Your dating profile has an SEO problem.

“Hinge is broken for me,” my friend Alexa said. “I get 2-3 likes a week.”

I took a look. Immediately, I saw the problem.

In real life, this friend is wonderful. She is an attractive 34 year old Brooklynite who works in publishing. She’s cerebral in a warm way, not a brittle way. She has the kind of mind that narrates her experiences in unexpected configurations, like writing about her dating life as a sports bracket. She has a gift for plucking out what is unique in someone’s essence and articulating it to them, making them feel deeply seen. She launches creative products at a furious sprint. She is not just “smart.” She is alive with ~ideas~ and agency.

Her Hinge profile, in contrast, could have belonged to anyone.

Her photos were not terrible, although there was room for improvement since half were mirror selfies.

What I really took offense to was the prompts.

The key to her heart? “Some combination of laughing, cooking & a willingness to adventure with me.”

Her greatest strength? “I’m always up to something.”

These aren’t bad answers. They just could comfortably describe 70% of all women. (Where are the brave, iconoclastic women who absolutely hate laughing and despise adventures?) But someone both extroverted and competent enough to launch a multi-city supper club and who exudes openness and warmth isn’t best described as “up to something.”

After all, if you are searching for a cerebral, thoughtful, intentional person, you don’t use photos to hone in on appropriate candidates. You look at their words. Both the content and how they express themselves in writing.

Normally, if I’m working with a client or friend, I’ll spend most of my time on photos. Apps are visual.

But for Alexa, I sensed a more deadly chasm: the kind of man who would most go nuts for her wouldn’t be able to recognize her at all.

Her most unique traits - her mind and spirit - were invisible.

In my parallel life, I work in ecommerce marketing.1

Part of the job is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization).2 It’s about 2 main things:

1. Understanding how web crawlers function so that you do things (like fixing website code structure and getting links from other sites) that curry favor with the algorithm overlords

2. Keyword research to understand what people are searching for in the first place - what words are they using? What questions are they asking? What are competitors getting a ton of traffic for that you currently aren’t?

I think SEO research is fun because it’s like getting to stare into the hivemind’s naked, innermost thoughts. It makes you aware of how important certain features and questions are to other people (even if they’re unremarkable to you!).

SEO also has a concept called “long tail keywords.” Terms like “wax candles” and ”glow up tips” are “head” keywords - high volume, high competition. Terms like “pink soy candles that smell like grapefruit and vanilla” and “how to use mastic gum for looksmaxxing” would be long tail.

Everyone dreams of winning those head keywords, but when it comes to dating, there’s a valuable lesson in thinking about the long tail.3 We fixate on “more options” but we forget that dating is the longest tail keyword that exists: an audience of one.

Let’s imagine you were born into a small family business selling yoga pants.4

Suddenly, you’re forced through circumstance to become website’s marketing director.
You figure you’ll take a stab at SEO.

At first, keyword research feels silly. Of course tons of people search for “yoga pants” and “lululemon”, big deal. But far bigger brands have those search terms cornered, meaning your site gets buried for generic, high traffic terms.

But as you dig deeper, you realize there’s a lot more opportunity than you thought. Even though you can’t compete for the #1 spot for “yoga pants”, there’s way more people searching “pink bamboo yoga pants with pockets” than there are companies targeting these terms with real skill or stock. Before, you didn’t really think that hard about bamboo fabric or pockets because it seemed so obvious and pedestrian to you. There’s so many other brands that do it! It’s just one of the many things you make! But lo and behold, once you make dedicated page with those exact words, SEO-mogging the competitors, you suddenly get a steady influx of new customers thrilled to find your pink bamboo yoga pants with pockets.

The key here is that there was nothing wrong with your pants. There was nothing wrong with customers for not buying from you before. They were not stupid, impoverished bad people: they simply couldn’t find you. The tactic you used changed nothing about the product, nor was it deceptive. The key was understanding what other people are already searching for that you already have. You just needed to highlight this feature in a legible way so that technology could pair you with the right people.

I’m using this weird digital marketing analogy because I want you to emotionally detach from your dating profile. I see too many people with terrible profiles say, “online dating doesn’t work” or “maybe people don’t want me because of my race/age/immutable trait.” Sometimes, when we step outside ourselves and view a situation with a colder eye, the answer is easier to accept.

There’s a commencement address from the legendary writer, David Foster Wallace, where he starts with this parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Wallace was talking about being aware of our default programming. It is easy to carry beliefs about the world or see things from a certain vantage point, never realizing that these mediate all of our experiences.

The problem in dating is that people often have little concept of what parts of them are appealing to a real romantic partner. Dating is more about our defaults. That is, who you are - your “vibe”, your demographics, how well you match someone’s preconceived “type” - and less about what you do. It’s a very unfair process in that way. We all want to believe that we are uniquely amazing enough to transcend every pesky filter on the other side. But the same thing that makes dating unfair is also what makes love beautiful: the best parts of people are just the water they swim in. Which is why genuine, authentic people often make bland, indecipherable dating profiles. They’re not trying to be a particular thing. They just are.5

We often fail to appreciate that what comes most naturally to us is precisely what makes us unique. We think that life is about working hard to achieve what is slightly out of our grubby, grasping reach. We’ve been trained to value what we had to earn — the promotion, the body, the years of therapy. So naturally, we assume love works the same way. That it’s something we have to deserve through effort, something we secure by being impressive enough.6 So we think our money and career and six pack are the thing that will find us love, when really, all they do is widen the top of the funnel. More options doesn’t guarantee love.

But love, when it’s right, isn’t a reward for effort. It’s a recognition. Someone sees the water you swim in and thinks, oh — that’s the water I want to swim in too. Which means the real work of a dating profile is more about conveying something far fuzzier than your high status job title: it’s about presenting a flattering view of yourself, sure, but more importantly, it’s about accurately communicating your vibe. It’s about thinking of your profile as the world’s longest tail keyword, designed to appeal to only one person. (Or 2-6, if you’re poly.)

I have worked with a handful of people this past year where I got unfettered edit power over their Hinge profile. When I was able to pick their photos for them from a sufficiently large photo library and workshop their prompts (and sometimes, persuade them to get better haircuts), I have gotten such gratifying updates in the weeks and months following:

I am going to go over nitty gritty specifics on how to redo your profile yourself using data and strategic thinking in the paid section below.

However, if you want to save yourself the trial and error time and see results right away, book me for an hour to revamp your profile.

After booking, please DM me your existing profile + your current filters on preferences for a partner (age, height, distance, etc.) and a brief summary of what’s not working well for you with dating. I will refund you if I don’t think I can be helpful. Otherwise, I will give you some instructions to prep for the call to make the most of our hour - generally, one hour is enough time to do photo selection and give feedback on existing prompts, but not enough time for me to rewrite/workshop your prompts with you.

• The exact changes I did for real men and women that turned their dating lives from “no one good likes me” to “I have so many options that it’s a little overwhelming”

• My super simple framework for what photos you need in your profile and what mistakes to avoid for each type of photo

• Big reveal! The prompt rewrite that took Alexa from 2-3 likes per week to 50+ per day

• How to use Photofeeler to benchmark and test new photos - including what minimum scores to aim for and how to interpret results

• A useful little tip on how I remove AI taint from prompts