For a long time, whether you were a software startup, independent consultant or e-commerce site, SEO marketing was a dominant strategy. Doing keyword research that led to writing specific blog posts designed to drive traffic to your site and get your ideal customers curious about who wrote such a specific and useful piece of content was a fantastic marketing strategy.
Then ChatGPT, Claude and a host of other AI tools came along, trained on the entirety of the Internet’s content and able to answer user’s questions without them having to filter through the ads and all the other cruft on a search engine’s results page.
Then Google decided to get in on the action, launching AI Overviews in May of 2024. And whether you feel they’re good or bad, you have to acknowledge that the old brand of SEO marketing by choosing keywords and writing articles for direct search traffic is in for a massive shift.
What SEO might look like going forward
SEO is definitely not my area of expertise, but one take that I’ve seen from ellipsis that I generally agree with is that “SEO will be MORE winner-takes-all“.
The thinking here goes that if Google and others are generating AI snippets, they’re doing that based on what the existing featured snippets contain. And since users are less likely to scroll down the page, getting anything other than the very top search result that gets turned into the featured snippet will matter less and less.
Because of all this, simple, keyword-driven explainer blog posts that rank on the first page of search results but not up near the top will probably become less and less useful. We’re already seeing “look up the answer” style of searching change, as people come to rely more on AI tools and less on sites like Stack Overflow (which has lost about a third of its traffic over the past 2 years).
So…should you stop writing blog posts?
The short answer is no.
It depends on exactly what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing, but as a consultant, I’m going to lean in harder on writing pieces exactly like this one and the others you see on the blog.
In general, I would be spending less time on posts like “How to create a drag and drop interface in React” that were purely explanatory and keyword-driven and more time on posts with a strong opinion or a net-new example or tutorial that ties into what you’re selling.
Well-written posts build authority
It doesn’t really matter whether you’re a solo consultant, someone looking for a job or someone selling a product online: people buy (or hire) from people they trust. There’s levels to this, but one of the best ways to create this sort of trust at scale is through publishing in some form. Whether it’s a podcast, a series of videos or blog posts over time, in a world of AI-generated content, content published by actual people does an arguably better job at building that sort of trust.
You still need to create a “binge bank”
The concept of a “binge bank” was one I first heard on the My First Million podcast and it really resonated with me. Here’s the core idea:
“Someday, if we start to get people to watch, there is now a library – we call it our binge bank…basically we just want to have a rabbit hole for you to go down…Because if people ever get interested, I want to have this bank of content people can binge. And sure enough, after 45 minutes down this rabbit hole, you’re going to walk out being like, ‘I think I love these guys, I feel like I know these guys and I want to hang out or work with these guys.’”
This feeds directly into the idea above. If and when people discover you and connect with one piece of your content, you want to be able to capitalize on that by showing them a wide range of other pieces that also show what you’re about. People (probably) aren’t going to want to work with you just based on one blog post, but if they spend some time scrolling through your blog or browsing through your Twitter (if you’ve been curating a presence there) that trust just continues to build.
Word of mouth is going carry even more weight
I recently was trying to set up a new website (not on WordPress, where my familiarity lies) and decided to start from scratch, research the tools I would need and try to figure out what the best or recommended way to set everything up was.
What I found was that most every article on the first page of Google was either just a keyword-driven article that promoted the site’s own product or was clearly AI-generated so that a brand could target thousands of keywords without having to write each content piece individually.
It was a very frustrating experience and when I finally found an article that was clearly written by someone experienced, I read through it right away. If I was in the market for someone to help me build this site instead of building it myself, this is definitely someone I would have reached out to, simply because their content made it clear that they knew what they were doing and they had the experience I was looking for.
This is also the kind of thing that helps people recommend you to friends. If they’ve read a piece of your content that’s specific and topical and they find a friend of theirs asking the same question, they can forward your article along. That will always carry way more weight than some AI-generated article discovered in search or a random recommendation from ChatGPT.
What are you going to write?
If this post inspired you to “hit publish” on something, I’d love to see it! The world needs more content backed by expertise and a strong perspective to balance out all of the AI-generated sameness that is currently taking over search engines.
And if you’re looking for more posts like this, feel free to make your way through the blog, where you’ll find tutorials, explainers and more to help you learn more about AI.