SEO Is the Worst It’s Ever Been (And It’s Still Your Best Marketing Channel)

Affiliate marketing is harder than ever. But that, too, should be expected. Affiliate marketing was a form of arbitrage, and all arbitrage opportunities are temporary. The window to easy profit has closed.

In many ways, we’re shedding the unhealthy and unsustainable expectations of SEO and learning to treat it more like a marketing channel, and not a magic money tap. The era of easy SEO has ended, and now we’ll have to work harder to earn those same disproportionate results.

I’m okay with that, and I think you should be too. Or as Alex Birkett put it in a discussion on LinkedIn:

And I agree with this—“SEO was too easy for too long”—and actually think it’s great that this isn’t the case anymore. Did we really want to spend the golden days of our careers publishing ultimate guides and pushing links to them to drive vanity traffic? Not me.

SEO is harder and less certain than before. But I am not going to stop doing SEO for Ahrefs.

If I was advising a startup, or helping a scale-up, or starting my own business, SEO is still the very first channel I would test. I would go into it with different expectations, and less certainty of outright success, but I would still expect it to be a major source of growth—and quite likely the best marketing channel at my disposal.

This is the only test that matters: even today, when it’s at its worst, is there anything better or more reliable than SEO?