SEOs are panicking because AI is taking over and their job is done. But I am unusually optimistic: this is not the case.
Yes, AI has changed SEO forever (and will continue to do so), but it won’t kill it. We just have to adapt. As? Prioritizing “in-depth content” on topics that can’t be answered quickly or easily.
Here are three reasons why I think this is the future of SEO.
If you ask ChatGPT how to reinstall macOS, you can easily follow its instructions to get the job done. Explain clearly What you have to do and As to do it.
This is the kind of “shallow” topic that AI is getting at.
Once Google rolls out SGE to the masses (which it will will probably happen soon), users won’t need to click to find answers to these types of questions. They’ll be right there in the search results courtesy of AI. Robots will steal traffic.
Compare this to ChatGPT’s answer for a topic like How to run a content check:
Even if the answer is cut in half, the question is clear: it tells us What do but not As to do it.
- How do we choose the right lens?
- How do we pull data from Google Analytics, our CMS, and website crawlers to compile a content inventory?
- What are the “proper tools” that will help in the audit?
Since this is a deeper topic, it needs a deeper answer. You can’t get that from AI. You need to click on a result to find a tutorial provided by someone with real experience running content audits.
These are the types of topics you should prioritize in a world of AI.
How can you find “deep” topics?
There is no exact science. It’s largely about knowing your industry well and applying common sense. However, if you’re doing keyword research, you can narrow your search by excluding keywords that trigger featured snippets. After all, if Google believes a query can already be answered well with a featured snippet, an AI response will definitely do the job.
You can do this in Keyword Explorer with the SERP Feature Filter:
You can also use the “Identify Intent” button in Keyword Explorer to learn more about what users are searching for. If it seems like something that can’t be answered quickly or easily, it’s probably a “deep” topic.
For example, it tells us that many people searching for “content audit” want “a detailed process for conducting a content audit, including templates”:
It will be virtually impossible for generative AI to offer users this, especially models.
If you’re still not sure whether a topic is “deep” enough for the AI to fail, paste your topic into ChatGPT or Gemini and see what it generates. If leaves a lot to be desired and only tells you the Whatnot the Asthen it’s probably a deep topic.
Backlinks are still a ranking factor. Artificial intelligence hasn’t changed that. You have to earn them if you want to rank in anything competitive, and the best way to do that is to showcase unique experiences, skills, and data in your content.
For example, we got a link from adobe.com (DR 96) when they cited a statistic of our study on how many pages do not receive search traffic:
And we got a link from hubspot.com (DR 93) when they mentioned the SEO report template we created:
But here’s the problem:
It’s hard to do this for superficial topics because there’s not much you can add.
Let’s take the topic for example how to reinstall macOS. What exactly can you write here besides the same basic instructions found in every other post? Nothing. It is virtually impossible to create “linkable” content on this topic. It’s too superficial.
It’s hard to rank for superficial topics because your content is never unique. It’s just a bunch of words that have already been said a million times. There’s nothing beneath the surface that people can cite and connect to.
It’s hard to make superficial topics interesting. I think this is why there is so much boring “SEO content” out there. You know what I’m talking about: no personality, just vague answers to boring questions nestled under keyword-rich H2s.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking:
“But Josh, this is what works! We’re only doing this because it’s what Google wants!”
This may be true for superficial topics, but we’ve already discussed how AI will steal traffic from these topics in the not-too-distant future. For deep topics that require more explanation, your content needs to be engaging and interesting.
There are (at least) two reasons for this.
Interesting content = “gain of information”
While bringing something new and interesting to the table doesn’t earn you more backlinks, it does May help you again rank higher on Google.
This is because Google cares about the originality of content and almost certainly has mechanisms in place to identify and reward it. In 2022 they even patented a mechanism for evaluating “information gain”.
Engaging content = better user signals
If you want to spark a debate among SEOs, direct the conversation towards user signals.
Many in the industry have been convinced for years that user signals such as click-through rate are ranking signals. You may also be familiar with Rand Fishkin infamous mini-experiment since 2014, when he asked his Twitter followers to click en masse on a search result, resulting in a No. 1 ranking that night.
Google says signals like these aren’t ranking factors because they’re too noisy.
If you think about it, clicks in general are incredibly loud. People do strange things on search results pages. They click like crazy and in general it’s really, really hard to clean up that data.
But… they also say it on their “How search works” page:
We also use aggregated and anonymized data interaction data to evaluate whether the search results are relevant to your queries. We turn this data into signals that help our machine learning systems better estimate relevance.
He will drink, he will drink. Directly or indirectly, user data influences Google’s algorithms. If everything you post is boring, uninteresting content that AI could write in the blink of an eye, no one will read it or engage with it. This may have a negative impact on your ability to rank.
Final thoughts
If you want the ChatGPT-style summary of this post, it’s this: Prioritize deep topics that the AI will struggle to answer, and create interesting, engaging content about them. This is how you build an SEO moat in a world of artificial intelligence.
I know it may seem like a waste of time, especially in a world where attention spans are ever decreasing. It’s easy to convince yourself that boring AI answers are what people actually want.
This is exactly what I felt a few months ago… before Tim kindly set me straight 😅
Maybe it’s just because he’s my boss and I respect him, but I think there’s some truth to this comment. People still want to read content, but only if it’s engaging and deep.
So, let’s make it our collective mission to choose wiser battles and create compelling content that stands the test of time.