The SEO industry is an industry in constant change. Not only do external factors, such as Google’s continuous updates, change the landscape at a rapid pace. It is also a very young industry with fast-growing companies and constantly new methods. This means that if you want to succeed in the long term, you must be prepared to change—often and significantly. Change management is difficult in any company, and when it needs to happen almost daily, extra effort is required.
Almost all companies talk about development. They run projects aimed at modernization or digitalization. They talk about change management, product development, and they set plans one, two, or five years into the future. “Companies that don’t move forward move backward,” I was taught at my first job when I was fifteen. Not to diminish the efforts of previous generations of entrepreneurs in our country—every era has its own opportunities and challenges—but the level of change required within search engine optimization is something entirely different from what has historically been required in paper manufacturing, steel production, or almost any other industry you might compare it to.
Granted, the industries mentioned above are facing changes right now as well. Take paper, for example—printing paper, whether copier paper or newsprint, has taken a serious hit in recent years. The internet and digital products have simply eaten up large parts of that market; the demand is no longer the same. Many were caught off guard, and now major investments are being made to adapt—or operations are shut down entirely. It simply requires significant resources to convert a paper machine from producing copier paper to making something else that is more viable today. If, when building the machine, one could have foreseen that we would suddenly stop copying paper, one would have built a different type of machine—one that could be repurposed. Perhaps not at the push of a button, but at least with a smaller investment.
The music, newspaper, paper industries, and many others have seen major changes over the past ten years. They live with change today. But make the comparison—what did the SEO industry look like ten years ago? There were only a handful of people in Sweden who could do search engine optimization properly. There were only a few companies that were more than just a guy in a basement. Virtually none of the companies that existed back then are still around today. They have been acquired, gone under, changed direction, or simply been overtaken. The newspaper industry has gone through a lot over the past ten years, but you haven’t changed your local newspaper five times during that period, have you?
If we also consider Google’s constant updates, the world of a search engine optimizer is one of continuous change. Sure, it may be painful to sit on a paper product when the internet emerges—but SEO has changed shape completely multiple times over these years. Moving from paper to digital can be painful, but those of us who have worked with SEO for ten years have had to make that transition again and again. We started with cuneiform in 2004, moved past wooden tablets in 2007, learned to print in 2010, and mass-produced in 2011. In 2012 it became worthless, so we threw ourselves into social media, which in 2013 proved to be meaningless. I’m not saying that people in other industries are less capable; what I want to illustrate are the extreme conditions that define the SEO landscape. I also believe that the lessons learned in our industry can be useful when developing a company in another industry. Of course, there are also things that make life easier in the SEO industry—one such factor worth mentioning is that it’s easier to make money in a rapidly growing industry.
So how should one relate to change within search engine optimization?
Our industry colleagues have handled this phenomenon in a few different ways. I won’t mention any names here—this is not criticism, but an attempt to paint a picture of the situation. The first approach is to be overly cautious. This model is heavily influenced by the American SEO industry. By never doing anything that has a significant impact on search results, some agencies manage to keep their heads above water. By taking very little risk—working mostly with titles and headings—they achieve small results, but maintain a model that lasts longer. One major advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t require extensive SEO expertise to function as a consultant. Many agencies can hire people from the nearest bus stop and send them out to clients; all they need to know is that the keyword should be in the title and how to produce a PowerPoint or two. Wrap it all in a bag full of fluff, and voilà—you have a sustainable SEO model.
The reality is that changing titles often does improve rankings—assuming no one has told the site owner that before. It doesn’t deliver the massive results of full-scale SEO, but for a site with strong authority and a reasonably sound structure, it can be a viable path forward.
Another approach we’ve seen a few times in the Swedish market is to be ready with an entirely new model when the old one collapses. One larger Swedish company has completely restructured how it works at least four times in seven years, particularly when it comes to links. No criticism intended—it’s an incredibly impressive feat to overhaul an entire production model every couple of years. The problem, however, is that the collapse often happens before the transition, with clients being kicked out of Google’s index and all that entails.
What we are trying to do
I would personally never accept Brath devolving into sending out inexperienced juniors to change people’s titles and calling it search engine optimization. Nor would I ever accept the level of risk-taking we’ve seen in the second example. A true search engine optimizer is more than a glorified webmaster and more than a fearless link spammer.
That’s why we need to build continuous change into every part of the company. From content production to analysis, every employee needs to keep developing constantly. To me, this is largely an organizational challenge. To scale properly, you need structure—and that structure risks locking the company into fixed working methods. The company becomes an expert in one SEO tactic rather than an expert in SEO.
Designing processes that embrace change from the outset is a major part of the solution. Building trust with clients—so that when we say we want to do things differently than we did six months ago, they are willing to listen—is another crucial component. Ultimately, however, the foundation lies with the people. I firmly believe that if you want to continuously develop and consistently deliver top-tier SEO, you need staff who truly understand search engine optimization. A five-week course is not enough, nor are even skilled senior consultants. You need a deeply rooted knowledge base within the company—absolute top-level expertise—to remain in constant motion, using the tactics that are best today and best tomorrow. That’s why we invest so much time and money in finding and recruiting the very best search engine optimizers.
