Bradley Benner runs a white-label SEO service. That means other agencies’ work lands on his desk before it lands on their clients’ sites, which gives him a view of the industry almost nobody else has. He used it on this episode to say something blunt about what he sees.
“80% of the work that comes across my desk, they’re still … doing stuff that has been outdated for years, and then they wonder why they’re not getting their clients’ results. But they’re still taking their money.”
Benner is the founder of Semantic Mastery and Semantic Links, and he has been doing local SEO since 2010, when he was an electrical contractor trying to make his own phone ring. The full conversation is in the episode recap. This piece pulls the uncomfortable thread.
He used the word unethical, and he meant the taking-money part
“It drives me up a wall because these agencies and so-called professionals are out there selling SEO services to unsuspecting local businesses, taking their hard-earned money and saying we’re gonna get you results … I think it’s unethical. You should keep up with what is working today if you’re gonna be selling it as a service, and if you’re not, then you shouldn’t be selling it.”
Notice what he is not saying. He is not saying those agencies are lazy or stupid. He is saying the bar for selling a service is knowing whether the service still works, and that a lot of people have stopped checking. You cannot audit that from outside. He can, because he does the fulfilment.
The specific thing that is outdated: the word keyword
“I don’t even bring up the word keywords anymore. I talk about search queries, because it’s not a keyword-based algorithm and it hasn’t been for years.”
That sounds like vocabulary policing until you see what it changes downstream. If you are optimising for keywords you build a page per phrase. If you are optimising for queries you build a page per thing somebody wants, and you let one page answer forty phrasings of it. The deliverable looks different, the reporting looks different, and the client’s site ends up a different shape.
Third-party metrics are the other tell
“It’s not some stupid third party metric like DA or DR or trust flow or anything else that matters about whether a link is valuable or not. What matters is whether it’s relevant.”
He arrived at that after months of testing through 2021, before launching Semantic Links in January 2022. His order of operations is relevance first, and a third-party metric only afterwards as a tiebreaker between two already-relevant sources. We went deeper on that in Bradley Benner on relevance over DR.
What he thinks the job actually is now
“Our jobs as SEOs now is not about pushing metrics. It should be about creating associations, strengthening those associations, and helping, forcing the models and the algorithms to recognize those associations.”
Brand, product or service, location. Get the brand referenced near the things it should be associated with, as often as you can, in places that are themselves about those things. That is the whole job description in one sentence, and it is the reason his link placements use brand anchors roughly 90% of the time.
The part that will annoy people
Benner is not neutral here. He sells the fulfilment service that fixes the problem he is describing, and he would tell you that himself. Take the self-interest as read and the observation still stands, because the observation is a count: four out of five briefs that reach him are built on a model of search that stopped being accurate years ago.
“I was never proud of some of the spammy stuff that I did as an SEO. But it worked. So I did it.”
Which is the honest version of the whole industry’s last fifteen years. So here is the question to sit with: when did you last check whether the thing you sell still does what you say it does?
