What career would SEO people have done 100 years ago

[r0ck5t4r]

Don’t mean to sound sarcastic but before the Internet?

[ryandiscord]

Phone book sales

[Puzzleheaded_Exit_17]

The Dewey Decimal System is SEO’s gramma. Not sure if most people who work in seo could handle that, though

[Nyodrax]

Most people who became SEOs before AI entered the space were writers in some way.

It’s one of the most common backgrounds in the field pre-entry to SEO.

So my guess would be some kind of writer/scribe/scrivner/etc

[ChodeCookies]

Grave digger

[DaedalusXYZ]

* Advertising
* Marketing
* Design
* Business administration
* …

[DavidHK]

Sign painting

[Brakuss]

The guy who convinces businesses to buy a space in their phone book

[TheLongTailGuy]

Business strategy/planning and advertising strategy/planning.

SEO is basically architecting demand capture and awareness on a few specific information highways.

When you open a business where you open it is important for a bunch of traffic reasons. How you build it, how the outside looks and how the parking or entering functions in relation to your demographic – both in demand capture and raising awareness. SEO would be the data scientists and strategic planners behind this. Not the behavioral scientists that influence behavior with ads but the people who draw strategic plans to optimize the innate features of a business or advertisements physical location and increase the probabilistic effectiveness of ad campaigns or promotions.

SEOs would also be part of analyzing and identifying the volume of physical traffic and traffic intent for different channels (like billboards or radio or “handing out flyers” or city/local newspapers).

It sounds a bit far fetched for pre TV and internet ads in 1926, but Nielsen started his market research company in 1923. So I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that an SEO would be someone involved in this level of early market research history. There wouldn’t be MANY of these people like there are now but of course, the proliferation of demand for SEOs created more SEOs.

To another commenters point: a lot of SEOs start as writers and they become SEOs due to the demand for the work and the fact that most content they write is for SEO anyway. Back in 1926 there probably wasn’t much demand for advertising and demographic analytics.

But using this illustration: an SEO in 1926 may have been a copywriter for a newspaper and wound up needing to increase the awareness of the paper to keep their writing job. So they ended up tailoring their newspaper articles or coverages to certain parts of the city and then found (through research and analysis) the most populated corners to sell those headlines. Over time they would have created so much organic business they’d hire someone else to write the content based on their analysis and input for the foot traffic channels they use.

Edit: wow that got away from me 😅

[SpiritFingazz]

I think I would have been an investigative journalist for about a decade, then eventually burning out and transitioning to a librarian.

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[tvoutfitz]

Statistically, farming

[T-R-I-P-Y]

Sign spinners

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