The Ungated Creative

full transparency, i’m writing this post strictly for SEO reasons. but i’d also like to take the opportunity to rant. because who doesn’t love a good rant?

first things first, here’s a link to my post about music licensing companies. it’s really good. if you’re looking for quality stock music or royalty free music or whatever, this is the only article you’ll need. have fun.

but the real reason we’re here is because i’m having an SEO emergency with that particular post. it’s been tanking in the search rankings over the last 18 months, and my affiliate and sponsorship revenue have been tanking along with it. not ideal.

so i’m going all in right now to fix this. i hired an SEO consultant. i’m redoing some of the content. i’m sourcing backlinks (or inventing reasons to backlink to myself, such as this article). the whole nine yards.

that’s all well and good, but here’s the thing i want to rant about.

i googled the keywords/phrases i’m competing on, and the results were fucking infuriating. the pieces ranking above me are half baked and shallow. they sound like they came from content farms, not from subject matter experts who actually give a damn.

in comparison, i’ve probably poured 100+ hours into the content of my piece. it’s thoughtful, detailed, and generally treats this like the complex decision it is. different types of creatives, with different priorities and values, will need to approach the question of how to source music differently. duh.

so i guess the thing that strikes me is that google, for all its technical firepower and world domination, still can’t deliver on its core promise of surfacing the best, most useful information for any search. it’s more game-able than ever, and shitty marketers are still able to get their shitty content to rank above the real stuff.

and this is true not just with my keywords, but with like 80% of the things i google these days. there’s almost always two or three results at the top that have clearly done great work on SEO, but are fucking garbage resources that don’t actually solve anything.

so really, i’m mad at google. get your shit together guys.

/rant