SEO professionals are panicking that AI will replace them and their job is over. But while I’m unusually optimistic, I’m not.
Yes, AI has changed SEO forever (and will continue to do so), but it’s not going to kill SEO. You just have to adapt. how? By prioritizing “deep content” on topics that cannot be answered immediately or easily.
Here are three reasons why I think this is the future of SEO.
Ask a question to ChatGPT How to reinstall macOS, you can easily follow the instructions and get the job done.Explains clearly what you need to, and how To do that.
This is the kind of “shallow” topic that AI is looking for.
Once Google rolls out SGE to the masses (which will (Maybe soon), searchers don’t have to click to get answers to these types of questions. Thanks to AI, it shows up in search results instantly. Robots steal traffic.
Compare this to ChatGPT’s answers to topics such as: How to perform a content audit:
Even if the answer is cut in half, the problem is clear. what I do but I don’t how To do that.
- How do you choose the right goal?
- How can I pull data from Google Analytics, CMS, and website crawlers to create content inventory?
- What are the “right tools” to help with an audit?
This is a deeper topic and therefore requires a deeper answer. You can’t get that from AI. Click on the results to find tutorials written by people who have experience conducting content audits.
These are the kinds of topics that should be prioritized in the world of AI.
How do you find “deep” topics?
There is no exact science. It’s mainly about understanding your industry well and applying common sense. However, if you’re doing keyword research, you can narrow your focus by excluding keywords that trigger featured snippets. At the end of the day, if Google feels that a featured snippet is sufficient to answer a query, an AI answer will definitely work.
This can be done using the SERP feature filter in Keyword Explorer.
keyword explorer[意図を特定]You can also use buttons to learn more about what searchers are looking for. If you can’t answer it right away or it doesn’t seem easy to answer, it’s probably a “deep” topic.
For example, we find that many people searching for “content audit” are looking for a “detailed process for conducting a content audit, including templates.”
It would be virtually impossible for a generative AI to provide this, especially templates, to searchers.
If you’re still not sure if your topic is “deep” enough for the AI to fail, try pasting your topic into ChatGPT or Gemini and see what it produces. If it leaves much to be desired and just tells you, whatnot, howThat would probably lead to a deeper conversation.
Backlinks are still a ranking factor. AI is no different. If you want to get rankings in anything competitive, you need to get them. The best way to do this is to showcase your unique experience, expertise, and data within your content.
For example, I got the link from: adobe.com (DR 96) When they cited the following statistics: Research on the number of pages that don’t get search traffic:
And we received a link from hubspot.com (DR 93) When citing the SEO report template we created:
But here’s the problem.
This is difficult to do for shallow topics because there isn’t much content to add.
For example, consider topics such as: How to reinstall macOS. What exactly can I write here other than the same basic steps introduced in every other post? Nothing. It is virtually impossible to create “linkable” content on this topic. It’s too shallow.
Shallow topics are difficult to rank because the content is never unique. It’s a collection of words that have already been said millions of times. There’s nothing beneath the surface that people can quote or link to.
It’s difficult to make shallow topics interesting. I think that’s why there’s so much boring “SEO content” out there. You know what I’m talking about. No personality, just vague answers to boring questions nested under keyword-rich H2s.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking:
“But Josh, this works! We’re doing it because that’s what Google wants!”
That may be true for shallow topics, but we’ve already talked about how AI will steal your traffic in the not-too-distant future. For deep topics that require more explanation, your content should be engaging and interesting.
There are (at least) two reasons for this.
Interesting content = “information acquisition”
Even if you bring something new and interesting to the table and don’t get more backlinks, May still help you Show up higher on Google.
That’s because Google values originality of content and will almost certainly have mechanisms in place to identify and reward content. They also patented a mechanism for scoring “information gain” in 2022.
Engaging content = better user signals
If you want to spark a discussion among SEOs, steer the conversation toward user signals.
Many in the industry have long believed that user signals such as click-through rates are ranking signals. You may also be familiar with Rand Fishkin. The infamous mini-experiment Starting in 2014, we asked our Twitter followers to click on the search results en masse to earn us the #1 ranking for the night.
Google says such signals are too noisy to be a ranking factor.
If you think about it, clicks are generally incredibly loud. People do strange things on search results pages. They keep clicking like crazy and it’s generally very difficult to clean up that data.
But… they also say on their “How Search Works” page:
We also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data Evaluate whether search results are relevant to your query. Convert that data into a signal that allows machine learning systems to better estimate associations.
Tomato, tomato. User data directly or indirectly influences Google’s algorithms. If you only publish boring, uninspiring content that an AI can quickly write, no one will read or engage with it. This can negatively impact your ranking ability.
final thoughts
If you want a ChatGPT-like summary of this post, here it is: Prioritize deep topics that AI has a hard time answering and create interesting and engaging content around them. Here’s how to build your SEO moat in the world of AI.
We understand that it may seem like a waste of time, especially in a world where attention spans continue to shrink. It’s easy to assume that boring AI answers are what people actually want.
This is exactly how I felt a few months ago, before Tim kindly corrected me 😅
Maybe it’s 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 choose our battles wiser and make it our collective mission to create interesting content that will stand the test of time.