Hot take: People still think SEO is just stuffing keywords everywhere

I talked to three small business owners at a meetup in Ferndale last week and they all told me they load their website text with 'SEO keywords' and get no traffic. One guy said he hired a writer who jammed 'best Detroit pizza' into every paragraph 15 times. Google's algorithm has been smart enough to catch this for years now. You're not helping yourself you're just making your site read like a robot. When was the last time you actually checked your site's bounce rate after a keyword change?

3 comments

3 Comments

karenb971mo ago

Exactly, stuffing keywords is just making your site read like spam and driving people away.

mianelson1mo ago

Oh totally, it's like people forget we're actual humans reading this stuff... I found that just writing naturally for my audience and sprinkling in relevant terms where they fit worked way better than trying to game some algorithm. It's funny how being less robotic actually helped my site rank higher over time too.

lunah121mo ago

I literally had to read that twice because I could swear you were talking about my old site. Back in 2020 I was so obsessed with hitting the exact keyword density numbers that my articles sounded like a robot having a stroke. I had this one post about hiking boots where I used the phrase "best hiking boots" something like 47 times in 800 words. It was brutal. Google finally tanked the whole thing and honestly it deserved it. Now I just write like I'm telling a friend about a product and my traffic is way better than it ever was with that keyword nonsense.