SEO looks like “snake oil”, pedantic bickering and pontification that outside the most foundational instances wastes a lot of time/energy for virtually no/highly uncertain reward/return. SEO tools overwhelmingly have no/minimal intelligence, meaning they can’t correctly understand/interpret what a metric about page means. For instance, if my page is definitively longer than competition (this is completely intentional and I know it well), it cannot understand whether or not it is good/bad. It just blindly says “its longer, so its bad”. It just pushes convergence to competition in a large number of parameters/dimensions and if followed blindly will make everything generic (in the sense its very similar to competition), which is antithetical to long-term strong sustainable SEO/growth strategy that would virtually unquestionably demand uniqueness (or at least severely discourage chasing competition) in at least some dimension/parameter. Chasing competition becomes a dog chasing its tail.

Here is ideas generated SEMRush’s “On site page checker”:

  • “Make your text content more readable. Compared to your rivals, your text-based content is difficult to read and understand. Try to improve your content’s readability.”
  • “Use video content. Your rivals that rank higher than you in the Google top 10 for some of your target keywords are using video content. Try to embed a video on your page.”
  • “Enrich your page content. Compared to your rivals, some related words are not present in your page’s content. Try to enrich your page’s content with the following semantically related words: (list of suggested related keywords)”
  • “Earn links from more sources. Try to acquire backlinks from the following domains: (list of some domains)”
  • “Add internal links that point to this page. No internal links point to this page. Try to add at least one internal link that point to this page.”

Problems:

  • The content is academic (notes of a subject). It is intended to be extremely comprehensive and off high-quality as it is for my prep. Of course, its less readable than mass-produced (possibly AI-generated) (marketing) slop and articles. It is not a weakness, its long but structured very well with markdown sections, lists, etc., but of course it does not understand it and just pushes convergence to competition. Similarly for video and missing keywords: its not usual (marketing) blog/article and I cannot simply converge it onto generic (marketing) blog/article.
  • Getting organic backlinks is extremely challenging/hard. Asking so and so domains to provide a link to me is not scalable, not over long-term. As search engines evolve and become more intelligent, they are/will learn to differentiate between a backlink in a generic mass-produced slop that has no substance/value to anyone and backlink by a user/high-quality domain/post.
  • I have added internal links to that page, but somehow it does not see it. Nevermind, don’t take it seriously

At first glance, it would seem that all of that is just because my content is quite different and perhaps SEO cannot differentiate between a generic article and academic notes. But that is superficial understanding. As I said, the core problem is pushes convergence to competition. Its a terrible and counter-productive and possibly dangerous strategy over long term.

Similarly, here is what SEMRush “Site Audit” for a set of pages produced (these are “warnings”):

  • “3 pages have duplicate H1 and title tags”
  • “2 pages have low text-HTML ratio”
  • “2 pages have a low word count”
  • “1 page doesn’t have enough text within the title tags”
  • “1 page doesn’t have an h1 heading”

These are stupid metrics. Every page does not need a predetermined static ratio of “text/html”, word count, etc. “Text/html” sounds nonsense metric anyways. There is nothing wrong with identical H1 and titles. This looks like pedantic bickering and pontification

Similarly look at what “seositecheckup.com” says. I have presented i in form “priority: issue”.

  • HIGH: Connect your webpage with social media networks using APIs or AddThis, as social signals are becoming increasingly important for search engines to validate a site’s trustworthiness and authority.
  • MEDIUM: Add a Google Analytics script to this website to help in diagnosing potential SEO issues by monitoring site visitors and traffic sources.
  • HIGH: To improve the website experience for your visitors, it is recommended to eliminate any render-blocking resources on this webpage.
  • HIGH: Consider reducing the HTML size to improve loading times and retain visitors.
  • MEDIUM: This webpage contains too many H1 tags! H1 tags should re-inforce the intended topic of your page to search engines - too many tags may make the topic less clear, or look like spam tactics. Consider using less than 5 H1 tags.

Ratings/scores by this tool and several others (including premium ones like SEMRush) is based on potential for improvement (as previously shown for SEMRush), not an absolute assessment of page/site. It is perfect for an endless cat-and-mouse game and pontification (and cynically, maintaining own SEO tool/app business; any issue identified is easy justification for existing/continuing subscription/contract).

As for the specific issues raised by seositecheckup:

  • absence of google analytics, social media integration is not a critical flaw. It does not necessitate a high/medium level priority. Its absence can be perfectly acceptable and in fact highly desirable in many cases, but its too dumb to realize that.
  • I don’t see any render blocking resources. All link tags in head tag come right at the top before any script tags, CSS link tag comes first. The page is static HTML with minimal embedded JS. It is served from cloudfront CDN, so it loads insanely fast. Here is performance as reported by that site, first value being my actual value, the second value being recommended value
    • Time To First Byte Test: 0.207 seconds, 0.8 seconds
    • First Contentful Paint Test: 0.761 seconds, 1.8 seconds
    • Largest Contentful Paint Test: 0.76 seconds, 2.5 seconds As you can see, the site is likely catgorically incorrect about the claim and even if its not, its a complete non-issue, until I introduce heavy JS or make page 10x longer/heavier
  • As I said before, its academic notes. Naturally it is very long. I cannot simply shorten it.

Put bluntly, SEO besides the hardcore technical/foundational (like including structured JSON-LD/Microdata/RDFa data in head tag, including robots.txt and meta robots, analytically and data-driven profiling set of keywords for say a handmade coffee mug store or whatever, etc. and so on) is a waste of time and counter-productive, antithetical and possibly dangerous/fatal over long-term growth/development/other goals