I love your posts John, but "Hacker" implies a level of coding in my opinion, and I think most here on HN would agree.
As someone who talks to a few dozen SEOs a week, 99% of them cannot code in a fashion needed to be a "Growth Hacker". It's not that they can't contribute to growth, it's just that the traditional methods SEOs use (content, technical fixes, social) would not be considered hacks, but just solid online marketing.
SEOs are there to solve a problem. The problem of course is much deeper than getting your site noticed. It's a vision consisting of strategies with the following goals:
The Basics:
1. Get the most traffic from search engines you can (obviously)
2. Ensure the traffic you get is from the people you want to reach
3. Ensure that you are providing what searchers are looking for
4. Try to build a brand and a vision people can understand
5. Build an audience that will keep returning to your site
Now these things are solid online marketing, sure but there are other goals too, that are more "hacker" in nature.
6. Perform analytics to find out which methods are working
7. Finding the most optimum content to attract new traffic
8. Find what landing pages are creating customers
9. Finding the most optimum paths to lead to engagement
Now this is starting to sound like hacking. We're all problem solvers here. This is gathering information and using it to get the best results possible. Like optimizing routines to save cycles.
As a developer, what are you trying to do for a company?
1. Build software that solves problems for the most people possible (usually)
2. Ensure that your software is targeted towards the people who need it
3. Ensuring your software is solving their problems effectively
4. Making the user interface as effective as it can be (usually by some form of analytics)
5. Finding the best ways to save cycles and utilize hardware (again found with analytics)
Do you see the parallels? This is exactly why I keep one foot in SEO, and one foot in Web Development, because they seem like entirely separate disciplines, but they have more in common than not. The name of the game here is optimization, and both fields strive for optimizing an experience.
Calling someone a software "hacker" means they learn as much as they can about a process and refine it. Tweak, push, pull and stretch. They optimize software to better meet the needs of those who use it. A SEO is a "hacker" because they optimize the website to meet the needs of those who use it. It's not about writing code, it's about finding ways to do more with less.
This is what I gather he's trying to say.
What about the branding decisions made long before? Or the work put into the marketing framework? The work that went into creatives? And I'm not even getting into the coding that goes into bringing everything together.
SEO can provide growth, but only after you've used everything else in your arsenal to get the platform to the point that you are ready to start optimizing.
Oh, how many times have I seen this mistake! SEO is one of your marketing tools, but (done right) it is not a premature optimization.
So unless you really do not care about the crawlability and understandability of your site/app, you should be optimizing for bots in parallel with human usability.
Growth hacking is a bedrock of the best SEO practices out there. The best SEO is inherently viral to compel and force people to link to your content. Think about Youtube, and everyone embedding videos with links back to youtube... This is literally the definition of SEO strategy...finding ways to build into your product inherent link-bait.
I would argue that Growth Hacking is a prerequisite to execute excellent SEO.
How does that follow from "solid marketing doesn't make it a hack"?
"I think SEOs understand how people and the Internet work"
Yet you don't even understand the difference between "every ford is a car" and "every car is a ford" ... huh? What did I just read?