The Gateway

The skill I was actually trying to learn was copywriting, which is really just writing marketing copy, or sales through words.

A friend I'd met online told me about a job at an Australian agency called Copysmiths, and the application was unlike anything I'd done before. It stretched across 12 emails, each one needing a response, and ended with a 3,000-word document.

At the time I was just ready to do it, so I worked through every step without questioning the process. I didn't know it then, but I was training for SEO the whole way through. Copysmiths was the gateway.

When I started, I thought I already understood SEO. From the outside, it looked like one simple thing: getting a page to rank on Google's first page.

The reality has so much more nuance than that, and you see it the moment you open the documentation Google publishes for SEO experts. It's extensive and deeply nested, full of variables that interact with each other in ways you don't expect.

Four years in, I'm still learning something new every week. I liked it less at the start because I thought it was easy, but the deeper I got, the more of the picture I started to see and the more I loved it.

Organic Isn't Free

Here's something most people don't realize about SEO. Yes, it brings in organic traffic, but organic doesn't mean free. Free is a different thing entirely. Free is the idea that you do some magical SEO work and suddenly you're at the top of the page. The truth is there's so much more in play than that, and the work is constant.

What matters now is the type of content you put out. Quality has become more important than any of the tactics most SEO guides will push you toward, and the gap between the two keeps widening.

Why Personal Sites

This is part of why I love the concept of a personal website. On my personal website like this, I can write about a case study I did for a real business, or share the thinking behind a project. Content drawn from real work has more ranking potential in AI engines than almost anything else you could publish.

That's where my focus sits now. My primary attention goes to AI engines and how to rank for them, which in SEO terminology is called AEO and GEO, or answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. Google keeps releasing new documentation to help merchants rank in that space, including features like the AI overview and the recommended or sponsored spots inside AI search results. It's a new platform with new rules, and most people haven't caught up yet.

Still Learning

Content marketing and link building are still my niches, and I expect they will be for a while.

If you're thinking about getting into this space, that's the part to embrace: the learning doesn't stop, and that's exactly what makes it worth doing.