Stop writing blog posts and calling it SEO
You’ve been publishing two blog posts a week targeting high-volume keywords, and your traffic is still flat or declining
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There is this question I am frequently asked in some form or another, and it goes like this: “We’ve been publishing two blog posts a week targeting high-volume keywords, and our traffic is still flat. What are we doing wrong with our SEO, and should we fire our agency?”
The answer is that nothing is wrong with the execution of the blog post SEO process, because the problem is not how they are doing SEO, because this is NOT SEO. If I wanted to be generous, I might call it content marketing, but since it’s rarely written with any audience in mind other than Google, it’s not really marketing either. This is just content being sold by an SEO agency, claiming it is SEO work
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Blog posts for SEO are not a new misconception that cropped up with AI content, but the diminished cost of content has caused this strategy to proliferate without any guardrails. It is an expansion of how agencies learned to sell the channel and how in-house teams justified their busy roadmaps. Ever since I first entered this industry, the SEO playbook has always been some version of: write articles, rank for keywords, drive awareness, and eventually that awareness becomes revenue.
In truth, nobody ever wanted to look too closely at that “eventually” becoming revenue, because then the whole playbook would break, as it should. My experience with one of my first consulting clients, which was actually an analytics platform that was able to discern that “eventually” hardly ever happened, made me reconsider how content is and should be used in SEO.
SEO is not just content
Real SEO is a much simpler and more demanding proposition than writing content to be indexed because it is the practice of making your product findable at the exact moment someone is ready to use it, and that is the entire job. This is Product Led SEO.
When you approach SEO as product-led SEO, the keyword or prompt you care about should not be “how to do xyz” because it has a high monthly search volume. It should be whatever the user is going to type right before they are ready to take action on your site. If the asset you end up “ranking” for that keyword is a blog post, the user might click on it, but then there’s no action to take other than to read that blog post.
The user will read it, leave, and the overwhelming majority of them will never come back. Information is a commodity; you gave it away for free, and if all the user wanted was information, they are not a user with intent. If they had intent, they clicked in, saw content, and then bounced to a different result with a solution. That bounce is not a UX problem or a content quality problem. You built a reading experience and pointed it at someone who came to do something.
This entire playbook is even more problematic in an AEO-dominated SEO roadmap because much of the content that typically appeared in blog posts will be usurped by LLM responses. What matters and will always matter is the conversion flow.
Focus on the action
When I consulted for Tinder, this distinction between reading and acting was critical because the SEO that actually moved the business was not a blog full of dating advice articles but the work of making sure that when someone searched for singles in their city or for a specific dating scenario, they landed on a page that put them directly into the product experience, where the landing page was a door that opened directly into something you could do rather than something you could read.
When I worked at SurveyMonkey, the same principle held, because the SEO that mattered was not articles about survey best practices but the work of making sure that when someone searched for a specific kind of survey template, they landed on a page where they could immediately start building that survey. Content marketing existed separately and served a genuinely different purpose around awareness and credibility.
Comcast implements this principle in an interesting way: when users search for how to cancel their service, Comcast does not serve them a blog post with tips and FAQs; it serves them an action page, specifically built to capture that intent and route them into a retention flow. This page is exactly what a well-designed SEO asset should do: meet the user at the point of intent and move them into a product experience rather than a reading experience.
Awareness only matters if it converts
The objection I hear most often when I make this argument against writing blog posts and calling it SEO is that “informational content drives awareness”, which is an important part of SEO. In response, I always push back by encouraging the org to find conversion data to prove that hypothesis. In most cases, it doesn’t exist. If it does, of course, they should continue doing what they are doing.
Even so, what makes this worse is that most of the keyword-volume content companies produce is not particularly good because it is thin, templated, and completely interchangeable with what every other company in the same category produces, written by someone who was given a keyword target and a word count.
Content and SEO landing pages are different
The smarter path is to treat SEO and content as two separate functions with two genuinely different mandates: content marketing is measured by audience growth, subscriber counts, engagement, and brand recall over time, while SEO is measured by signups, purchases, free trial activations, and pipeline contribution.
SEO is not just about pumping out blog posts, and the sooner a company internalizes that, the sooner the channel starts producing revenue rather than traffic and ranking charts. A blog post is a fine tool for telling someone what your company believes, and it is a terrible tool for capturing someone who already knows what they want and is one click away from getting it from a competitor instead. Find the moment of intent, and put the product in front of it.
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