The basic problem I’m seeing with a lot of SEO is balance. In a way, it’s like legal advice for a communications crisis.

Lawyers will tend to give you fairly conservative advice, intended to minimize your legal exposure as much as possible. So you’ll find the statements that get approved by legal are often bland, oblique or filled with caution and qualification.

But while those messages may limit your legal exposure, they might well enrage the people you’re trying to talk to. Approach a situation that calls out for compassion by responding with legalese, and you’ll look callous and clueless. And the damage to your brand could well eclipse whatever legal exposure you were trying to avoid.

Similarly, if you just think about keywords and findability when you’re writing a blog post (or drafting blog guidelines), you’ll come up with something that tastes delicious to search robots but somewhere between insipid and revolting to live human beings.

They won’t develop the relationship with you that they might if you were using an authentic voice, and they won’t engage with your blog. So while you’ll be indexed with exactly the keywords you’re looking for, you won’t get either the traffic or the links that can help lift you to the top of the search results for those terms.

You’ll win the battle and lose the war.