SEO will change more and faster in the coming years than it has in the past.
LLMs are improving rapidly. We understand GPT-4 is better than GPT-3, but there’s capability blindness against understanding specifically how the new models are more capable and the specific tasks and opportunities this opens up.
Google’s rollout of genAI in search at scale will be limited in the next 1–2 years because of the expense. I discussed this in my recent post on AI featured snippets.
There will be big winners and losers here. I’m looking forward to this because I see Ellipsis as one of the few firms that can navigate this world successfully.
If you work with us, we’ll make sure you’re more successful than ever going forward. If not, what questions should you ask to avoid getting screwed by AI?
Are you ruining the internet?
At our last Ellipsis meetup, I spoke about the bullshit jobs thesis.
If you’re not familiar: bullshit jobs refer to knowledge work where even the person doing the job secretly believes it shouldn’t exist. If the job didn’t exist, either nothing would change, or the world would be a slightly better place.
A lot of SEO work falls into the bullshit jobs category. If you’re churning out content nobody will ever read, insisting on “optimizations” that add nothing (or worse, shuffle text around in a way that makes it less useful), or hide behind experience-as-a-vibe to justify work which adds no value, you’re doing a bullshit job.
The Verge referred to SEO professionals as people who “ruined the internet” and I’m sympathetic to the argument.
I tried to buy a new phone recently and it was a nightmare. I couldn’t find any information about what the “best” phone was without drowning in affiliate links.
I gave up buying a new phone and decided to cook dinner. I chose a new pasta recipe. Oh no! Worse! Instead of finding recipes, I found endless stories about how the recipe on bestpastarecipes.com was handed down to the author by a wise stranger on a mountaintop. I ordered a pizza instead.
AI commoditises mediocre content creation.
The Verge article points out that because we can’t know how Google works, it creates space for charlatans. Further, because SEO work takes time, it’s difficult to distinguish good and bad SEO work in the first months of an engagement.
One of my big problems with the SEO industry is overcomplication. There is space for complexity. Keyword selection must be driven by as much data as you can get your hands on.
Your content philosophy must be simple: create the most useful content possible. Anything else, and you’re complicit in ruining the internet.
Why are you scared of algorithm updates?
The reaction to the March 2024 Google update has been remarkable. People are losing it over the changes.
This reaction comes from 2 different approaches to SEO:
- SEO is a finite game, where you try to win against the algorithm as it exists today.
- SEO is an infinite game, where you philosophically align yourself with Google in creating the most useful content possible.
The first option sets you up to fail. It sets you up for – at best – short-term success, but any gains are ephemeral and can disappear into the sands of a poorly maintained Google Sheet.
In this world, algorithm updates are scary because you don’t have a fundamental understanding of why your content ranks and are at the mercy of the next update.
The next update will happen. And it will happen frequently. Google needs to change how it ranks content. If you’re playing the finite game, you’re going to lose.
If you’re philosophically aligned on creating the most useful content, you can expect more rewards over time as Google’s understanding improves.
If your agency is scared of algorithm updates, start asking harder questions.
How are you calculating search volume?
In order to respond to SEO<>AI, you need to update your strategy. The foundation of any SEO strategy has to be search volume.
Search volume gives us insight into the popularity of different topics. But, search volumes are estimates yet many treat them as absolute truth. Different providers use different methodologies, each with strengths and weaknesses.
Are you seeing “stock” or out-of-the-box search volumes? Which provider is your agency using? Do they understand its strengths and weaknesses?
I consider it a strategic weakness to rely on a single provider. Search volume is the foundation for your strategic decisions. From there, what’s the searcher looking for? How will the content meet this need?
Your agency should have a robust process for analyzing SERPs and understanding the different types of intent behind searches. This has always been the case, but with change on the horizon, it only becomes more important that these things are robustly considered. This is critical for doing work today that is defensible tomorrow.
How is your content creation differentiated from ChatGPT?
We’ve already discussed the strategic need to create the most useful content.
Consider how genAI fits in. If you’re generating content, the searcher can do the same with ChatGPT directly, or Google can generate the same answer.
The answer isn’t necessarily to avoid AI in content creation. FALCON AI is a case study: it uses technology to deliver a better outcome than a human expert could by themselves.
The same approach can be used for specific writing tasks. I’m into AI-powered research and editing at the moment. It’s not about generating content but about giving the human expert better information for a better outcome.
Your writer won’t listen to 10 hours of podcasts with subject matter experts to write a regular article, but we’ve built a tool to do that and return key points for the writer.
Your philosophy needs to embrace the possibilities technology opens up. We’ve been doing this for years by building internal tools and I’ll keep doing that: it’s a competitive advantage, and the outcome is better-than-ever content.
You need to understand the limitations. AI is terrible at long-form critical thinking and original research. The more you lean into what makes content great and unreplicable, the better.
Your agency needs to confidently and clearly explain how they’re using AI to create better content for you. You need a smart and nuanced answer, because otherwise you have huge strategic risk of your content being easily replicable by LLMs in the future.
How are you delivering value?
Ranking, search volume, traffic, impressions… these don’t inherently deliver value. The only thing that matters is conversions. For a good SEO agency, this has always been the case, but in a genAI world, you need to consider how this shifts.
In the future, good ranking may not be linked to good performance. With AI featured snippets and a rise in zero-click searches, visibility may be limited to the highest-ranking content.
In this world, a rank of 5 – previously considered good – is now of significantly less value as it gets significantly fewer clicks.
This is true for some searches but not all. The strategy becomes more important. You need your SEO agency focused on delivering value, not rankings, and you need that today for protection tomorrow.
The key value proposition of FALCON AI is it predicts ranking. We’re urgently evolving this to focus on value instead, because the 2 may not be correlated going forward. In order to do this, we’re using new data sources to understand:
- Is this search going to result in clicks?
- Could this search be answered by a genAI featured snippet in the future?
- What’s the commercial value at the client level of clicks from this search?
You pair that with a focus on conversion rate optimization from organic clicks, and you’ve got a winning solution. We’re focused on being indispensable to our clients, and you need an agency focused on the same.
The AI revolution is coming, and I am thrilled
The AI revolution is transforming SEO, making it more complex and competitive than ever before. This is a wonderful opportunity: we are uniquely positioned to help our clients not just navigate this new landscape, but to thrive in it.
Imagine being able to predict not just rankings, but the actual commercial value of each click! Or having the ability to automatically optimize content for both search engines and conversions in real-time. These are the kinds of AI-powered capabilities we are investing in and excited to bring to our clients.
However, the window of opportunity is narrow. As AI continues to advance at a breakneck pace, the gap between winners and losers in the SEO game will rapidly expand. Agencies that fail to adapt will be left behind, and their clients will pay the price in lost visibility, traffic, and revenue.
The AI revolution in SEO is coming, and I couldn’t be more excited.
