Somewhere between the invention of the internet and whatever you did on your phone this morning, a profession emerged. Nobody planned it or asked for it. It has its own conferences, its own celebrities, its own LinkedIn arguments, and its own collective dread every time Google sends an update.
There are approximately 1.5 billion websites in the world.
Most of them are ghost towns. Abandoned blogs, bankrupt e-commerce stores, domain squatters waiting on a payday that will never come. Parked pages with a generic holding message and a stock photo of a handshake.
But nobody cares about that, that's not the story
The story is there are people who spend their professional lives trying to get websites to appear near the top of a search engine. They call themselves SEOs and I am one of them.
What is SEO?
Google, defines the job on its own website:
SEO, short for search engine optimization, is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine.
So: help a machine understand a webpage, then convince a human to click on it. That is the job. In full. There is a pseudo-science to it, but if you spend enough time in it you will realise that nobody truly knows anything, and by then you are already deep inside the enclave and it is too late.
The Paid Version
There is also a paid version, where companies give Google money to appear higher up the results without doing any of the first bit. This is called Paid Search. SEOs consider this cheating. Paid Search professionals, in return, consider SEOs to be people who do in three years what they could accomplish in an afternoon with a credit card.
The SEO Ecosystem
In any functioning first-world economy, an industry will eventually grow its own infrastructure. SEO is no exception.
There are SEO tools.
Expensive ones, with monthly subscriptions that track rankings, audit websites, and produce reports the client will not read. You may have used some of them.
There are Global SEO Events.
Multi-day conferences in convention centres where attendees network, attend panels, and argue about whether a Google update was a core update or a spam update. Brighton SEO, Athens SEO,
There are SEO influencers.
People with large followings who post Linkedin about algorithm changes with the urgency of a breaking news anchor. There are levels to this trust me, some influence only other SEO's, some don't even practice anymore, some make content on how to do SEO for other SEO's and do webinars to a handful of people.
Theres also a movie: