Why Backlinks and Schema Markup Are Overrated — And What Actually Matters in SEO for Regulated Industries

Backlinks and schema markup are overrated. For regulated SMEs, what actually works is accuracy, compliance-literacy, and content that earns trust — not tricks.

REGULATED INDUSTRIES SEOTECHNICAL SEOINSURANCE SEOSEO CONTENTFUNERAL SERVICES SEOSMES

Jorge Jaroslavsky

9/11/20267 min read

Introduction

I've spent twenty years doing SEO and another twenty-five before that taking things apart to understand how they work — radios, computers, insurance risk models, whatever was in front of me. So when I look at how the SEO industry talks about backlinks and schema markup, I don't see strategy. I see people repeating things they were told, without ever checking whether the thing is actually true.

Here is what I've concluded, after two decades of watching this play out across finance, insurance, automotive, legal, and funeral care: backlinks and schema markup are not the problem. The obsession with them is.

They've become a substitute for thinking. A checklist item you tick so you can tell a client something got done this month. For regulated SMEs — the businesses I work with — that substitution is expensive, and sometimes it's dangerous.

If you're an SEO professional reading this, I'm not telling you backlinks don't exist or that schema does nothing. I'm telling you they've been promoted to a status they haven't earned, and your regulated clients are the ones paying for that promotion.

If you're the owner of a regulated business — an insurance broker, a law firm, a funeral home, a financial adviser — I'm telling you something more direct. Stop letting people sell you certainty about mechanisms nobody fully understands, when what actually protects your business is something much older and much less glamorous. Being right. Being clear. Being someone your client can check up on and find that everything you told them holds up.

Backlinks: A Trust Signal Built for a World That Doesn't Exist Anymore

The pitch for backlinks has stayed the same for twenty years: if a respected site links to you, Google treats that as a vote of confidence, so go get more votes. It's a tidy story. It's also a story built for a web that was much smaller, much less gamed, and much less automated than the one we operate in now.

I spent thirty years inside an insurance brokerage before I ever wrote a line of SEO strategy. In that world, trust isn't something you accumulate by being mentioned by enough third parties. Trust is earned by whether your paperwork is correct, whether your risk assessment holds up when a claim actually happens, and whether you told the client the truth about what their policy covers before they needed it to.

Nobody at AXA or Allianz ever asked me how many other brokers had mentioned our firm. They asked whether the numbers were right.

Backlinks measure something adjacent to authority — visibility, connections, sometimes just budget — and Google has spent years trying to strip out the parts of that signal that were being gamed. What's left is a metric that can still be bought on outreach marketplaces, manufactured through guest-post networks, or manipulated through link exchanges dressed up as "digital PR." None of that has anything to do with whether your content is accurate, whether your advice is sound, or whether a person reading it walks away better informed than when they arrived.

For a regulated business, chasing links carries a cost that generic e-commerce sites don't have to think about. A link-building campaign that gets flagged as manipulative doesn't just cost you rankings — it can put your domain under manual review at exactly the moment your compliance department is already nervous about what's published under your name.

I've seen agencies run link campaigns for financial services clients with the same playbook they'd use for a mattress brand. The mattress brand can absorb a penalty and recover in a quarter. A regulated firm dealing with an unexplained ranking collapse in the middle of a renewal season cannot afford to wait that out, and often doesn't get the chance to.

None of this means links are worthless. A genuine citation from a trade body, a regulator's resource page, an industry publication that actually read what you wrote — those still mean something, because they're difficult to fake and they reflect a human decision that your content was worth pointing to.

The distinction I'm drawing isn't "links good" or "links bad." A link earned because the content deserved it is a completely different object from a link purchased because a spreadsheet said you needed forty more of them this quarter. Most of the industry still talks about them as if they're interchangeable. They aren't.

Schema Markup: Useful in Theory, Frequently a Liability in Practice

Schema markup gets sold as a translation layer — structured data that tells Google exactly what your content means, supposedly removing ambiguity and earning you rich results in exchange. In principle, I don't object to the idea. I spent years working with parsers and data structures before I ever touched SEO, and structured data as a concept is sound engineering.

The problem is what happens when that concept meets the reality of how most SME websites actually get built.

I've watched schema implementations on page builders — Hostinger's Web Creator is one I've dealt with directly — break in ways that exposed raw JSON-LD code to visitors, right there on the page, undermining exactly the professional appearance a regulated business depends on. A funeral home's website is not the place for a chunk of broken markup sitting next to the obituary listings. An insurance broker's site is not the place for it sitting next to the claims contact form. In both cases the damage isn't hypothetical. It's a visitor looking at your site and concluding nobody is paying attention.

There's a deeper question underneath the technical failures, and it's the one I actually want SEOs to sit with: why does a search engine that claims to understand natural language at a near-human level still need this much scaffolding bolted on to figure out what a page is about?

If your content answers the question a person actually has — clearly, in the right order, without padding — a competent crawler should be able to work out what it's looking at. Schema markup, in a lot of the implementations I've reviewed, isn't clarifying genuinely ambiguous content. It's being used to compensate for content that's vague, poorly structured, or written to hit a keyword count rather than answer a question.

That's not a markup problem. That's a writing problem wearing a markup costume.

Where schema does earn its place — product markup on an e-commerce catalogue, FAQ markup on a page that's genuinely structured as questions and answers, review markup where the reviews are real — I use it. What I won't do is tell a regulated client that adding a few lines of code is going to solve a trust or a clarity problem that actually lives in how the content is written. And I certainly won't ask them to carry the risk of a broken implementation on a page builder that was never designed to handle it properly in the first place.

What Actually Moves the Needle in a Regulated Industry

Take backlinks and schema off the table for a moment and ask what a compliance officer, an insurance buyer, or a family arranging a funeral is actually doing when they land on your page. They are not evaluating your domain authority. They are reading, deciding whether you sound like you know what you're talking about, and checking whether what you've written matches what they already understand to be true about their situation.

That's the whole game. It's also a much harder game than link-building, because it can't be delegated to a tool.

It requires someone who actually understands the industry writing — or at minimum, closely supervising — the content. I've spent decades on the inside of regulated risk assessment, and I can tell within a paragraph whether an insurance-related page was written by someone who's read a policy wording or by someone who's read three competitor blog posts and reorganised the sentences. Buyers in these sectors can tell too, even if they couldn't articulate exactly what tipped them off.

Accuracy matters more than most SEO advice accounts for. Get a compliance detail wrong — the wrong regulatory body named, an outdated threshold, a claim about coverage that doesn't survive a second reading — and you haven't just hurt your rankings eventually. You've handed a skeptical, risk-averse reader a concrete reason to distrust everything else on the page. One mistake, in a sector where the buyer is trained to look for exactly that kind of error, does more damage than a hundred backlinks can undo.

Usefulness matters just as much, and it's routinely confused with length.

A page that actually answers the specific question a person in crisis or under regulatory pressure is asking — clearly, without three paragraphs of throat-clearing before you get to the point — will outperform a padded 2,000-word "ultimate guide" almost every time. The person reading it isn't browsing. They're trying to solve a problem, often an urgent one, and they reward whoever respects that.

And then there's the part no algorithm update will ever touch: whether the person or firm behind the content can actually be trusted to deliver, once the click has already happened. You can't markup your way into that. It's built the same way it's built in insurance, in law, in any regulated trade — slowly, through consistent accuracy — and it's lost the moment you get careless.

Conclusion: Stop Outsourcing Judgement to a Checklist

If your SEO strategy for a regulated client still centres on acquiring links and layering on markup, you're optimising for signals Google itself has spent years trying to see past. Meanwhile you're ignoring the one thing it's actually gotten better at recognising: whether the content in front of it was written by someone who knows what they're talking about.

I didn't learn this from an SEO course.

I learned it from thirty years of watching what actually earns trust in a regulated commercial environment, and from a career built on the habit of opening things up to see how they really work rather than accepting the explanation on the box. Backlinks and schema are tools. Sometimes useful ones. They are not a substitute for expertise, and no regulated business should be paying an SEO consultant who treats them as if they are.

Play the customer's game, not the algorithm's. The algorithm changes every year. The customer's underlying question — can I trust this person with something that matters to me — hasn't changed in living memory.

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