[arbuge]

No it's not just ads at all. SEO drives traffic. There are many ways to monetize such traffic, and ads are just one.

A lot of SEO is driven by local business owners who hire SEO people with dubious track records that make big promises. They invariably clutter up their websites with 10,000 articles along the lines of "best plumber in dallas".

It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

[Regnore]

The problem isn't that websites owners want to promote their website to the top of the search results, the problem is that Google's financial interests are aligned with those pages instead of its users.

If Google was putting significant resources towards combating SEO spam instead of encouraging it, the sites returned from a query (e.g. the sites that make Google the most money) would be the ones that the user most wanted, not the ones that maximally participate in Google's ad-extortion business.

[jklinger410]

> One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

It's incredibly expensive to rank highly for something. There are tips and tricks to make your site amenable to the search engines, but it takes a lot of time or money to get it to actually notice you.

[chusmeria]

> It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

That doesn't even make sense. SEOs exist to make sure websites are more consumable by bots for search indexing. They likely have no backend experience or much experience working directly with css/html, and are more likely dealing with full stack developers who have no desire to understand how their code is functional for users but isn't consumable by bots. The most successful deal with brick and mortar companies which require actual capital to create and not just SEO skillz, and anyone with a brain would know dropshipping is so 2014 (there's like a million of these failed journeys documented on random boards like blackhatworld where people try to monetize search like you suggested, but it's a hella minority because we are deep into the enshittification of search). SEO is important to deal with things like the proliferation of angular 1, which was a hellhole abyss for startups in search because google wouldn't index their shit and developers needed to iterate fast. Hell, a large part of the react community is based around things like server side rendering just to get around google bot refusing to let JavaScript load and search results were polluted with handlebars variables for years because of that. Google bot still has problem rendering webpages while I do all of that shit all day with google's own puppeteer.

Tl;dr: SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal with the ongoing enshittification of search, and basing their value or success on whether they could launch their own site isn't a good benchmark.

[JohnFen]

> SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal with the ongoing enshittification of search

SEO is a $122 billion/year industry. That doesn't seem like a cottage industry to me. And it exists in order to get companies to rank higher in search results.

I think the SEO industry is a large force helping to make the web much worse.

[chusmeria]

That's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of marketing at 5 trillion. SEO is surely making the internet worse, but google is also incentivizing the absolute hell out of it by dedicating resources and promoting personalities a la John Mueller and other Search Advocates within the space. Currently, Google's inability to assign value to pages in a coherent way is making it worse. The Google SEO guidelines, proliferation of tools like lighthouse, AMP pages, and an outdated search algorithm encourage the homogenizing of the web, too. It's a bit like if Google built a factory in the tropics where they organize pools of water. Their goal is to encourage more water, stagnant or not, because their job is to organize pools... but then folks complain about the mosquitos as if they weren't invited. Welcome to the jungle.

[giantrobot]

But you have heard of me!

-- Capt. Jack Sparrow, SEO guy