SEO gets treated as a traffic metric more often than it should. Rankings, impressions, sessions — all useful, none of them the point. The point is whether the right person, searching for the right thing, lands somewhere that answers their actual question. That's a precision problem, not a volume one, and it's easier to see clearly once you've sat on the other side of the desk.
The view from the other side of the desk
For fifteen years before I worked in marketing, I was a buyer for major builders' merchants. That job taught me exactly how procurement actually works, and it isn't the way most supplier websites are written for. A buyer starts with a specific need — a capability, a spec, a tolerance — and searches for that, not for the supplier's name or slogan. They build a shortlist from whoever's content actually answers the search. Then they invite tenders from that shortlist.
Suppliers who can't articulate their specific expertise clearly, in language that matches how the buyer searches, never make the shortlist. It doesn't matter how good the actual work is. If the site talks about the business in general terms, the buyer moves on before they've even seen it.
The mistake many businesses make
The common error isn't a lack of effort — it's promoting the business from the inside out. Companies write about what they offer, in the language they use internally, without first mapping that against what the buyer actually types into a search bar when they have the problem. The result reads well to the business and means very little to the buyer standing in front of it.
The strategy: sell less, educate more
The fix isn't a louder sales pitch. It's the opposite: content that demonstrates specific expertise against a specific problem, written so a buyer immediately recognises their own situation in it. The less we sell online, the more likely we are to educate — and it's the educating that finds the common ground a sales pitch skips past.
A buyer doesn't want to be sold to before they trust you know their problem. Show the knowledge first.
Why this matters more as costs rise
Traffic and ad costs both keep climbing, which makes the quality of who arrives at your site matter more than how many people do. Educational content does a kind of filtering that a sales pitch can't: it attracts people who are already engaged with the specific problem you solve, and it quietly repels the people who were never going to convert anyway. Fewer visitors, better conversations.
If any of this sounds like your business — a genuine capability that isn't showing up where your buyers are actually searching — that's usually the first thing worth fixing, well before spend or volume.