This extract is from SEO in the Gemini Era by Marie Haynes ©2024 and reproduced with permission from Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.
Much of the SEO advice you will see online today is borne from shared community wisdom that was learned about Search in the days before Google was actively using AI.
So much of what many of us do as SEOs and treat as standard practice is based on a search engine that was a list of heuristics – handwritten rules programmed by humans. So much has changed.
For example, let’s say you are tasked with creating a new article for the website you are working on.
You’ll likely start with keyword research because we know that in order to appear relevant to a search engine, you need to write content that covers a topic thoroughly and uses keywords that are semantically related to your topic.
So much of the content that we have on the web today is borne from a process that looks like this:
- Do keyword research to see what your competitors have written.
- Create content that’s similar but perhaps a little bit better, or more comprehensive than theirs.
- Do keyword research to see what other people have covered, but you have not included.
- Create content that covers that stuff too.
- Do People Also Ask research to find related questions to cover so that we can write content that looks even more relevant and comprehensive to search engines.
- Create more content to answer those questions even though Google already has content to answer them.
Nothing in that process is causing us to create content that truly is original, insightful, and substantially more helpful than what exists online.
Yet, that is what Google wants to reward!
An SEO agency will often spend many hours each month improving the technical SEO of a site, improving the internal link structure, or perhaps getting external links and mentions. These are all things that can possibly help a webpage to look better to a search engine.