There’s a recurrent debate within the SEO business over the slowdown in clicks, and AI overviews are at the center of the debate.
Many SEOs and companies have reported a significant decrease in the amount of organic traffic that is generated by informational search results, which has led editors to think about the nebulous question: Should we stop creating content for informational searches?
If I were to give you a simple answer either way, however, that would be the opposite. There are more complicated issues that are at hand, with the largest being the huge moats of content that we’ve developed to help with SEO.
We thought it was a service for users; however, in fact, the emphasis was to please Google.
We did manage to achieve ranking, traffic, and revenue, but we also contributed to the degeneration that we fueled in the exact similar as Google.
In this article, I’d like to look into three different areas:
What brought us here?
Was it the mistake we’ve made?
And, perhaps more importantly, what can we expect from teams responsible for content in the new era of large-language models (LLMs)and AI search?
What brought us here?
The old SEO strategy focused on wasting time, especially for SaaS businesses.
Here’s what the classic playbook looked like.
Startups could be part of Series B and invest heavily in the development of content moats with a fast pace.
As a member of the team, I was responsible for content production around 100 blog posts per month, and 40-50 writers on the payroll.
The one SaaS firm has posted over 1000 blog posts, and the entire world was cheering. We wrote case studies about the occasions that we described as inspirational because they were the top Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and drew significant traffic.
They expanded rapidly to encompass entire topics in just two weeks, regardless of whether or not the subjects are relevant to their product.
The goal was to cover, and always with coverage. If we’re truthful, we didn’t create the content for specific users. The content was designed to help SEO. What Is SEO & How Does It Work?
Google couldn’t assess the quality of the content
Google states that it favors quality over optimization, but I have numerous instances to show the contrary.
I’m assuming that Google didn’t have a reliable method for evaluating the quality of its content. Instead, it relied on the level of the amount of engagement and traffic analyzed by Google, and also these vanity metrics SEOs could easily alter.
The most valuable content is never enough. It is essential to:
- Create backlinks to other sites to increase the credibility of your site.
- Create various entities to ensure that the bots “understand” the page
- You can pay for people to write positive reviews about you.
- Create a ton of pages with support since your competitors were doing the same thing.
- Subheadings of competitors should be matched to have a chance of being ranked
- Add real value to your page to increase your time spent on the webpage.
- Utilize an arbitrary word count, even if it means you have to sacrifice the depth of your writing
The majority of the things we attempted to implement to SEO on the internet were not natural and detrimental to the user experience. It was akin to a downward slope to the bottom, and the user was required to pay for it.
Google considered brand-name recognition more than quality. The only way to make it known was through volume…hence the excessively stuffed content clusters.
We were rewarded for putting SEO over the user
In the past, getting an accurate answer from Google was not an easy task. There was a way to put the query and see an answer page with the blue links of 10.
To understand a certain idea, you’ll open a few tabs, go through some introductions, and then read through the jargon and hope that you find the answer. If not, you can go back to the SERPs and then rephrase the query.
Here’s what it looked like in real life.
For those who want to verify the accuracy of their report, they’ll be required to look up some reports from other trustworthy sources to confirm. Tom Anthony described it as “post-search browsing” in an earlier Whiteboard Friday episode.
It was evident that the experience for users was not flawless from the beginning:
- Type a query
- It is possible to open 3 to five tabs
- Control-F is a way to locate the word you typed
- Find anything that seems authentic
- Double-check the information with a different
- We wish you all the very best.
While they’ve added hyperlinks to WebMD and Healthline on the left, my focus is on the left-hand side of the page, which has answers, and the right-hand side, which meets my demands for answers.
This is where the problem is in the explanations that are detailed in AI overviews remove the incentive for users to be engaged and can lead to lower CTRs for a range of sites.
We are conditioned to see travel as the goal, and this must be modified.
Rankings that are higher do not necessarily translate into more traffic. For instance, we (Moz.com) are the top ranking in a phrase that has 165,000 searches. But we’ve seen the loss of 50% of the number of people who visit our website, due to mostly due to an AI-related overview. Many brands are experiencing the same decline in clicks.
The previous method of marketing content was developed in order to attract traffic to SERPs. The method relies on the production of large volumes in order to increase. However, Google no longer rewards the speed of content. So, what do you proceed?
We must first begin to alter our thought process to think in these ways:
Stop making clusters for the sake of speed
I’ll let you in on an insider’s tip?
The thing that I am the most irritated about with Google SERPs is that I find companies appearing on the SERPs for items that aren’t relevant to their primary products.
Take into consideration email automation tools, or other automation software that have a high ranking on the search engines’ optimization (SEO) terms.
Final thoughts
Informational content is still essential, however, only if it’s constructed in a manner that meets the demands of the users and is linked to the overall user experience.
We must move past the cycle of constantly optimizing that is of no use; instead, focus on creating content that builds trust, builds our brand, and drives actions.
Before you write the next piece, think about whether the content solves the problem for my audience or is just creating some confusion on the SERPs.
