Why people see SEO as “dark magic”

It’s usually of common practice to misinterpret something that you don’t have a fair level of knowledge to understand. It is something implicit in the human nature, the bias to focus on the negative side of things before we even consider the positive side.

I remember when I got my first job at a Design agency in Lisbon around 1998 — at that time I was in the last year of my degree — I had time to experiment, explore and research the Design world, I was full of ideas and great theory of how things could be accomplished and I even had nice grades to prove that. But soon I realized that many people, either inside the company or outside were always reluctant in pursuing and trying new stuff, and I heard many similar stories from my university colleagues that worked in other companies. Soon it became obvious to me that most people are afraid to admit they don’t know something (mostly to someone younger), either because they are afraid of “losing control” or to be seen as “deprecated” by their peers. As one gets older in a leading position, if they don’t face challenges on a daily basis they get “comfortable” without even noticing they are losing on innovation and competitivity.

So, mostly, people are afraid to lose control, either because they didn’t keep up with time and explore new technologies, or they thought those would be irrelevant and wouldn’t impact their business… Or just because they lost motivation on what they do and seek an easy and comfy way to pursue business. When someone tries to challenge them, they become unwilling to listen to others and assume they are right at all times. And that’s what mostly happens in the web world!

Many “old school” companies ignored the potential of a well established web presence, either by leveraging the power of search and social media, or because they didn’t try to come up with a differentiating factor once it becomes something perceived as given in the web world. The web deeply changed the way we access information and get to products.

So what does all this has to do with people saying stuff like: SEO is a “dark magic”; SEO is “snake oil”; SEO is dead; [insert here next meme]?
Well, because they are trying to evaluate something they don’t fully know or understand, because they just realized they have been losing on something and now they need to catch up with it somehow… And now they just found out that somehow this search/SEO/SEM thing affects their business after all. So they go out, try to get this “new thing” as fast as they can and they realize it’s harder than they thought, or they got the wrong/incomplete advice, because SEO is composed by a lot of things together and it’s not a just a single factor, a plugin, or outputting pretty URLs. So they end up not getting the results they planned, and get frustrated.

…OK in some cases that is just pure link-baiting, but those are the exception :^)

People in general don’t like change, we don’t like the idea of having to adapt over and over again, you can see this at its best when Google launches something that changes search or anything people are used to, you’ve seen it with Google Suggest, Google Personalized Search and recently with Google Instant. Well without change there would be no innovation, and Google loves innovation, you do the math. I don’t expect that everyone agrees with me in this post, because people tend also to learn the best with their experiences. And it doesn’t matter what you write, people will read what they want to read, but at least I expect to get you thinking about it, and maybe next time you hear about some change on the web, on search, or social media, or wherever, you consider the positive side and figure out how to adapt, before dumping your negative thoughts and rants straight out.

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