following that, getting that website to move higher up on the search results.
Typically, people when they google never go beyond the first page to find the information they are looking for, so if a company is heavily dependent on search traffic, it would be in their best interest to invest a lot of money in SEO since it would have such a high ROI for that company.
For me, I was just trying to figure out how to get the blog to be linked on a Search page.
I took a short little course on SEO and how search engine spiders work to find new content on the web. It is actually really fascinating, the background of how this stuff all works, especially since the internet is something all of us use on a daily basis.
The Dark Side of Search Engine Optimization: Conformity Over Innovation
Basically, as connections start forming between different pages through links, it starts to form a way for the spiders or bots to find the page.
In addition to the structure of the linking or connecting pages, the keywords that someone types into Google form the seeking that the bots crawl the pages and connections for.
So an SEO-optimized page would have plenty of keywords that the specific audience you are trying to attract would be using to find your site.
I happened to read an article about how a change in the search algorithm a few years ago led to website owners restructuring the basis of their sites to what has been termed ‘topic clusters.’
When you see the change visually in how a website was structured prior to this and after, you can really see how Google is remarking the world.
How SEO Forces Websites into a Uniform Mold—And What That Means for You
Certainly, our experience of consuming information has changed with Google and the internet, even without taking into account the rise of social media.
I had written my master’s thesis on a contemporary poet named Tan Lin and one of his books, which was exploring the way the public audience experiences and processes the death of one of its stars, in particular, Heath Ledger.
Now that is a very limited reading of the actual book because it is really about everything in contemporary life on the internet or the public sphere.
Tan Lin was very concerned with what the internet was doing to the experience of reading and the consumption of information, and was very influenced by a work of sociological research by Nicolas Carr called Is Google Making Us Stupid?
For Lin, he became very aware of the very quick consumption of information through the internet which prioritizes skimming rather than a deep read.
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Certainly, different types of mediums demand different types of performances, I can’t think of a single soul who actually reads the newspaper.
You skim it and if something catches your eye you give more attention to it.
But Lin, following Carr’s essay, started seeing this surface quality across any medium he was reading as if the type of reading we do on the internet was dominating his experience with all mediums.
Tan Lin’s Warnings: The Internet’s Impact on Reading and Information Consumption
We have so much stuff today trying to grab our attention, nobody could deny this.
But what was concerning to me when I was researching SEO was that in order for a website to be found, it essentially had to reorganize itself and start pursuing SEO as a category outside of content.
For all the idealism of the internet, it seems a little counterintuitive to push a uniform conformity onto everybody.
The conformity is necessary for the content to be discovered and since the internet is the eternal present, divesting itself of the past at every moment, there will come a time where all content is the same.
Something that is wild, provocative, and dangerous will be unable to be found because it wouldn’t conform to how Google’s bots want it.
Why SEO Isn’t the Only Path to Success: Embrace Your Originality
This is part of a larger concern I feel with the rise of AI and ChatGPT.
Now, I want to be clear that I am no Luddite saying we should destroy it all.
I actively use ChatGPT as a resource and since I didn’t know how to go back through all the content I had already written for the blog and optimize it for SEO, I just used ChatGPT and prompts to expedite the process.
As I put things through the prompting asking for titles and subtopic headlines, I started to experience the haziness which can come from consuming content on the internet, where suddenly the distinct voice has lost its distinctness.
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Read Leadership, Influence, Poetry: A Journey in Rising from Defeat
ChatGPT and the Rise of Generic Content: How AI Is Diluting Creativity
Now, I didn’t revise or rewrite any of the content of the blog posts, I just added SEO optimized titles and subtopics.
But suddenly, like a flash, I began to become acutely aware of reading on the internet.
Gone was my original title of a blog post which was an allusion to a movie, to be replaced by something that the search engine can find easily.
My fear is not so much what I often hear concerning the rise of natural language models where we will replace our memory and creativity because that has always been the concern when a new technology comes.
My fear is that everything will sound the same. It will all be the same.
A new blanket of conformity stretching over the human race. Or at least our presence online.
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