Is editorial SEO dead?
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence and North Star Inbound. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
For the last two decades, the outlines of the SEO playbook have hardly changed. In 1999, SEO consisted of doing keyword research and using those words as seeds for creating content, and this was the same approach in 2023.
This reality held even as the world morphed from dozens of search engines down to just one or, if we are generous, two. SEO has also remained unchanged despite search algorithms that started as essential digital yellow pages to its current-day of mind reading, image identifying, and always listening AI librarian. While search layouts, experiences, connectivity, and devices fundamentally changed, keywords as the starting point for content did not.
Search as it is today
Look at any competitive query on Google; you will see nearly every site with almost identical content and similar SEO titles. For most of these queries, being in the top 3 of search results is all that matters because users click those first few results without regard for the brand or URL.
Tweaks around content quality, site structure, and a lot of linking are what push the top-ranking pieces of content higher in the search results, but it's arguable that the first few results are truly the most deserving of a click.
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We secured over 100 links in massive publications, such as The Sun, Grazia Magazine, Popsugar, Daily Mail, and lots more.
These are the three types of PR activities our team ran, throughout the year:
This approach of writing content around a keyword that a user might search for was far more logical many years ago when there was limited content published on the internet, and there was an opportunity to be one of the small handful of sites visible for these queries. When there are fewer sites for a specific query, merely publishing will guarantee visibility to those that would search those words.
Search is crowded
But then the secret got out that this was the pathway to SEO riches, and there were hardly any queries with substantial monthly searches that did not have multiple websites writing content for that specific query. Merely having access to SEO research ceased to be a moat for SEO visibility when SEO knowledge and keyword research tools became publicly available for low or minimal cost.
Even in this environment, organizations and websites that were willing to invest the time and money to outpace the competition might have still seen some upside and were, therefore, rewarded for this strategic approach to SEO.
Generative AI
The use of generative AI to create content has sped the demise of this SEO approach, and I think 2024 is the year that most editorial SEO will face a reckoning. Generative AI has neutered the last two barriers to entry to editorial SEO: budget and quality content. With the popularization of AI content, entire websites can be spun up with thousands of editorial SEO pieces without human interference. AI tools can build keyword lists, write content briefs, and produce content at a scale and price that was impossible just a few years ago.
This problem isn’t the rankings because more prominent brands with better links can still push their way ahead of the pack; the real issue is the user.
Why should a user go to a search engine, choose a result, and then click to read an SEO-focused piece of AI content when they can just cut out the intermediary by posing their question directly to an AI tool?
This isn’t just a hypothetical question but a question that every marketing and content leader should ask before building a content roadmap. If the content that is being produced can easily be replicated in an AI result, then the marketing team’s value add is minimal.
It’s not just marketers that should be and hopefully are asking themselves this question, but it’s the same ones that the search engines asked themselves. This is why Bing so quickly integrated ChatGPT into their results and why Google launched a generative AI beta in their search results.
Editorial SEO’s future
Subpar editorial SEO has always been the weak link in SEO, but there was never an alternative to information discovery, even if it was commoditized information. Up until last year the only way to access long-form information was via the millions of websites in the world who were organized by search engines, generative AI has disrupted both sides of that exchange.
Going back to the original question I posed in this newsletter, is all editorial SEO dead? The answer is a resounding no, BUT bad editorial SEO is on its deathbed. There is and always will be a place for great editorial SEO, but the content has to meet a bar that AI can’t replace.
This means that the content has to offer unique insights, emotions, opinions, and lived experiences - all things that an AI can’t HONESTLY do. For example, travel review sites can and will be disrupted by AI responses that give hard facts, like hotels within 1 mile of a specific destination that offer certain requested amenities.
In a pre-generative AI day, it would be hard to aggregate these facts from different sources, which might have given a travel site that solved this information gap a competitive edge. Now, the travel site might have to give up on retaining these searches, but searchers who seek emotional reviews and even stories will still need to turn to the travel review site.
A bride deciding where to host her wedding will likely not be satisfied with a generic AI summarized result and will want to read the long reviews written by other brides who made a similar choice.
To underscore this point one last time, I don’t believe the rules around SEO have changed. Instead, users' access to information has been democratized, and SEO content can no longer exploit asymmetric access to information.
As you build your content plans for 2024, keep in mind that the competition is no longer just the other sites in your niche but any tool/assistant/search engine that can provide information easily. Be better than that.
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If your site is not performing and there are clear opportunities to apply best practices, stop wasting time looking at other sites and take an honest look in the mirror.
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A recent example after losing traffic through 2022 algo updates and HCU.
Now:
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