Dave means well. That’s the thing. He’s not trying to make your life difficult. He just attended a two-day digital marketing conference in Birmingham, sat through a keynote about AI search, and now he’s forwarding you articles at 9pm on a Tuesday with the subject line “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS???”
You have. You saw it six months ago.
Welcome to one of the most common – and most quietly exhausting – problems in SEO. Not algorithm updates. Not technical issues. Dave.
Why Dave keeps happening
It’s not just conferences. Dave takes many forms.
Sometimes Dave is your CEO who bought a cheap SEO tool that’s showing completely different numbers to everything your SEO consultant reports. Now there’s a spreadsheet. There are questions. There is a meeting.
Sometimes Dave is your business partner’s contact who “does a bit of SEO on the side” and has strong opinions about backlinks. Or a LinkedIn post that got 847 likes from someone with “growth hacker” in their bio, claiming everything your SEO is doing is wrong.
Dave is everywhere. And Dave has opinions.
The problem is – and I say this as someone who’s been doing SEO since before most of Dave’s LinkedIn connections were born – Dave isn’t always wrong. That’s what makes it complicated. Sometimes Dave stumbles onto something really worth looking at. More often though, Dave has half a story, no context, and excellent confidence.
What Dave usually gets wrong
The conference Dave attended probably had good speakers. Some of them possibly knew what they were talking about. But conference keynotes are designed to be exciting, not accurate. Speakers need applause, not caveats.
So Dave comes back fired up about AI search being the future, having heard approximately forty minutes of content about a channel that currently drives a fraction of the traffic Google does for most B2B businesses. He didn’t hear the bit about how this varies wildly by industry. He left before the Q&A where someone asked about actual numbers.
The cheap tool Dave found is probably measuring something real. Just not the same thing your SEO consultant is measuring, in the same way, over the same time period. Different tools use different data sources. Showing Dave two tools that disagree doesn’t mean one of them is lying – it means data is complicated and someone needs to explain that without making Dave feel stupid.
The LinkedIn post Dave forwarded? Written to get engagement. Broad claims get shares. Nuance gets ignored.
None of this makes Dave malicious. It makes Dave a person who absorbed incomplete information and got enthusiastic about it.
How to handle Dave without losing your mind
First: don’t dismiss him outright. I know that’s hard when you’re three months into a solid SEO strategy and Dave wants to blow it up because of a tweet. But if you wave Dave away, Dave goes quiet and then brings it up in a board meeting instead.
Ask Dave for the source. Not aggressively – genuinely. “That’s interesting, can you send me the full article?” Half the time the article itself contradicts what Dave remembered from it.
Then take it to your SEO consultant. A good one won’t be defensive. They’ll either explain why it doesn’t apply to your specific situation, acknowledge it’s worth considering, or occasionally say “Dave’s onto something, let’s look at this.” Any of those is a useful outcome.
What you’re really doing is creating a process. Dave doesn’t disappear, but Dave becomes something you can handle systematically rather than something that derails your entire strategy every six weeks.
When Dave might actually have a point
Here’s where I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes Dave is right.
Not because the LinkedIn post was accurate, or the conference keynote was well-researched. But because sometimes an outside perspective – even an imperfect one – catches something worth looking into.
If Dave keeps raising the same concern and your SEO consultant keeps dismissing it without really engaging, that’s worth paying attention to. A good consultant will welcome the question and give you a proper answer. Not a defensive one. Not a “trust me, I know best” one. An answer with context.
Not sure if Dave has a point?
That’s exactly what I’m here for. If your business is dealing with conflicting SEO advice, a sceptical stakeholder, or a consultant you’re not sure whether to trust, let’s have a conversation.
Sometimes you need someone to look at what’s happening and tell you plainly: Dave’s wrong, here’s why. Or: Dave’s onto something, here’s what to do about it.
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