Death-to-SEO

TL;DR – I tried tech blogging for easy money. Built a full site, wasted a month, and then realized SEO is basically useless now unless you're already famous. This README is a post-mortem of my failure. If you’re someone trying to "rank on Google" and expect traffic to flow in, you might wanna give this a read. It’s a how-not-to.

How I Wasted a Month on Something Obsolete

Spoiler: My findings won't surprise you, everyone knows SEO is dead (except past me).

Let’s rewind the clock to Nov 2024. This is sorta what’s going through my brain:

"I want easy money without getting out of my comfort zone — i.e., my room. What can I use to do that? I like writing, and I like tech, and I just happen to be a physics nerd (meaning: good at explanation)."

Conclusion reached: Do tech blogging. That way, while learning CS for myself, I can explain it to others, which would in turn make me better understand it — all while making solid bucks. One stone three birbs and oh, would you look at that — I’m in luck — I also just happen to be a web dev. I can make a site for myself. What’s stopping me? Let’s goooo.

(Biggest blunder looking back — I should’ve researched it, and I feel dumb that I didn’t, ’cause normally I don’t try anything funny without proper research.)

Start the coding part and we’ve got a mess already.

I’m not sure where to start. I’ve never done blogging sites before and there are a million things I could do. What to do first? No clue. (Future me here: You should write the content first. Do NOT start writing any code till you have what you wanna put on the site.)

Let’s take some deep breaths and start with the standard/generic stuff — i.e., Hero, Featured, Benefits. Now what would a perfectly rational guy who only operates on logic like me do here? If you said “make homepage,” you’re right. But I wasn’t. So let’s make a contact page.

Wow. Genius idea, dude — a contact page in 2025? Why??? Email exists, FYI. Maybe I’m incapable of understanding this level of genius. So 11/10 for making the contact page. Great work!

OK, what’s next? Surely we’re doing the homepage now, right? RIGHT? Nope. How about an About page? (Damn. Again with these prehistoric pages.)

OK, that’s enough. I won’t bore you with the rest, but next I did it: I made the homepage. Legendary achievement. Trust me — it was damn long, so many sections, so much writing.

And it took me a good amount of time to make the Hero. I refuse to tell you how much. Yeah, go ahead, laugh away.

But wait — we still haven’t done any backend. What do we do? We already wasted so much time...

Plan B: Use CMS. Just need to plug an API and done. OR are we? I thought it would be easy, but it snowballed into a day. :(

Time to end this. The last page. Please, I just wanna get this over with. Oh wait, what’s that? Most people will spend 90% of their time on this page?

Should I — a perfectionist — go down without a fight here? (Yes, you should have.) Of course not.

Now there goes my 2 days, and we have the page I’m most proud of: A spinning galaxy animation with code (Actually no, it’s kinda bad. But at the time it looked epic and stuff. I’m not lying.)

And before I even knew it, one month had passed. But hey, at least It wasn't because of scrolling YouTube this time. Now I only have one job. How hard could this be?

I only — and only — need to post some content on the page once per week. Surely it’s doable, me right? (Future me: 🙂)

And that was the final nail in the coffin. My ADHD have had enough. But it wasn’t really my fault — writing those tech blogs is easier said than done.

First, I need to spend 100+ hours learning something. Then I’ll have to heat my brain to make it digestible for others to absorb. And so my lazy ass QUIT.

Months go by and it’s a thing of the past. I have no recollection of it ever happening.

July comes and I’m into SEO now, ’cause it’s all the talk of the town. What will my ADHD-ass do? Dive head-first, of course.

And 2 days later, I’m an expert on the matter. I know more about SEO than professionals with 2 decades of experience.

And I’ll have to quote myself here — because me, or more specifically this writing version of me, didn’t come up with that. Please reach out to the me of Nov.

Now here’s the quote you’re not waiting for:

"SEO is D-E-A-D. Ever since the AI kingdom attacked, everyone realized websites are kinda a waste of time. Why spend 10 minutes reading a blog or something when you can ask an AI for an answer in seconds?

YouTube exists. And even videos aren’t enough to keep my Gen Alpha span of attention from going crazy. So how could a blog — a boring wall of text — keep me entertained?

Blog is now a crime against humanity because it requires you to have an attention span. Say what? You expect that from mortals? Life sentence. Give ’em life sentence. cough

But I digress. So here’s the main thing you need to know:

Traditionally, SEO was just keyword specialization. As long as you could find something that wasn’t very popular and had a few backlinks for authority, it was enough.

But nowadays, Google isn’t dumb. They know you’re trying to game the system by buying backlinks. And the population on the internet has exploded, making it almost impossible for a keyword to be left alone.

And if it’s a popular one, like 'web developer for custom websites'? Game over. Like, everyone wants that. Not just you.

Who would be dumb enough to miss out on free money?

And I’m not done yet. Everyone nowadays knows a brand for the x thing.

Say you need to buy x for $100 but got none — who would you trust enough to borrow from? A new one you’ve never heard about or Klarna, which everyone knows?

Oh wait — you bought it with Klarna. Damn. Moving on.

Oh yeah — Reddit and stuff also exists. People literally ask each other who to get x from and not blindly trust Google.

Even an introvert like me goes to AI for asking who I should buy from.

So I ask: What’s the point of ranking on Google if everyone will ignore you?

If you’re looking to squeeze out that 1% of the population that would come from Google — I admire your optimism, I really do.

OK, so I could go on — but this is starting to sound like a TED Talk.

So let’s conclude my TED Talk:

Only basic SEO is useful now. Like — if someone searches your business on Google, you appear. That’s it for SEO.

Now put all that SEO budget into marketing yourself/advertising. But that also may or may not help — depending on your very specific case, which is always the case. Because: real world."

So yeah, after knowing all that, I do feel dumb for wasting my month. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go cry in the corner.

Oh oh oh — and what do you think I was doing before I wrote this post? What possessed me to write all this in August, you ask? Hasn’t it been a while since I’ve known SEO is dead, you say? Yep. Good question. Why now and not before?

So I’m on Reddit, looking for “ways to make money online.” And after enough research, realization hits me that blogging is a waste. But my time was wasted :(

What do I do? Make it into a GitHub project, of course. So yeah… SEO is dead, I wasted a month, and now I’m open-sourcing my mistakes.

Ight enough rant — to get started:

git clone https://github.com/scorchinghot/Death-to-SEO.git
cd download/Death-to-SEO-main
npm install
npm run dev

Tech Stack

Next.js

Prismic (CMS)

Formspree

Framer Motion

Lucide React

React Three Fiber

Three.js

React Spring

shadcn/ui