Is SEO still a thing in 2022?

Depending on your industry, SEO can be crucial part to scaling your business. These days provided you have the technical aspects right, site speed, mark up, structuring etc - you'll have a solid framework to build from. It's harder to pull those black hat tactics that we've all heard of, so it's best you just focus on providing quality content, and ensure Google is indexing it. Developing a strategy isn't too hard, utilise tools like Answer The Public to develop out your strategy, monitor search console for changes and adjust as needed.

From experience I've seen clients who've hired a SEO agency years back, and have never stopped paying them due to the fear their traffic will bottom out. I do believe SEO agencies offer value, however base level offerings such as technical suggestions and keyword strategy don't get businesses far. Typically the people who pay for the base level offerings don't have the in house talent to write solid blog posts / action the suggestions. Plus most base level offerings could be augmented by paying for a tool like SEMRush yourself, and letting the automated reports run.

Long tail searches with little competition are the easy wins. Popular keywords will take time and effort, but usually with alot of work involved.

Yes SEO is very much a thing. We are in a very crowded space (who isn't these days) and got one of our articles that was written about 5-6 months ago now appearing in top 5 results on Page 1 for that keyword which has decent volume. So it is definitely possible. But we didn't just SEO it. We actually wrote really good quality content with lot of valuable information and google is smart enough to rank it well after a few months.

So, the trick is to be patient and do quality work. It will show.

SEO has limited effectiveness (and always has had limited effectiveness) if your goal is to rank high for one phrase. Put simply, if you want to rank #1 for X and somebody else wants to rank #1 for X you both can't have it.

Generally if you're thinking that way you're going to find promoting your web site difficult and expensive no matter what. In the case of paid advertising, for instance, that other guy who wants to rank #1 is going to spend as much as you if he's as stubborn as you and between the two of you you can drive the cost of advertising into the stratosphere.

Where you can win in SEO is developing a site that ranks for many phrases (thousands!) Consider a blog, for instance, where you might have a few hundred articles and each one is like a lottery ticket. There are thousands and thousands of queries that might bring people to a blog article so it adds up to a lot of traffic, if not laser-focused on the purchase imminent user that you want.

From my personal experience using Google, it is the best time for black hat and grey hat SEO since "keyword stuffing" became inefective. As the internet is a lot bigger these days, I would go as far as saying that we are in the golden age for black hat SEO.

As for white hat SEO, I think it still might work as long you have a nice budget for it or happen to be really good at it. You have to beat a lot of Goggle ads and a lot of black hats, not just competing content.

Yes and no.

You can spend a fortune on developing an SEO strategy and trying to game your way to the top of specific results. But if you are patient, build your website with some basic good practices, and write regularly on topics people care about - you can still build pretty okay traffic.

Imo, SEO is still super valuable - but investing traffic that might be months (or even years) down the road of hard optimisation and content work can be put into question. To decide in your case, I would use SEO tools (SEMrush, ahrefs, there are many) and see how difficult it actually is to rank for your relevant keywords. If it is not manageable in your timeframe, there are 18 more channels (referencing Gabriel Weinberg's traction book here) you could test out before returning to SEO.

I get the impression we've crossed the point of no return where you can't deterministically buy yourself into a page rank. Seems like you have to design your website in the most profitable way for google ads. Every website seems to do the same annoying stuff and is basically just ads with content padded around them.

It's one of the many marketing channels. SEO is a long term strategy and paramount to ongoing leads. Once you get it right, the pipeline of leads opens up and your CPA (cost per acquisition) drops (compared to paid media channels besides email marketing)

Should you rely on just SEO? hell no.

You can still signal to search engines that you’re genuine by doing content marketing and you will get search traffic using all the old SEO tricks, but showing passion and genuine interest in your niche is so important and can’t be faked. Search algos are hard to fool.

Yes very much so. You need to focus on long-tail search phrases and develop differentiated content.

Hire an SEO early and do NOT outsource this to an agency. They will bleed your budget and deliver very little.