SEO consultant Insung Song
From rankings to structure, five years of it
Honestly, I was scared. Everyone was talking about GEO and I kept wondering if I was the one falling behind.
After I wrote the five year retrospective, there was more I wanted to say. This time I want to write down what I decided to focus on, and why I decided it that way.
Everywhere you look now, people are calling it the age of AI search. A lot of people are moving fast on it, and it is genuinely good to see the Korean marketing industry, which never paid much attention to Google SEO, suddenly awake.
For a long time Naver meant Korea did not think much about Google SEO. On this new front, though, people here seem to be studying ahead of the curve, and I am glad about that.
But with GEO this hot, I am making a different choice.
Keep going deeper on SEO.
To explain why, I have to start with the last five years.
The next part of this story, on video
How the choice in this piece actually gets executed is laid out in SEO fundamentals and GEO, combined, as a video and a written piece. The audio is in Korean.
✦What I was looking at, from rankings to revenue
Rankings
At the start I cared about one thing, moving keywords up.
It is embarrassing to admit, but when I landed a big keyword I wanted to show it off. I wanted to sit in a meeting and say, these are the keywords I did.
I had a bit of a swagger problem, looking back. I thought moving a ranking was the whole of the skill.
Traffic
Then I fell for traffic. I published a lot, multiplied visitors several times over, and got to work on sites that thousands of people hit in a day. Then a question came up, with the client, out of nowhere.
Is all of this traffic actually converting?
Conversion
So I looked at conversion. Whether the page matched the intent that brought someone there, whether the structure and the speed held up, and what people actually did on the page, using tools like Microsoft Clarity. Dig into that and the next question arrives.
Do these converted people actually turn into revenue?
Revenue, then efficiency
So I looked at revenue. How the conversation went after the form was filled, whether the leads were any good, whether the strategy actually fit the customer we were aiming at. Along the way I used Google Ads to test the market quickly, find out which keywords and messages landed, and fold that back into the SEO plan.
And another question showed up. With all these people and tools involved, is this structure actually efficient?
It depends on the project, but some SEO work is heavy on people. Development, design, content, lead handling, a marketer per language, account management. The deeper I looked the longer the list got, and some project budgets climbed into the hundreds of millions of won.
Looking back, I am the kind of person who always figures it out one step late. Chasing rankings taught me traffic. Getting drunk on traffic taught me conversion. Chasing conversion taught me revenue, and chasing revenue taught me how to build a structure efficient enough to leave a profit.
✦SEO was never an agency job. It was a partnership
Over time I learned how much the client's own view matters, and that leading with my strategy alone does not work. I learned it late.
Every client's situation is different, and two companies in the same industry are still not the same. Nobody wants a site stamped out of a template. I do not know whether I have some artist streak in me, but I wanted to make something that only fit that one client.
Which put me in front of the same question every time. Should this website exist for SEO, or should it exist for the customer?
You have to serve what the client's customers want, carry what the client wants, and still reflect the SEO plan. The balance between those three is the whole job.
Push SEO too hard and the visitor has a worse time. Chase visitor comfort only and you drift away from SEO. Indulge the design too much and you drift away from it as well.
So I tried, tested, shipped, and fixed again to hold the balance. The brand rules had to hold, and everything had to stay inside the law and free of exaggeration.
Which is how I found out this work does not run as an agency job. You have to become the client's partner.
It is not a two or three month job. Sometimes six months, or a year, is not enough.
Learning the industry and learning what is actually hard for the client takes that long.
Some of it I can answer straight away. Some of it we only find out by going through it together, and some of it I learn by failing and getting back up.
Stay with something long enough and your heart ends up inside the business. When a client's company did well I was happy like it was mine, and when it struggled it hurt. That, to me, is what a partner is.
Over those long stretches, the one who learned more was me.
My clients taught me business. I met people who were excellent both as operators and as people.
They helped me, and some of them passed good projects my way.
They were already good. They just were not doing SEO. Some of them were running their business well enough that they did not really need it.
If anything I learned business from them. I went in to help with SEO, and what I came away with was how to solve a problem, how to conduct yourself, and how to keep developing your own product. I took far more than I gave.
It is also why I never got around to my own site or my own sales. Existing clients and referrals kept coming. People thought better of me than I deserved and came back.
In those years I got married and had a child. SEO has been good to me.
Recently I have hosted a few podcast episodes. They were supposed to be me talking about SEO, and I came out of them having learned more than I taught. There are a lot of people digging into this seriously.
✦All of that time is what brought me to this choice
I will admit I was afraid of missing the GEO wave. So I studied it, ran my own tests, took inquiries about it. But until I have finished verifying it myself and I am sure I can stand behind the result, I am staying with what I do best, which is SEO.
Why I judged it that way, the numbers behind it, and three things to do right now are written up separately alongside the video above. Here I only want to write down what was behind the choice.
The question I ask myself most often now is this. Am I actually trying to solve this client's problem, or am I just selling my service to make more money?
What does this client actually need? It might be SEO. It might not be.
And can this client and I really work as partners for a long time? These are the things I think about more now.
I would rather be a partner people keep for years than a company that grows fast.
I listened to Professor Michael Horton today, someone I respect, and this stayed with me.
“We are not called to be extraordinary people who change the world. We are called to be ordinary people doing the work in front of us. An ordinary businessman, an ordinary farmer, an ordinary teacher. Rather than straining to prove how much you achieved, help your neighbour today, where you are.
Professor Michael Horton · source video
I am an ordinary marketer and an ordinary businessman. I have no grand ambition to change the world, but being able to help somebody's business, and getting to be in this seat at all, is enough to be grateful for.
✦For anyone who wants to find the thread together
For the last several years I have worked alongside companies taking on a market across a border, through the good and the bad of it.
If I had to reduce the work to one word, it would be connecting.
Connecting search to customers, one market to another, one side of a border to the other.
If you are losing sleep over a market you do not know yet, call me into that gap. Tell me about the company and the situation, and we will work out where to start.
I would be glad to come, and to stay as a partner for a long time.
