Recently Zack and I put our heads together to try and crack the SEO nut. If you’re not familiar: SEO (or “Search Engine Optimization”) is the way that you get discovered through web searches. Unfortunately if you Google for terms relevant to Treefort like “White-label OTT app” or “How do I launch a streaming platform” or “Create an audiobook app” we don’t show up until the 10th page in Google, if at all. In fact if you’re reading this article — congratulations! You’ve found the needle in the haystack.
Zack and I were discussing what could be behind Google’s apparent apathy for Treefort. Zack pointed out that this blog was a bit of a graveyard: 0 posts in the last 5 months and only 3 in the last year. A veritable desert of keywords and search terms. Keeping an up-to-date, relevant blog is a known way to boost your search ranking. So we decided to start posting more.
I’ll be honest - at first we considered generating posts en masse with AI. Why put in hours of work to hand write blog posts when 5 minutes of prompting could generate a fruit salad of hyper-optimized keywords large enough to feed the search monster for months? Everyone is doing it these days. This fellow published 12,000 posts in one day!
So we fired up ChatGPT 5-and-one-half and asked it for a couple sample posts. The results were what you’d expect: bland, soul-crushing prose about content creation and monetization strategies. After reading the posts, we immediately began discussing ways that we could hide our sin if we published them. Maybe we should disable email notifications for AI generated posts? Would there be a way to feed these posts to the search crawler without them being visible to people? How could we put some daylight between these atrocities and the Treefort brand?
Here’s what we realized: the whole point of SEO is to help real people find your brand. It is only working if a real person clicks your link. And when they click that link, whatever they’re looking at is their first impression of you. What do we want to say with that first impression? Do we really want to communicate that we think you’re a chump who’ll eat the slop? That you’re not worth even the hour of time it takes to write a blog post?
Rhetorical questions. We do not want to communicate that. It’s not that hard to write blog posts by hand, and we think a hand-written post gives a better and more accurate impression of Treefort. We are a very human company. We don’t have an AI sales bot writing emails. We don’t put an AI chatbot in front of customer support. Au contraire, Zack may write you a note with a ballpoint pen, stamp, and everything. One of our developers will answer your technical questions when you need help.
So here you go: a blog post written by a real live human. And if you didn’t enjoy it, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that I put more effort into writing it than you did reading it.
