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Today we see an enormous profusion of tools, strategies, models, and different applications in our old (and tired) SEO. Many of these offer a necessary breath of fresh air to our market. Semantic SEO, which won me over at first sight, is one of these “innovations” that arrived slowly and claimed its stake in the massive search engine optimization landscape.

However, I didn’t write this article to praise the strategy I follow, let alone to repeat tired criticisms of professionals who merely reheat old methods, change a thing or two, post them as news on LinkedIn, and beg for followers and comments. These people often send out a spreadsheet filled with the “same old thing” to SEO professionals who are shooting in every direction and fell for a profile-growth strategy disguised as knowledge sharing.

My point is to take a step back, return perhaps to marketing, digital project management, and administration to declare: the right tools for SEO are strategies and tactics.

The SaaS fetish and why SEO lost its way

We live in the era of the “software fetish.” If it’s a SaaS, we run like rabbits after a delicious carrot. A widespread belief exists that subscribing to the most expensive tool on the market or installing the latest plugin replaces a professional’s analytical capacity. With the “advent of AI,” this scenario expanded to include ChatGPT spreadsheets, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) built for Claude, or the latest scheme connecting NotebookLM, Gemini, and any random SaaS.

The optimization market became a hostage to vanity metrics and automated “scores” long before this. Don’t get me wrong; these metrics were useful at one stage, but they remain superficial if isolated from structural thinking. I didn’t use that term, “structural thinking,” by chance! Developing a structure for any phase of your optimization project separates the amateurs from the pros.

The core problem is that many SEO professionals have transformed into tool operators, ignoring that software is a means, never the end. I might be stating the obvious—after all, we all know this, right? But we also live under the pressure to deliver results faster in a landscape destroyed by AI, though no one wants to hear that. We need results.

Under pressure, resisting that spreadsheet or the new SaaS that promises to solve all problems at once is incredibly difficult, especially if you lack a thought-out, structured, and tested workflow.

SEO, in its most authentic and foundational conception, resides in the art and science of organizing information so it can be retrieved. When the focus shifts from intelligence to the dashboard, SEO loses its way and becomes mere statistical noise in spreadsheets that “reheat old formats.”

Strategy and tactic are the necessary rescue of marketing and management

I have a proposal to recover the technical dignity of our work. It involves, first and foremost, reclaiming the distinction between strategy and tactics—something administration and marketing consolidated decades ago. Here, I will champion my academic and strategic perspective.

Those who know me already know: for me, the non-negotiable initial strategy in SEO is choosing the Knowledge Domain. It is the “why” and the “where we are going” for a new project. It’s that good old map that prevents me from getting lost when everyone screams for results during a Friday meeting.

This is a long-term vision, closely aligned with the business objectives of the client who hired me. It is the conscious decision of which semantic territory the brand wishes to occupy and how it intends to be perceived as an authority in that field. It defines how the brand will structure its communication beyond its own borders and which lexicon it will use to speak with its audience.

Tactics, in turn, represent the “how.” This is where our set of practices needs a deep update, drinking directly from the fountain of Library and Information Science—longtime experts in organizing information. I propose that our tactics should not be mere “technical tweaks,” but the use of intellectual instruments:

• Knowledge Domain Analysis: To map how information is produced and consumed in a specific area.
• Creation of Controlled Vocabularies: To ensure terminological consistency.
• Taxonomy and Thesauri: To establish hierarchical and associative relationships between concepts.

With this trio, we have everything we need to structure the project from the start and create a step-by-step process to keep it updated as changes occur. A project starting this way finds its basis in the past and present while simultaneously connecting to the future.

To go further, we have modern tactics from the Semantic Web: structured data markup (Schema.org) and the construction of proprietary Knowledge Graphs. The tactic is the execution of grounded content, created by experts, where AI acts as engineering support rather than a substitute for thought. Without a clear strategy, any tactic, no matter how technological, is just wasted effort.

The Semantic Workflow as an intellectual tool

The approach I advocate in my Semantic-ware Workflow places human intelligence and Information Science methods ahead of any Google Doc, spreadsheet, or line of code. In this process, the use of taxonomies and thesauri precedes the publication of any article. Moreover, these are assets that serve as the foundation for building the content strategy and its execution.

The primordial strategic step here is defining the Semantic Field. We must, once and for all, abolish the archaic view based on keywords and empty search volumes. Our job is to build meaning through the alignment of concepts and the careful selection of the entities that represent them.

This isn’t impossible to do; you don’t need expensive software or complex systems. You can do it with the right process, paper, and a pen! The Semantic SEO course I created aims exactly at this: showing you how to apply a clear (and tested) workflow.

Access the landing page I prepared to explain everything about the workflow: Fluxo de Trabalho Semântico da Semântico SEO

A workflow to end ambiguity

In this scenario, disambiguation becomes the decisive act and the strategic focus. The process of making the sense of information explicit—eliminating multiple possible interpretations so that Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) operate with absolute precision—is what makes our project different from competitors who just repeat more of the same.

Think with me: if the search engine has no doubts about what you are saying, shouldn’t your visibility be the natural consequence of this clarity? Apply all your knowledge about indexing and information retrieval and reflect on that.

From organization to retrieval: tactics at the service of semantics

How we organize information on the site is a tactical decision of invaluable worth to your project’s authority. Here, the dilemma between Top-Down (general to specific) and Bottom-Up (base to top) approaches shapes the Information Architecture and dictates how Google will understand the depth of your site.

I have already discussed this here on the Semantic Blog, but the choice of how to approach the organization of your project’s taxonomy does not begin during the website development phase. This is a conversation that needs to be had with those who define the strategy of the company you work for, with the product, marketing, branding, and other teams.

They are your partners in the vital task of defining this approach and how the company will organize the information made explicit to search engines. This decision will help you use structured data much more consciously.

Structured data tactics (Schema.org), therefore, are not mere “decorations” used to generate rich snippets. They are one of the easiest ways to connect your project’s knowledge graph with the knowledge graphs of search engines.

I hope I am making myself clear: some tasks traditionally called “technical SEO” (as if it were a different type of SEO) are simply tactics belonging to a strategy. You can include server optimizations, page code, and other “technical” criteria in this category.

The SEO specialist as an architect of meanings

The right tools for SEO are not found just in a browser tab or a monthly SaaS subscription; they reside in your organizational capacity, your critical thinking, and a solid theoretical foundation, which I sought in Library Science.

In my view, the future demands an SEO professional who is an architect of meanings—someone who understands that optimizing for search engines is actually optimizing human and machine understanding of information.

I invite you to move beyond the surface of automated tools and “more of the same” spreadsheets. Create your own workflow or use someone else’s, but reflect on the changing search landscape, know your audience, and research how they search for what you offer. This is the most permanent point of SEO: people continue to ask trillions of questions every day, everywhere, in the most varied ways possible.

Your best strategy is to know these people, and the perfect tactic is to answer those questions.