Why SEO Obsession Ruins Small Business Websites - And How To Avoid It
Is your company’s website filled with text someone said you should add to rank better in search results?
Have you spent a ton of time and energy adding pages and posts because you heard “Google likes it?”
Is half of the copy you have online primarily intended for algorithms, not people?
If you answered “Yes” to these questions, you’re not alone.
Despite decades of user experience (UX) research showing that less is more when it comes to words on a website, SEO practitioners have been very successful in convincing business owners that more is always more.
It’s why many of the websites you find for garage door repair companies, personal injury lawyers, med spas, and even marketing agencies are filled with giant walls of text that practically no one actually reads.
How did this happen? Can you still rank well without lots of spammy text? This article will help you answer those questions, so you can stop making a mess of your own website, and give your customers what they actually want.
How Website Advice Reversed Itself
In 2000, a book called “Don’t Make Me Think” landed on the desk of nearly everyone building websites for a living.
Its author, Steve Krug, argued something that sounds almost too obvious to state: people don’t read web pages, they scan them, and every unnecessary word stands between a visitor and what they came to do.
His guidance? Get rid of half the words on each page. Then get rid of half of what’s left.
He wasn’t alone. Usability experts like Jakob Nielsen have been conducting eye-tracking studies for decades that continue to prove that most internet users want succinct information that is easy to read and act on.
You probably already know this from your own web-browsing experience. You’re often visiting a website because you’ve got a job to do or a question to answer, so you’re quickly scrolling to find what you need. Big block of paragraph text? Skim a bit and keep scrolling.
Juxtapose that with the boilerplate advice you hear today from SEO practitioners. Rarely, if ever, will you be told to trim content. Instead, the usual guidance from marketers runs along these lines:
Your homepage needs more keywords.
You need a separate page for every service and every town you serve.
You need to publish new blog posts constantly to demonstrate “topical authority.”
Some of this is well-intentioned, but some of it is driven by simple economics.
Cleaning up a website to improve UX is often a one-time project. Creating new service pages and blog posts every month is a source of recurring revenue for an agency or freelancer. It’s no wonder the latter gets pitched more than the former.
It’s also natural for business owners to always want more customers, which SEO practitioners always promise. It’s a much more appealing pitch, and you can easily see the deliverables, as opposed to someone saying they’re actually going to remove elements of your site that you might’ve put there in the first place.
And there’s no denying that people have found ways over the years to cheat the system, which undercuts Google’s vague guidance to “just create good content.” People love tricks and hacks. Best practices are boring.
It’s not getting any better today. Powered by AI tools, with the hopes of gaming AI systems, businesses are being told to create dozens or hundreds of new website pages that no one will actually see, let alone read.
Fortunately, deciding between SEO and UX is a false choice. The key is getting better at spotting SEO nonsense.
Good SEO vs. Bad SEO
Good SEO makes it easy for a search engine to understand what you sell and who you serve, so it can send you the people looking for what you’re offering. It’s about doing the things that will help these systems identify you’re a good, relevant result for someone searching.
Bad SEO encourages you to spend a lot of time and money on manufacturing signals in hopes of tricking algorithms. It’s focused on exploiting loopholes for short-term gains. It’s short-term, because as soon as Google or AI models get updated to spot this slop, all of it is worthless.
In fact, this has happened numerous times in the past 20-plus years. Companies created content farms to churn out large volumes of low-value content, only to see their search traffic fall off a cliff when Google tweaked its algorithms.
So how do you know the difference between good and bad? One way is to look at the guidance from companies like Google itself. While they aren’t flawless at enforcing their policies today, they still provide a roadmap for what kinds of behavior they’re going to stop or discourage in the future.
For instance, Google’s spam policies advise against “doorway abuse,” defined as having multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, i.e. 50 near-identical service area pages with the town name swapped out. Similarly, it says including long lists of cities and regions on a page - something that’s easy to find on many plumber and HVAC contractor websites - is considered keyword stuffing, which should be ignored.
Clearly, they’re aware of this tactic, and are presumably finding ways to devalue it. Do you want to spend time and money on things that may or may not work in the first place, and will only have less chance of working in the future?
These types of short-sighted, misleading hacks are evolving as we speak with the rise of AI. In response, Google published a guide to optimizing for its generative AI features. It includes a mythbusting section, titled “what you don’t need to do,” that almost reads like a laundry list of the services business owners are getting pitched right now:
Creating LLMs.txt files or other special markup.
Chunking content into smaller pieces to help AI models understand them better.
Seeking inauthentic “mentions” on other websites, like blogs and forums.
Rewriting content for AI systems.
Elsewhere in the same guide, under its content recommendations, Google takes on the volume question directly: a high quantity of pages doesn’t make a website higher quality or more relevant to users.
That alone is worth asking about if someone has told you to publish constantly to build “topical authority.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put more information on your website. There’s a difference between a generic listicle that anyone could have written, and a first-hand account of a specific job that only you could tell. It’s a matter of substance vs. volume.
On the flip side, what Google advises, and what will likely be rewarded in the future, isn’t that different from what web usability experts were advising decades ago:
Make text easy to read and well organized.
Make content unique and remove duplicative text.
Make sure content is up-to-date.
Make sure you give people what they want.
Of course, this sounds nice, but how do you know what to specifically do with this information?
Serving People & Machines
It can be very empowering to sit down with your website and ask this key question:
“Who is this experience for?”
By taking the user’s perspective, rather than guessing at a machine’s programming, you can very easily see what type of information to focus on.
The reality is most people have very basic questions they want to answer on a website. My own research into features like “Ask Maps” in Google Maps shows consumers asking direct, compound questions: does this business sell jelly doughnuts, and is it open at 8 a.m.? Mountwell Marketing’s research into agentic AI found customers using agents to phone small businesses for price checks and product availability.
If a customer needs to know whether they can bring their dog along late at night for a club sandwich at a certain price, that’s the content that belongs on your website.
So, start with the essentials. Audit your website against this list, and consider removing whatever falls outside it:
Your business name, logo, and branding, consistent with what customers see in the real world.
Complete contact information: street address, phone, SMS, email, and how to reach you after hours.
Accurate hours of operation, including holidays and special hours.
What you offer, in plain language, with pricing information wherever you can give it.
A clear description of each product and service, including how to buy or book it.
Answers to the questions customers actually ask, including policies and guarantees.
Proof you can be trusted: reviews, testimonials, licensing, accreditation, and evidence that you are active in the community you serve.
A page structure that lets someone understand the offer in as few words as possible and act immediately, with detail available below for anyone who wants it.
Customers’ own words, instead of industry jargon.
Many businesses are missing multiple items on this list. By checking them off, machines have better essential information to use in results, while customers can easily get what they need to act quickly, leading to more foot traffic, leads, and sales.
Ultimately, focus on the full spectrum of opportunities that will move the needle for your business. SEO may only be one small part of it. Read Mountwell Marketing article on what type of marketing your small business actually needs.
Not sure whether your site is helping your customers or blocking them? Why not schedule a free introductory call with Mountwell Marketing for a practical discussion about your small business and its customers.
Miriam Ellis is one of the most prolific writers in the SEO industry, having spent more than a dozen years at Moz, and freelancing for a variety of marketing companies and publications, such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Guide, Whitespark, Wix, and many more.