Teaching SEO While SEO Was About to Change

Written in 2026, looking back at a year I spent teaching SEO, with the benefit of knowing which of my own confident slides aged well and which aged badly.

For a good stretch of this year I have been standing in front of rooms explaining how search works, as an SEO trainer at MarkPlus Institute and as the SEO expert for Kognisi.id, the learning platform under Kompas Gramedia. Teaching a thing forces you to say out loud what you actually believe about it, in front of people who will use it on Monday. So I want to do something slightly uncomfortable: go back through my own 2022 slides and grade them. Still true, half true, or delete.

Still true

A few things I taught hold up completely, and I suspect they will keep holding up.

Understand intent before keywords. The question behind the query matters more than the words in it, and that has only become more true as machines got better at reading meaning. Also on this shelf: technical health is table stakes, a site that is slow or broken loses before content even enters the conversation. And the oldest one, be genuinely useful to a real person, which sounded like a platitude in 2022 and turned out to be the entire game.

I taught those with confidence. The confidence was earned.

Half true

This is the honest middle, the slides I would keep but heavily annotate.

I taught keyword research as the front door of the whole process, and it is still useful, but I gave it more weight than it deserves now that discovery happens across video feeds and chat as much as search boxes. I taught link building with a straight face, and while it still matters, I overstated how much of the outcome it explained. And I taught ranking position as the goal, level one, first result, win. That one needs a giant asterisk, because within two years you could hold the top spot and still lose the visit to an answer sitting above you. Ranking and traffic quietly became two different things, and my 2022 slides treated them as one.

Delete

Then there are the slides I would pull out entirely, and the exercise is humbling.

Anything that treated Google as the whole map of discovery. I drew the world with a search engine at the centre and everything else orbiting it, and that picture was already going out of date as I taught it. Anything that promised a repeatable “do these steps, get this result” formula, because the ground moved too fast for recipes. And a certain confident tone about how stable all of this was, as if the rules I was teaching were physics rather than the current mood of a system run by people making changes.

Why I am glad I kept them

Grading your own old work is a slightly embarrassing thing to do in public. I do it because the alternative is pretending I always knew. I did not. I taught things in good faith that time proved half right, and the only way to be honest about a fast-moving field is to admit that the person teaching it is also being taught, a little behind, by the thing itself.