A response to The Truth About S.E.O. (March 2024)
In March 2024 I said something that a lot of agencies avoid saying in a sales meeting. A new website will not, by itself, push you to the top of Google. I put it this way:
“It can be tempting to tell a prospective client what they want to hear.”
And then I told the truth instead. Some search factors are in your control, like page titles and descriptions. Many aren’t, like how many other sites link to you and how long your pages have been in Google’s index. A redesign can even cost you a little, because changed URLs and redirects can make Google reevaluate pages.
All of that is still true. This is one of those articles where the agentic revolution doesn’t change the core message. It changes what surrounds it.
What is still outside your control
I said that a client’s actual rankings would be determined by factors outside their control. That hasn’t changed. Agents can’t make other sites link to you. They can’t age your domain. They can’t read Google’s mind, and nobody else can either.
If anything, the search landscape has become less predictable since 2024. AI-generated answers now show up in search results, and people are asking AI assistants questions they used to type into Google. I am not going to pretend anyone has fully figured out what that means for rankings. The honest answer is still the trust-building answer.
What is easier to get right
The things that are in your control got much easier to do well.
In 2024 I said the simplest, highest impact practice was writing good meta titles and descriptions:
“This simple practice has the greatest impact on a site’s optimization.”
I still believe that. The difference now is effort. Writing a thoughtful title and description for every page on a large site used to be the kind of task that got put off forever. Agents can draft them from the actual page content in minutes, and a person can review and refine them. The same goes for the other practices I listed: descriptive alt text on images, internal cross links between related pages, and clean, efficient images.
The redesign risk I described also shrinks. When a site is reorganized, every changed URL needs a proper redirect. Mapping hundreds of old pages to new ones by hand was tedious and easy to get wrong. Agents can help build that map so it is complete, and my team checks it before launch.
And there is a structural advantage I couldn’t offer in 2024. A custom theme, built without a page builder’s extra layers, produces cleaner, leaner pages. That makes it easier for search engines to understand what each page is about, and it means you aren’t losing ground to a slow, bloated site. I wrote more about that in my response on page speed.
Content is still the work
What doesn’t change is that relevant content is still what earns rankings. Agents can help draft, organize, and polish. But deciding what your organization should say, what your audience is really searching for, and what makes your answer better than everyone else’s is strategy. That is human work.
So the trade off I used to describe looks different now. In 2024 a client had to decide how much budget to give to development and how much was left for content and SEO. Development was the big line item. Now that development costs have dropped so much, more of the budget can go to the content and planning that actually move search results. We no longer have to give one up to pay for the other.
Still the truth
My closing advice to agencies was to lay out the full picture, both the risks and the opportunities. That is still the right advice. Telling the truth about SEO is still one of the best ways to build trust.
The truth today is simply a little better. The parts you control are easier and cheaper to do well. The parts you don’t control are still out of your hands. And anyone promising otherwise is still selling something.
¡Viva la Revolución!