SEO Dies Every Two Years – What Matt Bailey Taught Me About 30 Years of Tactics

I started doing SEO in 2007, and I’ve watched it die about every two years since. Mobile-first was going to kill it. Voice search was going to kill it. The Helpful Content Update nearly did, for a lot of people. So when I got Matt Bailey on Unscripted SEO in November 2025, a guy who was resubmitting pages to AltaVista all night before Google existed, I asked him the question I actually care about: what’s been true the whole time? If you’re the one defending an SEO budget this year, his answer is the one you want in your pocket.

You can hear the whole conversation on the Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Here’s what stuck with me.

SEO dies every two years, and the tactics are what’s dying

Matt’s through-line is that the name was always wrong. “I have never liked the term SEO, search engine optimization, because what are you truly optimizing?” His answer: “you’re optimizing for visitors, you’re optimizing for their conversion, you are optimizing for their engagement.”

He learned that before anyone called it SEO. Matt went to journalism school, which taught him he didn’t want to be a journalist. It also taught him how to lay out a page with a headline, subheadings and bullet points. He built real estate websites like newspaper pages, and the markup turned out to be exactly what search engines wanted. Then came the line I’d put on a sticky note for every SEO who’s been told their job is obsolete:

“When people say SEO is dead, I interpret that as the old tactics are dead.”

Well, the truth is that the stuff that doesn’t die is boring. Content that answers questions, a page someone can read, and a site that converts the visitor once they land. If you’re building your plan around whatever killed SEO this year, you’re building it on the part that expires.

Red tape outlasts every algorithm update

Matt’s spent years writing courses for LinkedIn, Udemy, Udacity and others, and he tells every one of them the same thing about an SEO course: “the most amount of shelf life you’re gonna get is probably 18 to 24 months.” University is slower. The intro to marketing textbook for an undergraduate class he taught the semester before we talked “was only a year and a half old, but there was a whole chapter on how the metaverse is going to change marketing.” Its authors were marketing PhDs “who have never had a marketing job.”

What those authors miss is the politics. Matt’s version: you can have the skills, but you still have to sell ideas internally and settle for doing “six of the 10 things you want” because IT won’t do the rest.

I’ve lived the extreme version. Michael McDougald of Right Thing SEO likes to say the most expensive thing in SEO is red tape. I once had to edit 10 pages for HCA as a subcontractor for a subcontractor of an agency. I took a drug test, went to their campus, used their laptop, got three sign-ons and sat in a room with a security guard. For 10 pages. Matt’s whole response was “it’s absolutely insane.” If you price enterprise work, price the red tape, because it doesn’t change when the algorithm does.

Let’s go back to being webmasters

This is my soapbox, and Matt gave me a reason to stay on it. Somewhere between 2010 and 2020, when Google traffic was easy, SEOs got comfortable. Social got its pages, paid got its pages, and SEO got the blog. Nobody looked at branded search even after the company spent $20,000 on radio and video ads. My pitch on the show was to go back to 1998 and act like webmasters again, because email, social, search and newsletters all feed each other, and every door is a crossover opportunity.

Matt brought data from his OMCP work. Their job studies found that “SEOs have more of a track towards management and leadership than other disciplines like social media, email, or paid,” because SEOs already have their fingers in every channel. If you’ve been corralling everyone together, you’re already doing the job above yours.

A blog that was 90% AI, and a company with no CRM

Matt didn’t hedge on AI: “SEO works. It still works. In fact, SEO works on LLMs.” What worries him is the shiny object. He’s watched businesses chase the metaverse, NFTs and big data, and the AI version looks the same. One company he talked with “didn’t even have a CRM in place” and wanted AI to generate leads and content. Another blog he reviewed was “90% AI generated pages,” and it showed. The posts were generic, and they didn’t perform.

The part that should worry your CFO is the delay. Matt thinks AI losses will take longer to show up than past fads did, “because if you’re firing people because AI can write articles, boy.” His comparison for what AI is good at: “having a thousand interns. They could do it speedy, but it still required someone to knock off the edges, clarify, add some better writing and get it there.”

Your homepage copy could belong to a carpenter

When I audit a site, I sometimes copy the homepage text next to a competitor’s, or next to a business that does something totally different, and ask the owner which one is theirs. You excel at customer service? So does the industrial carpenter. Those pretty sales phrases mean nothing to readers, to SEOs or to LLMs.

Matt’s version comes from five years at Microsoft Worldwide Education. Marketing teams kept describing a full-service suite to small business owners, and he kept stopping them: “What they want is to make payroll. They want to be more efficient and spend less time at the office.” As his grandmother would say, you have to change your language. His team did exactly that on a recent rewrite. Instead of claiming great customer service, they spelled out “how our customer service works and why people like it,” and he says it “works great in AI and it works great in Google.”

That’s also where your conversion work hides. If your precast wall company doesn’t publish the sample shop drawings a contractor needs for a county RFP, the contractor will get them from somebody else. The ranking gets them to the page. The friction further down the funnel decides whether they buy.

What 30 years of “SEO is dead” means for your next budget meeting

Here’s what I’d bring into the room, based on Matt’s answers and my own scars:

1. Separate the tactics from the skills. Fund the skills that never changed, and treat this year’s tactic as an experiment.
2. Answer who you are and what your objective is first. Matt starts all seven of his strategy questions there, before anyone names a channel.
3. Put conversion work in the SEO budget. In Matt’s words, if you’re not learning conversion optimization, “you’ve lost the game.”
4. Don’t fire the people who direct the interns. A thousand fast interns still need somebody to knock off the edges.

For the full episode recap, read Matt Bailey on 30 years of SEO on Unscripted SEO. For the agency version, read Matt Bailey’s tactics vs evergreen skills test on SEO Arcade. Matt’s at sitelogic.com and on LinkedIn. If you want to learn this from him, learn.sitelogic.com runs coached courses, and he told me he wants about five people per course, not a thousand.