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SEO as a Uni-channel | SEO is big enough to not need multi-channel marketing
Posted by on May 9, 2026 at 6:49 pmEvery agency will tell you to spread your budget across Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, email, and whatever platform launched last week. Most of them are wrong, or at least premature.
This is not a post against the multi-channel
IF you're doing multi-channel thats great. SEO doesnt work for everyone – there are a lot of brands on TikTok that dont do any SEO.
What is this uni-channel idea about?
This is just about saying that Google is so big (with or without Youtube and I love YouTube) – that "mutli-channal" isn't mandatory.
The Threat of Google penalties
Clearly some people – like those experimenting with Scaled Content (like manual AI scripts and airdrops etc) are in for a rude awakening. And yes, the HCU event was horrible – destroying legitimate businesses. But a multi-channel approach isn't a guaranteed cure – I doubt 90% of the HCU would work on Facebook or TikTok? So – apart from coming at anti-Google stance or trying to tell people becareful of relying just on Google – I doubt anything would have changed
Google is Massive
Google generates somewhere around 75% of global sales traffic and gets 8x the traffic of all social channels combined. That's not a channel. That's the internet. And the thing most businesses don't realize is that you don't have to wait around for someone to search your exact brand name.
In the past 5 years:
- LinkedIn has tightend the reach of organic posting
- twitter dissappeared
- Reddit is (slowly) clamping down on Spam
- Meta ads are overly complex – often with poor ROI for SaaS
You can target your competitors. You can find the adjacent searches, the people looking up the problem your product solves before they even know a solution exists. Someone searching "why am I losing website visitors" is a lead for an SEO tool. Someone searching "how to stop my team missing deadlines" is a lead for project management software. You find where intent already lives and you show up there.
The multi-channel pitch exists partly because it's genuinely useful at scale, and partly because managing five channels is five times the retainer. Most small and mid-size businesses would get a better return just going deeper on Google before they go wider anywhere else.
SEO includes LLM visbility
That makes the reach and market even bigger. You dont have to agree – just think about it.
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1 Reply
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Agree with you on this.
The “diversify your channels” advice gets repeated like it’s gospel, but for most small and mid-size businesses, going deep on Google before going wide anywhere else is the right call.
I was the founding marketer for a SaaS and helped them grow their revenue from $1.5M – $7M. 70% of that was from SEO, including all our enterprise level deals coming from the website. So it’s a no brainer to me.
I believe the point about adjacent search intent is the one most people ignore. They think SEO only means ranking for their exact category term, when the real win is ranking for the symptoms and problems their product solves. People search for the problem long before they search for the solution category. If you can show up there, you’re getting in front of buyers earlier than your competitors who are only chasing bottom-of-funnel keywords – which is not to say do away with BOFU – ofc.
The HCU point is important and I think it’s the strongest argument the multi-channel folks have, but you’re right that diversifying channels doesn’t actually solve the underlying issue. If your business is built on scaled content, you’re going to get hit somewhere eventually. The fix is doing SEO properly, not hedging by also being on TikTok. A solid SEO foundation with topical authority earned from real clicks is way more durable than people think.
LinkedIn is getting saturated; Twitter is good but in my opinion for freelancers; Reddit – cracking down on Astroturfing; Meta ads getting messier. All true. The cost and complexity of those channels keeps going up while Google still rewards good relevant & authoritative content with consistent traffic if you do the work.
LLM visibility, to me, is not a separate channel as much as it is an extension of search behavior, and the same fundamentals (real authority, real topical relevance, real clicks) translate directly.
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Thanks for sharing!
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Love this! I guess I didn’t realize SEO can work as uni channel, but i get it now. I often think to myself how do I approach it the right way, in order get results in the long term? I’ve got an online agency (not mentioning my niche as i don’t wanna come under advertising, but it’s the common one). My potential clients are all around the world. People call the market saturated but I’ve already seen that the demand is good too. I started diving into seo this January. I was naive and stupid enough to go fully into pSEO and made thousands of pages target the keywords I wanted. But ofcourse it doesn’t work. Majority of them got wiped off in the recent update. But I saw the potential, I was getting leads.
I’d love to get advice on:
1. How actually structure my SEO strategy for the long term? What should I keep track of?
2. I’ve seen heytony say that a page can still rank without backlinks if my pages are relevant.
3. I got like 5 services that I provide. Ofcourse i have individual service pages. I also try to do keywords research and write relevant blog posts and create BoFu pages like Edward sturm says. My question is – is there a limit to having proper keywords research pages that have unique content? At what point does it count as scaled content?
4. Say I’m doing proper keyword research and targeting them, am I being held back due to essentially having no backlinks (I’m guessing yes?)
5. What should I do with the pages that got wiped out by the recent update and are now stuck in “crawled not indexed”? Should I just remove them?
6. Do you think I’m missing any other important points?
7. If I’m willing to go all in on SEO, how much monthly spend am I looking at to actually get things moving if I do keywords research myself and implement that on my website, am I only looking at paying for baclinks then (non spammy)? Aside from the keywords research tools.I love this community and I’m sorry if im asking for too much, but this is one of the places I try to take knowledge from because I respect a lot of you guys here. These questions have been on my mind for a while and this post triggered me to ask them finally. TIA.
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Except SEO no longer works unless you have authority, eeat, soclai media presence/folowers/activity etc.
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I agree in terms of ideal end-state capabilities/reach, but at the same time, paid media strategy is relevant at every scale, because it usually can contribute to greater pipeline velocity, even if lead quality is lower compared to organic-attributables
Sort of speaks to the split that is *growth marketing vs *performance marketing
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