You’re right that some approaches to SEO are sleazy. They are a bit old fashioned at this point, and usually result in short term results which crash and burn. Google does actually care if users don’t find a good result; they are working on improving the results every day.
But you’re wrong in the sense that SEO done correctly is just a good way to get in front of potential customers who are actively searching for information by proving value to them up front.
Let’s say you run a company and I tell you customers are searching for your product 1000 times a day. What are you going to do? Not invest in SEO?
So, to demystify it, here’s what we do:
1. Identify topics that people are searching for, prioritize by search volume and conversion potential
2. Create content which is going to best satisfy that person’s search intent. We don’t want them clicking the back button and choosing another result, that would hurt our rankings in the long run
3. Try and link to the new content from other pages on our own site
4. Identify any technical issues which would prevent a search engine crawler from being able to access or understand our content
That’s pretty much it.