If you’ve been around these parts as long as we have, you’ll remember the literally insanity that was old SEO. It was new and it felt like hacking the internet, and it was in many senses… very easy. In recent years there has been a seismic shift in SEO, and many outside of our industry still believe that old SEO is as advanced as it gets… they’re probably also the ones who believe SEO doesn’t work.
For those who don’t need a night cream – let us get you up to speed on the ‘good* old days’…
OLD SEO: THE DINOSAUR ERA
It was the wild west. You could slap “best dog food” into every header tag, image alt, and paragraph like it was seasoning on chips. Keyword density? More like keyword obesity. Every blog post was a word-stuffed piñata hoping to explode with page one rankings.
H1: Best Dog Food
H2: Why Best Dog Food Is the Best Dog Food
H3: What Makes Best Dog Food… Well, the Best?
Image alt: best dog food in bowl
It sounds insane and derivative. But it worked. My god did it work. You’d write one-off posts like “5 Reasons Labradors Love This One Trick” and then ghost your own site like it was a bad Tinder date. The idea of mapping a full topic? Ha. You just needed volume, not value. And volume people did.
You need to remember this was before LLMs, so your fave virtual assistant wasn’t pumping out meaningless content, an actual human being was. The poor, poor interns.
Crap keyword-stuffed blog? Post it. And links? Oh boy. Build 300 links with the exact anchor “best dog food” in one week? Google used to say, “Thanks for the heads-up!” – and you sat back and watched your traffic soar. It was equal parts impressive as it was terrible.
*Were they really that good?
AND THEN CAME NEW SEO
It got smarter, sexier, and semi-sentient… it’s new and improved, and it’s still SEO. New SEO wears Crocs ironically, listens to lo-fi while building topic clusters, and understands search intent like a therapist at a dinner party.
Things changed massively – as search engines prioritised the searcher instead of the websites, and sh*t got real.Now, it’s not about how many times you mention a keyword. It’s about why someone is searching for it.
What else do they care about? How can you guide them through their search journey? New SEO is nuanced and articulated; it is about being helpful at your very core, and it requires a lot more than setting and forgetting.
New SEO is like a dinner party, sure the main course (keywords) is important, but there is so much more to be done to curate the vibe (show up at the top of the first page).
You serve the appetiser (related subtopics), the sides (FAQs), the wine (internal links), and the dessert (a juicy CTA that makes them want more). Did we kill that metaphor? Maybe. But you get the point. SEO has become super contextual, and actually? We are here for it.
SO NOW WHAT?
It’s not about building 50 identical review pages anymore. It was easy, sure – anyone could do it, and we ranked like no one’s business. But ultimately, it wasn’t that helpful.
Now It’s about creating content hubs that go deep, wide, and weird. Hubs with structured data, schema, semantic layers, and enough clarity that even Google’s AI wants to quote you.
Now that’s making it. Not only is it a win for the website owner, but most importantly – for the searcher.
New SEO puts user intent at top priority, and while the humans still reign supreme (hi robots we love you)… we think that’s a good thing.
Old SEO was brute force.
New SEO is finesse, flow, and futureproofing.
Write like a human. Optimise like a machine. Build like a nerd. And always, always ask: Does this help the person reading it, or just the bot crawling it?
The answer is everything.
Want help building that next-gen SEO strategy? Slide into Empire9’s DMs, metaphorically or otherwise. We remember the old ways for sure… but we’ve moved with the times, and are all over it.
