Sure, You Can, But Should You?
Local SEO has long suffered from the “Jurassic Park” paradox. In the movie, Ian Malcolm basically calls out a familiar trap: people get so wrapped up in what they can do that they forget to ask what they should do.
That’s modern SEO in a nutshell. You’ve got hundreds, maybe thousands, of knobs you can turn: fixes, hacks, audits, plugins, settings, “optimizations,” and a dozen tiny tasks that look productive in a spreadsheet. But among all the noise, there’s only one signal, and it doesn’t care how many characters are in your description tag: results.
Scrappy Marketing is, by definition, built around identifying and isolating the actions that will move the needle for your business, rather than checking off every item on an SEO report.
Defining the Signal
If we’re going to separate the signal from the noise, we have to be super clear on what we’re trying to accomplish. For a local pool builder, that might be more qualified leads clicking on their Google Business Profile. For an AI Startup, it might be brand visibility or direct ROI. If that’s the signal, then the noise would naturally be anything that requires your time, money, or focus but doesn’t directly drive the business results you want.
Beware the “Report”
SEO reports and technical site audits love to nitpick stuff that’s technically “nice,” but usually won’t move the needle by itself, like missing image alt text. Alt text matters for accessibility and helps Google understand what an image is about, but it’s rarely the reason the phone isn’t ringing. The same goes for reports that still nag you about the meta keywords tag, even though Google has said it doesn’t use the keywords meta tag for web ranking. Then you’ve got the sitemap panic, where an audit acts like not having /sitemap.xml is some kind of crisis, even though sitemaps are mainly a discovery and crawling helper and aren’t a “rank higher” cheat code. And don’t get pushed around by H1 warnings either, because Google has said multiple H1s won’t get in the way of your SEO, so you shouldn’t burn a week fighting your theme over a tool’s red exclamation point.
Noise Created by the Passage of Time
It’s often said that SEO is a long game, and that’s certainly the case. As someone who has been in the field for the better part of three decades, I can attest to the fact that some things that are now verifiably “noise,” would most certainly have qualified as “signal” in the past.
The shining example of this? The Meta “keywords” tag. In the early days of SEO, it mattered. It helped you rank. Google asked for webmasters’ input, and they got what they asked for. Of course, it wasn’t long before every meta keyword tag was stuffed with hundreds or even thousands of keywords, phrases, misspellings, and certifiable junk. So, Google said “Never mind. We’re not even reading that. Stop.” At that exact moment, meta keywords became noise that thousands of professionals charged clients millions of dollars to continue doing, whether our of ignorance or greed.
Recently “Noise-ified” SEO Report Items
Not everything that becomes noise does so as drastically as the meta keywords example. It often happens over time that one concept is devalued in favor of another, or in favor of Google’s logic simply advancing to the point where your input is no longer needed. Here are three examples of SEO techniques that are clearly on their way out:
Meta descriptions as a ranking lever: Google’s own docs frame meta descriptions as something that may be used for snippets when they describe the page well, and they also say snippets are primarily created from on-page content. So yes, write meta descriptions for click appeal and clarity, but don’t expect them to be a direct ranking lever.
Over-optimizing titles because “the title tag is everything”: Google explicitly says title links are generated automatically and can pull from multiple sources, not just your <title> tag, so a lot of “perfect title tag” busywork is really about improving what Google can choose from, not forcing a single outcome. That’s a big reason audits that obsess over tiny title formatting rules can turn into noise fast.
Chasing perfect Core Web Vitals scores for SEO: Google has clarified that while Core Web Vitals are used as a ranking signal, “trying to get a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time,” which is basically Google telling you not to turn that knob past the point of diminishing returns.
XML sitemap obsession: SEO audits love to panic about sitemaps, especially if they can’t find /sitemap.xml. But Google’s been clear (via public comments from its team) that not having an XML sitemap isn’t a ranking disadvantage, even though sitemaps can still help discovery and crawling for some sites. Translation: don’t treat “sitemap present” as a needle-mover unless you’ve actually got an indexing problem.
H1 “warnings” (missing H1, multiple H1s, “wrong” order): A bunch of tools will throw red flags if you have multiple H1s, or if your theme outputs headings in a way the tool doesn’t like. Google’s John Mueller has said Google’s systems aren’t tripped up by multiple H1 headings, and that pages can rank fine with none or several. So yes, make headings readable for humans, but don’t let an H1 warning bully you into busywork when you’ve got scrappier fish to fry.
Chasing perfect Core Web Vitals scores for SEO: Google has clarified that while Core Web Vitals are used as a ranking signal, “trying to get a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time,” which is basically Google telling you not to turn that knob past the point of diminishing returns.
Back to “Jurassic Park” for a Moment
The whole point of Scrappy Marketing is separating the signal from the noise, because time and focus are the only budgets you never get back. If a task doesn’t tie directly to outcomes, it’s not “SEO,” it’s just activity that looks good in a spreadsheet.
So the next time you’re staring at a report, ask the infamous Ian Malcolm question before you touch anything: you can do it, sure, but should you?
