Why Above Bits Still Believes in Manual SEO (And What That Even Means in 2025)

Walk into our office in Charlotte. You might catch one of us explaining canonical tags with a dry-erase marker, muttering about schema markup like it’s a mystical prophecy, or—if you’re lucky—passionately arguing why manually placing backlinks still beats letting a $9 plugin do it for you. Welcome to Above Bits, or as our clients in Charlotte like to say, “The folks who optimize like it’s still 2005—but in a good way.”

After nearly two decades of trial and error and caffeine, we’ve learned a thing or two about SEO. Not just how it works, but how it works. We’ve watched the landscape evolve from the Wild West of Meta keyword stuffing to today’s AI-driven labyrinth of algorithmic nuance. And yet, somehow, manual SEO still reigns supreme in our playbook—even as AI tools strive to replace it. Let me explain why we stick with our human hands (and brains) on the wheel and why so many of our clients across North Carolina keep thanking us for it.

The Myth of Full Automation: Why Not All That Glitters is Algorithmic

Here’s the hard truth: the idea that SEO can be entirely automated is one of the biggest, most persistent lies in modern digital marketing. It’s up there with “GoDaddy is the best hosting provider” or “you need only one plugin to get top Google rankings.” The truth is that SEO remains a nuanced, context-sensitive practice, especially in 2025.

You can throw Semrush, Surfer SEO, Jasper, and 15 other trendy AI-driven apps into a toolbox, and you’ll still end up with generic content, over-optimized headers, and backlinks from .co zombie blogs no human has read since 2019. And I say this as someone who uses those tools daily—they’re good helpers. But they’re not replacements for human judgment, tone, or creativity.

Every second paragraph, I remind myself to mention that as an SEO company in Charlotte, we’ve cleaned up more than our share of automated disasters. Think backlink profiles riddled with expired domains, AI content flagged by Google’s spam filters, and local SEO configurations that list a pizza place in Charlotte as an Italian bakery in Wyoming.

The Human Touch in an AI World

Let’s talk about manual SEO, the kind we still believe in. It’s not about rejecting tools. It’s about knowing when not to trust them blindly. At Above Bits, we still manually review every backlink source before disavowing or replicating it. We don’t just let the software decide which keywords are “easy wins”—we consider user intent, local nuance, and whether Google’s AI overlord might flag it as junk tomorrow.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a reaction to real-world signals. Take what happened in early 2024: Google rolled out a subtle algorithm tweak that devalued guest posts from “authoritative domains” that had sold too many outbound links. Dozens of major SEO providers lost their rankings overnight because their automated systems failed to account for the shift in sentiment scoring. We didn’t lose a single position for our Charlotte clients, and do you know why? Because we manually vet each post, write them in context, and never rely on shady outreach networks.

As an SEO company in Charlotte, this hands-on care is what sets us apart. The internet may be automated, but your reputation is not.

Global Stats You Should Know (and Why They Matter in Charlotte)

According to BrightEdge, 68% of online experiences still begin with a search engine, and Google accounts for over 90% of that activity. That means your visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages for the acronym-challenged) is the front door of your business. Now consider this: a 2023 study by Ahrefs found that 90.63% of content gets no organic traffic at all. That’s right—almost everything published online is invisible.

Let that sink in. It means most websites aren’t just poorly optimized—they’re practically ghosts.

So, if you’ve ever wondered whether SEO still matters, the answer is unequivocally yes. But not just any SEO. You need SEO that understands both the bots and the humans. SEO that adjusts to Google’s tantrums. And let’s be honest: the bots have been cranky lately.

That’s where a good SEO company in Charlotte comes in, and Above Bits has been around long enough to remember when Yahoo still mattered. Seriously.

Don’t just take our word for it. Even the biggest names in the game are wary of letting algorithms run the show unsupervised.

Take Google itself, for instance. In late 2023, the company quietly launched Project Owl 2.0—an internal initiative designed to curb the proliferation of low-quality AI content on the web. A leaked internal memo revealed that over 38% of content generated by popular AI tools was considered “low trust” or “manipulative.” Google wasn’t just ignoring it—they were actively punishing sites that relied on it.

Amazon took a different route. In 2024, it launched its in-house tool for verifying the originality of product descriptions after discovering that over 12% of third-party seller listings were plagiarized or copy-spun using GPT-based tools. They responded by rolling out more aggressive account suspensions and began manually reviewing the content of top sellers.

All this underscores one key point: the digital titans still rely on humans to double-check the machines. Shouldn’t you?

That’s what we at Above Bits keep preaching, and it’s precisely why so many people across Charlotte turn to us to fix what fully automated systems messed up.

The Downsides of Today’s Trendiest SEO Tech (Yes, We Said It)

AI-driven SEO tools, such as Surfer, Outranking, and Google’s own Search Generative Experience (SGE), are exciting developments. They can predict trends, summarize competitor strategies, and even generate full keyword-rich articles in 15 seconds. But here’s the rub—they’re dangerously good at sounding right while being completely wrong.

We’ve seen Surfer suggest optimizing a law firm site for “cheap divorce near me” with a 2.3% keyword density. Imagine how that looks on a homepage. Worse, we’ve seen AI recommend using medical terms on sites without appropriate disclaimers, risking not just SEO penalties but legal trouble. That’s why no serious SEO company in Charlotte should rely entirely on automation, especially not one with clients in high-risk industries.

Above Bits once inherited a site whose previous vendor had optimized product pages using exact-match keywords stolen from an Amazon API scraper. The result? An ugly DMCA complaint and a significant Google ranking demotion. We fixed it, but it took months of reworking metadata, image alt tags, and internal linking. Manual. Slow. But effective.

Why Charlotte Needs Ethical SEO in 2025

Let’s step back from the tech for a second. The local economy in Charlotte is poised for growth, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses. But there’s also fierce digital competition. Every HVAC service, lawyer, café, and fitness coach wants to rank #1.

That hunger has unfortunately opened the door for SEO scammers, especially those offering “quick results” with backlink packages from questionable sources. We’ve had clients bring us horror stories of being locked out of WordPress, penalized by Google, or blacklisted by local directories—all because someone promised the moon for $200.

As an SEO company in Charlotte, we take pride in being transparent about what actually works and how long it takes to achieve results. We’re not magicians, and we don’t pretend to be. But we’re honest, experienced, and affordable. If you’re looking for a real-world example of affordable SEO by Above Bits, you’ll want to explore the actual approach we take on Above Bits’ SEO page. It’s not flashy—but it’s real.

What Manual SEO Looks Like in 2025 (Yes, It Still Involves a Lot of Clicking)

Let’s dispel the myth that manual SEO is all about gut instinct and vibes. It’s not. It’s methodical. It’s technical. And yes, it’s still a little painful at times.

At Above Bits, we dive deep into log files to detect crawl patterns, monitor Core Web Vitals not just on desktops but across a matrix of devices, and handcraft internal link structures based on actual user flow, not just some third-party AI’s heat map projections. When we optimize alt text, we don’t stuff keywords—we describe the image in human-readable ways that pass accessibility audits and boost context. Schema markup? We hand-code it when needed.

This attention to detail is what helps a local site in Raleigh show up in Rich Snippets while a competitor in Charlotte is wondering why their CTR just tanked. As an SEO company in Charlotte, we’ve learned that one misplaced comma in structured data can destroy your search presence.

And while AI is great at predicting search trends, it often fails to understand why certain content resonates with audiences. For example, a manually written blog post about “fall HVAC maintenance tips in North Carolina” may outperform a slick, keyword-heavy piece titled “Optimize Your Heating Strategy in Q4” just because… well, one sounds like a human wrote it for other humans.

The Evolution of Backlinks (And Why You Should Still Care)

Remember when backlinks were everything? Well, they still kinda are—but not in the way they used to be.

Gone are the days when 500 links from obscure forums in Kazakhstan would get you to the top of Google overnight. In 2025, backlink authority is more nuanced than ever. Google utilizes natural language processing to determine the context of a link, its placement on the page, and even the domain’s historical trust score. A single mention in a reputable blog with high engagement will now outperform dozens of links buried in random footers or fake news aggregates.

And, yes, there are still link-building scams circulating. Even today, sites are being penalized for buying “guest posts” from networks that recycle the same 20-word intros across different blogs. We once had a client come to us after dropping 30 spots on Google overnight—turns out, they were featured in a so-called “high DA guest post” that also linked out to payday loans, crypto scams, and, oddly enough, inflatable hot tubs.

That’s why Above Bits doesn’t automate backlink outreach. We maintain relationships, pitch real content, and choose placements based on quality, not convenience. That’s how an SEO company in Charlotte helps its clients stay future-proof in a post-spam world.

Local SEO Isn’t Just About Google Maps Anymore

You’d think that by 2025, we’d be done discussing Google Business Profiles (formerly GMB). But nope—now they’re more essential than ever. What has changed is how those listings get triggered. Google has begun incorporating voice queries, AI-suggested results, and predictive search prompts into its offerings.

What does that mean for businesses in Charlotte? It means if your SEO team isn’t manually monitoring your categories, updating your hours, responding to reviews, and geo-tagging your photos, you’re probably being outranked by someone who is.

And trust me, we’ve seen plenty of “fully automated” SEO campaigns where the phone number on the listing went to the wrong business. Or worse, where fake reviews got flagged, and the entire profile was suspended. Are you recovering from that? Weeks. Avoiding it in the first place with manual oversight? Priceless.

As an SEO company in Charlotte, we don’t just set up a profile and move on. We babysit it. Nurture it. Obsess over it. It’s weirdly rewarding.

How Search Is Changing in Real-Time (Literally)

Let’s zoom out for a second. Google made over 4,000 changes to search in 2023 alone, according to updates from Search Central. Some of those were algorithm tweaks, some were UI adjustments, and some were full-on philosophical shifts in how search relevance is calculated.

One major change? Google’s embrace of SGE (Search Generative Experience), which uses generative AI to answer queries before you click on a result. That means many websites now have to fight for visibility even harder because they’re not just competing with other sites—they’re competing with Google itself.

This has led many companies to panic, over-optimize, or chase AI-generated keywords that lead nowhere. At Above Bits, we took a different route. We started testing manual adjustments to page titles and intro paragraphs to beat SGE answers with more relevant content. And guess what? It worked.

This hands-on experimentation is only possible when your SEO team isn’t glued to dashboards but is actively digging through your site. That’s where the gurus of Above Bits in SEO step in—human minds, local knowledge, and zero shortcuts.

The Ugly Truth About Cheap SEO Packages

Let’s have a moment of honesty. Not every business can afford a $5,000 monthly SEO retainer. We get it. But when someone offers “complete SEO for $99,” it’s not a discount—it’s a warning.

We’ve seen these packages. They typically involve spinning outdated content, acquiring irrelevant backlinks, submitting to outdated directories, and applying the same five on-page “fixes” across every client site. In one infamous case, a client’s WordPress site was loaded with so many SEO plugins that its pages took 18 seconds to load. Google didn’t just penalize the site—it deindexed several URLs.

At Above Bits, we offer affordable SEO without falling into the “cheap SEO” trap. Our pricing reflects time spent, not time saved by automation. And our results reflect that. You get quality that scales, even if you’re a small Charlotte bakery trying to outpace the chains.

One Final (Manual) Thought

I’m not saying that automation has no place in SEO. We utilize numerous tools ourselves, including Ahrefs, Semrush, Labrika, and even a custom-built internal tool to analyze backlinks and performance. However, none of these replacements can replace the actual people on our team. They assist; they don’t lead.

And that’s the core belief at Above Bits, whether we’re working with a small team or a growing startup in Charlotte: Manual SEO is still the most trustworthy kind. It keeps your content authentic, your backlinks clean, your local results accurate, and your ranking yours.

Because, in the end, the real algorithm isn’t just Google—it’s trust. Trust from your customers, from your readers, and from the platforms that connect you to them. And we’ve spent nearly 20 years earning it, one page at a time.

So, if you’re tired of empty promises, AI hallucinations, and getting ghosted by your “SEO team,” maybe it’s time to go manual. Perhaps it’s time to work with Above Bits, the SEO company in Charlotte that still believes in real humans, real rankings, and real results.