The brief about showmanship
Stop optimising for compliance. Start optimising for attention. And watch organic performance soar.
Modern SEO is missing an ingredient
A lot digital marketing is focussed on being efficient. Programmatic pages. AI-written content. Agentic workflows. Scale, scale, scale.
And slowly, without realising it, we’ve optimised away the very thing that makes marketing effective.
Showmanship.
The art of producing work worthy of attention. Something with personality. That stands out in a category. That leaves an impression in a user’s mind, not only in your metrics.
Attention is what leads to clicks, engagement and conversions. These feed the algorithms.
From the Semrush Ranking Factors study. To the multitudes of meta data A/B tests by SearchPilot. To the DOJ antitrust trial testimony and Google leek revealing the importance of NavBoost.
Different sources, same signal. User engagement strongly impacts organic visibility.
Showmanship is how you manufacture meaning
The problem is, most SEO is built to be “best practice”.
It meets the brief. It includes the entities. It passes the EEAT checklist. But correct isn’t the same as compelling.
Liberty Mutual’s meta data would be considered SEO best practice. But I see bland.
Andrew Tindall in The Creative Dividend argues that meaningful attention is rarely comes from rational messaging.
When you focus on communicating services, savings or other salesy material, it triggers short-term activation of in-market audiences, which you do need to convert, but understand, this alone can’t grow the brand. It can’t set you apart. Competitors can easily run similar copy. So if this is all that you do, you will be constantly chasing your tail.
Layer on something stronger. Brand personality, narrative, emotion, a point of view. Messaging that sell’s a feeling, not a feature.
NerdWallet is triggering (in a good way).
Such emotional creative consistently outperforms rational messaging, because when people feel something, they engage more deeply. And engagement strengthens memory. And memory shapes preference when it eventually becomes time to act. That is how you invest in long term growth.
AI is already showing your brand. Are you tracking it?
AI search visibility tool Trendos gives you the data to take immediate action:
100 Custom Prompts for Free: Track specific queries across AI models.
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Trend Tracking: Monitor your brand’s growth or shifts in the AI search ecosystem over time.
Zero Friction: No demos, no paywalls—just the data you need to lead the conversation.
“But my industry is boring”
No. You’re category has a low emotional baseline. That’s different. And not an excuse.
Every industry can create a feeling. Think:
Ryanair’s humour
Nike’s relatability
Slack’s tribalism
Dove’s inclusivity
Duolingo ‘unhinged friend’ chaotics
Most of your Discover feed is just engineered curiosity
There are no dull industries. Only dull marketing.
Which sadly is becoming increasingly common as marketers hand over more messaging tasks to AI. Which, by its nature, crafts commodity content that is middling by design.
It copies the same tired formulas, people have been copying from other people, since someone reverse-engineered a ranking algorithm back in the 2000’s and the entire industry has been following it as an instruction manual ever since. We have normalised blending in.
But when every result looks the same, which is worthy of attention?
The outcome is that audiences default to the first they see. This is why we see a ‘big brand bias’ in search results. It’s not about authority, it’s familiarity.
Dull marketing doesn’t simply fail to persuade. It sends negative signals. It gives a reason not to click your article, not to watch your video, not to share your content. This makes visibility worse than worthless.
Because that inaction teaches the algorithms to not include your brand. Dullness forces marketers to buy the attention showmanship could earn organically for free.
Show off your SEOhowmanship
Stop making it all about rational attributes of the product name and packaging. Add in some imagination.
You are a marketer. Show you can earn attention.
But know, even peak showmanship will be ineffective if the audience doesn’t associate the content back to your brand.
How to solve that with Distinctiveness is the topic of next month’s newsletter.
If this newsletter helped you, be that person for your marketing mates and share it:
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That’s it for this brief.
Till next month,
- Jes