I Didn’t Choose SEO. But I’m Choosing to Be the Best | SERP & Destroy #1

How I went from panic-Googling ‘what is SEO’ to chasing the top 1%.

I became an SEO three years ago. Not by choice.

Gerald’s message hit early that morning: “Andrés, they’re firing me. Everything’s going to be your problem now.” I panicked. Gerald was good: they just didn’t want to listen to him. Classic case of hiring an expert and then ignoring the expertise. Sure, he’d taught me the basics, handed me outlines, walked me through the fundamentals. But running the whole thing? I’d never touched SemRush. Never built a strategy from scratch.

Minutes later, my bosses on Zoom: “We want you to handle everything: SEO and writing. We believe in you.”

I took the job. Not because of their bullshit pep talk. I took it because I needed the money.

I became a writer seven years ago. That one was my call.

It hit me on some random Tuesday: “Quit everything and become a writer. The world needs your stories.” Or something like that. Probably less dramatic. Probably I was just done with KPMG.

So I quit. Started País Lector, a site about literature. Wrote about poetry, banned books, dead authors. I thought if I wrote well enough, people would find me. That talent was enough.

Cute.

That’s why I do SEO now. Build a strategy, research keywords, create solid content, watch the rankings climb. With just thirty articles, here’s where we are:

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how well you write if no one can find you. You could be Hemingway back from the dead. No backlinks? You don’t exist. Weak domain authority? Google buries you on page 47 next to jello recipes from 2009.

SEO taught me that. The hard way.

But somehow the pieces clicked. Or that’s what I tell myself. I had three random skills: finance (thanks, KPMG and my useless degree), writing (thanks to my obsession with stories), and now SEO (thanks to Gerald and rent being due). Someone was bound to pay me for that combo. And someone did. Now I write for clients who don't mess around: crypto, finance, iGaming. The kind of niches where page one isn't a vanity metric, it's revenue.

I spent three years learning concepts that made me sound smarter than I was.

Keywords. Backlinks. Domain authority. Sitemap. Schema markup. Meta descriptions. SERP. Core Web Vitals. Crawl budget (still not 100% sure what that means but it sounds important).

I learned the tools: SemRush, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Screaming Frog (sounds like a punk band, it’s actually audit software).

I read hundreds of LinkedIn posts. All noise. Half of them predicting SEO’s death: “Everyone’s just gonna ask ChatGPT.” The other half inventing acronyms every week: GEO, AEO, LLM-SEO, God-knows-what-SEO. Some are out here optimizing for ChatGPT like it’s the second coming.

Anyway. Here’s what actually matters: Timothée Chalamet is taking the Oscar. Mark my words.

So what happened to that job? The one that dragged me into SEO. The one that sent me down this obsessive spiral of trying to crack Google’s algorithm.

We broke up.

They wanted to rank on ChatGPT. Fully obsessed. I wanted to do SEO that actually made sense—not just chase whatever trend was hot that month. Irreconcilable differences. We went our separate ways. Stung a little. Not much.

Don’t worry. It was an amicable split.

So I made a call. I’m going elite.

Not just “pretty good at SEO.” I mean the real shit. Python. Data analysis. Automation. The people who charge $10K+ and actually understand BigQuery without panic-Googling it every five minutes.

Top 1%. Maybe 5%. At least top 30%. We’ll see.

Why?

Because I like money. Because I like learning. Because I need something to obsess over, and this one pays well.

I’m documenting everything here. The wins. The spectacular failures. The nights I’m up at 3 AM debugging a Python script that should be simple but absolutely isn’t. The times Google rolls out an update and wrecks my life with zero warning.

I’m not promising motivation or inspiration. Just honesty. And probably some dark humor when everything falls apart.

I’m also going to prove something: good writing and SEO don’t have to be enemies. You can rank without writing garbage like “Discover <<gold price today tuesday>> in this guide for <<gold beginners understanding>>.”

AI-generated slop isn’t worse than the keyword-stuffed disasters we had before. They’re both trash. But we can do better. We have to.

LLMs are changing everything. True. Google still matters. Also true. And good SEO can change the trajectory of a company. That’s a fact.

I’m going elite because I like money, I like learning, and I want to master this thing before it drives me insane. Whichever comes first.

Be my witness.

This is SERP & Destroy: the SEO corner of The Human Glitch Report.

What’s next? A quick SEO primer in the next one. Then we go deep: BigQuery.

Welcome.