We used to do SEO. We don't anymore, except where it's actually load-bearing for a client. Here is what we deleted from the playbook over the last 18 months.
Long-tail content farming. The strategy of writing 200 articles targeting low-competition keywords because the math used to work. The math no longer works because Google now answers most of those queries before the user clicks on a result. We were producing content that rendered to nobody. We stopped.
Backlink campaigns. We never enjoyed them, and the few we ran in 2023 returned nothing measurable for any client. The era when you could improve rankings by getting twelve guest posts on industry blogs ended around 2019, but the agencies selling backlink packages somehow forgot to mention that.
Topic cluster maps. The idea that if you build out a “pillar page” linked to fifteen “supporting pages” and they all link back to the pillar, Google rewards the structure. Google does not reward the structure. Google rewards the existence of one good page on the topic, written by someone who knows what they are talking about, that other people on the open web link to organically. Everything else is gardening.
Keyword density optimization. Self-explanatory. Nobody at Google has cared about keyword density since approximately the Bush administration.
Programmatic SEO at scale. We still do this when the client has a real database of content to expose, real differentiation, and the willingness to ship and maintain hundreds of pages. We stopped doing it as a default offering, because most clients do not have those things, and the result for most clients is a graveyard of thin pages that drag the whole domain down.
What we kept: writing very few, very good pages on topics where the client has actual expertise; making sure those pages load in under a second; making sure the metadata and structured data are correct; making sure the site is crawlable. That's it. That's the entire SEO product now. It costs about ten percent of what the old playbook cost and works about three times as well.
If your SEO consultant is still pitching you topic clusters in 2026, find a new SEO consultant.