Everyone Is Using SEO. Nobody Knows They Are.

Everyone is using SEO. Nobody knows that they are.

SEO isn't a term now. It's a standard. If we don't use it in practice, we aren't in business.

Here's how that actually shows up. Someone's describing a problem with their business, nothing to do with marketing on the surface. "Man, I'm not getting those jobs anymore. I used to get a lot of residential calls. Clients would come to me." The first real question you can ask back isn't about SEO at all. It's: what's your local strategy? What kind of local marketing are you using?

Say the word SEO instead and watch what happens. It's become the naughty word. Everyone's been pitched it, everyone's been cold-called about it. Nobody has quietly brought it up. Nobody has subtly said, "hey, how's your business strategy going, are you looking to work more locally or more at scale?" The word shows up swinging, so people flinch before they hear the rest of the sentence.

Most businesses are local. They live local. Very few are trying to push past their town's own border, and the ones that do are usually just covering the towns around them, not building something bigger. Here in Oregon you'll see businesses trying to grow up and down the Willamette Valley, and the old way to do that was to open a shop in every town you wanted to serve. That's not a requirement anymore. If you're running a big operation, sure. But it's not the baseline it used to be.

So if everyone's already doing this, whether they know it or not, the question changes. It stops being "should I do this" and becomes: how do I get ahead of everyone else doing the same thing?

Getting ahead is staying. Momentum is what keeps you from falling behind while standing still, and it should always be built into the plan.

Momentum isn't abstract. It's looking at who's around you and what they're doing. If you're an electrician and you only change out breaker boxes for clients, and everyone around you has started adding solar, you're becoming less important. Not because they outranked you. Because they moved and you didn't.

So this is about practicing a standard. The problem is nobody tells you what the standard currently is. Most of what reaches you is somebody calling around or blasting out a mass email about local SEO, or SEO in general, and they don't realize they're leading with the one word guaranteed to get deleted.

The question now for everyone isn't local SEO. Local SEO is just the thing that gets you seen.

But what is the thing that gets you seen?

That's the question.