In this guide, we’re diving into twelve content marketing tactics we’ve tested and continue to use with some decent results. We know they work, and we’re excited to show you the proof.

Generally speaking, low-competition keywords are search terms where you likely don’t need many backlinks to rank on the first page of Google (backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors).

By focusing on these less competitive terms, you can achieve higher search engine rankings faster and with less effort; and the higher the rankings, generally the more traffic lands on your site. This makes low-competition keywords a perfect SEO tactic for new sites and sites without a strong backlink profile.

To illustrate our results, here’s a heatmap showing the relationship between keyword difficulty and Google rankings for nearly 200 pages from our SEO glossary content project.

We were able to rank in the top ten with few links and a templated content approach. But that wasn’t enough for mid to high KD keywords; these would require more comprehensive content and additional backlinks.

How to get started

Use a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to quickly find keywords that need fewer backlinks to rank.

1. Enter a seed keyword (or multiple seed keywords).
2. Go to the Matching terms report.
3. Use the KD (Keyword Difficulty) metric to show keywords with up to 20 KD. This will show you easy keywords based on the backlink profile.
4. Pick a relevant keyword and open the SERP panel to see what kinds of pages rank. If you see popular brands dominating, those keywords may be hard to rank despite the low KD (here’s why). SERPs without brands like that should be easier to target.
5. Repeat step #3 for every relevant keyword on the list.

And here’s an example of a keyword with low KD and just a few strong sites (based on the Domain Rating metric).

Tip

To gain an extra point of confidence that a keyword is well within your reach, use the lowest Domain Rating (DR) filter. If you set the filter to your site’s DR (check here) or slightly higher, it will display only those keywords where a site with your DR or lower already ranks.

Here’s a small sample. At Ahrefs, we often seek expert commentary to enhance our content. I reached out to Ashley Faus with one simple question about her article and she was kind enough to share my article with her audience of 13K people (I didn’t even ask for it).

Not everyone will be as generous as Ashley, but you have to assume they will.

How to get started

In the first one, you leverage things that typically engage people on social media and weave them into your content. Rand Fishkin, in his article on content amplification, calls these share-inducing emotions, for example:

1. Novelty: An article about “A cat learned to use sign language” will attract more attention than “Cats can meow.”
2. Belief reinforcement: A report linking organic food to better health will be shared by those who already support organic farming.
3. Fear: A headline like “New disease spreading rapidly” will get more shares than “Health improvements in 2024.”
4. Controversy: Debates over “Climate change policies” attract more engagement than consensus articles.

There’s also the targeted approach, and it’s a whole different beast — it needs customization, good research, and etiquette. You need to get that person’s attention with something they will likely care about (such as their work), but you can’t ask for anything in return.

And that is exactly what happened in the example I shared above. No strings attached, just a simple request from one professional to another.

Publishing original research is a proven method to boost your SEO through backlinks (links from other sites) and becoming a thought leader in your niche through references to your work.

When you create original studies, like data analyses, case studies, or industry surveys, other authors will often use them as sources, which means more backlinks for you. These backlinks increase your site’s website’s authority, which can help other important pages on your site rank better too.

For example, we did a study on why most web content doesn’t get organic traffic and got 6K backlinks from 2.9K different sites, and those numbers keep growing without us lifting a finger.

Besides improving your SEO, original research makes you a thought leader in your field. When other sites mention your research, it boosts your reputation, making you a trusted and respected brand.

How to get started

For example, to find relevant research about SEO, we use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer to look for content that has “study” in the title and at least 200 referring domains (to weed out some less popular ones).

The first is an hour-long workshop on competitive analysis for a content marketing and SEO community. This video promotes both free and our core toolset, generating 1.8k views.

And here’s a sponsored video by one of the top influencers in the SEO industry. This video promotes our free academy and our free SEO tool, generating 50k views.

And here’s a contextual ad on a channel with over 500K subscribers. This promotes our core toolset, generating 19K views.

As you can see, we’ve chosen to work with both small and big influencers, and what we promote depends on the audience and the topic. But in any case, it pays to have some kind of free offering to hook the viewers on the value you provide as a business with minimum friction.

How to get started

To find the right influencer, there are a few steps you need to take.

1. Define your goals. Clearly outline what you aim to achieve with influencer marketing, such as increasing brand awareness, driving engagement, or boosting sign-ups.
2. Figure out your budget. You can use average influencer earnings data like this one to estimate the budget.
3. Identify potential influencers. Here are a few ideas: 
   1. Start by considering your own employees and customers who might already be fans of your brand and have a following .
   2. Use social media platforms and specialized tools like Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, Sparktoro, Social Blade, and Followerwonk to find relevant influencers based on your niche and keywords.
   3. Seek recommendations from your audience.
4. Evaluate influencers. Ensure that the influencers align with your brand values and have genuine engagement. Look beyond follower counts to assess their influence and audience interaction.
5. Monitor and measure. Ask the creator to share reports with you (including content output and engagement metrics).

Find out more about finding influencers to partner with in our guide, Find Influencers: 6 Easy Steps to Choose the Right Ones.

5. Use templates and programmatic SEO to streamline content creation

Using content templates and programmatic SEO is about producing more content in less time, with the latter allowing you to actually automate content production.

With templates, you can set up a standard format and just fill in the details. It’s great for things like product pages, definition glossaries or local listings where you need similar content for many items.

We used templates to create an SEO glossary and a directory of beginner-focused SEO guides for different professions. As of today, they’re bringing in a total of 67k visits each month.

Programmatic SEO is basically content templates on steroids. Programmatic pages are usually created automatically directly from data, like product prices, weather, or location information. This lets you cover many keywords and topics without writing everything by hand.

We used programmatic SEO to take advantage of huge search demand for free AI writing tools. We drive over 600K monthly search visits this way, and you can see on the graph below how this approach allowed us to publish dozens of pages in a day (sharp spikes on the yellow line).

How to get started

First, you need a set of keywords that could be targeted with similar types of content. One of the best ways to do this is to use a keyword research tool to categorize your keywords by terms. Terms like “definition”, “what is”, or “cost of living” indicate that people want the same kind of content for different topics.

1. Open Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and enter a broad seed keyword, for instance “marketing”.
2. Go to the Matching terms report.
3. Open the Terms tab and browse through keyword categories.

Here’s an example – over 4.6K search keywords requiring definitions which could be targeted with the same page template.

6. Create a unique newsletter to delight your readers

Our old newsletter was basically a handful of links to our latest blog posts, but then we made some changes:

• We started sharing useful stuff from other brands and creators.
• We stopped sharing “every” blog post; only the ones with a true FOMO value.
• We group news by topic and write a quick blurb for each to save people time.
• We made it fun. Every Ahrefs’ Digest kicks off with a meme:

And it worked. People really seemed to appreciate the changes:

I appreciate the TLDR respect that @ahrefs puts into their newsletter. Less is more!

— Adam J. Humphreys (@Making8) June 6, 2022

Some people will never bother to read a newsletter. But there are people who turn to newsletters because they save them time searching for valuable information — that’s where you come in.

How to get started

Technically, starting a newsletter is straightforward — sign up for a tool like Mailchimp and get all the tools you need to start collecting emails and sending newsletters.

But what matters the most and is not that easy when you’re starting out is the content and consistency. Here are some key factors to consider:

• Provide valuable, relevant, and unique content that addresses your audience’s needs and interests. It doesn’t have to be 100% your original content. Curating all the stuff that gets published online every week is a value on its own. If you’re not sure where to start with this, simply make this newsletter something you’d like to see in your inbox every week.
• Include things that people wouldn’t want to miss out on.
• Offer original insights, perspectives, or data that can’t be found elsewhere.
• Seek feedback and refine.
• Stick to a consistent publishing schedule, whether it’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

7. Offer free stuff to promote your “paid” stuff

This tactic involves giving away free tools, services, or content to attract potential customers.

Offering free stuff may be counterintuitive, but it works. It provides immediate value to users, helps to build trust, and demonstrates your expertise. Once users see the benefits of your free offerings, they are more likely to invest in your paid products or services.

We’ve developed free tools mostly by carving out small parts of our product and offering them on landing pages without any email walls to serve the intent of the searchers. So, in a sense, this way, the product promotes itself.

Results? Combined, our fourteen tools drive over 1.5M monthly organic traffic from people looking for these tools and 38.7M backlinks.

How to get started

When looking for ideas for free products that will generate traffic, try a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

1. Enter broad terms describing the functionality of your product (e.g., keywords, backlinks, traffic).
2. Go to the Matching terms report.
3. Use the Include filter with keyword modifiers pointing to tools, for example: “tool, check, checker, finder, analyzer, builder, free.” Set to “Any word.”

Now, to make sure the intent of the keyword calls for a tool to rank, look at the SERPs to see if tools rank at the top, or simply use AI to analyze the SERPs for you.

Naturally, there are other ways of finding content ideas, and you don’t necessarily need to develop apps. These could be a set of free spreadsheet templates, a set of proven AI prompts, or ready-made chatbots to use in ChatGPT.

If you’re offering services, the same principles apply. Document some free work to show people how good you are. Just like Justin Veenema, who shoots photos of strangers for free that get millions of views on Instagram.

8. Create a content hub for an SEO boost

A content hub is a centralized collection of related content organized around specific themes or topics. Its structure comprises a pillar page (high-level guide about a broad topic with links to other pages), cluster content (pages on specific subtopics), and links between the pages.

They’re an effective content marketing tactic for four reasons:

• Topical authority: Connecting your hub page and subpages with relevant internal links helps establish your site as an authority on a particular topic in Google’s eyes. Internal anchor text provides additional context to Google about the page content.
• Link authority: Strategically linking pages within a hub allows them to benefit from each other’s backlinks. This enhances the overall link authority of the hub, which can positively impact search rankings.
• Engagement: Hubs encourage visitors to explore multiple pages of content.
• Perceived value: Well-organized, comprehensive resources on a topic increase perceived value for visitors, often resulting in more backlinks as people prefer to link to the best, most useful resources.

Our content hubs emerged as a way to organize already existing content and get some additional traffic. For example, this hub is a beginner’s guide to SEO, consisting of seven articles already published as standalone articles.

And just by reorganizing old content, we got new traffic and new backlinks.

How to get started

To find opportunities for new content hubs, the process involves three steps:

1. Identify the hub topic. Choose a broad topic with informational intent, search traffic potential, and enough subtopics. Use tools like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to brainstorm ideas.
2. Create subpages. Develop detailed guides on subtopics related to the main topic. Ensure each subpage links back to the hub page, which links to all subpages.
3. Internal linking. Use hyperlinks to connect the hub page with subpages, building a cohesive structure. This boosts topical and link authority and enhances user engagement.

See the full process in our guide Content Hubs for SEO: How to Get More Traffic and Links With Topic Clusters.

9. Optimize existing content for quick traffic gains

Content optimization is the process of improving the quality and relevance of content to ensure it ranks higher in search engine results, engages the target audience, and achieves specific business goals.

This tactic allows you to leverage your existing content to reach more people, often with little work involved. This can be updating old information, including a missing subtopic, making a guide more beginner-friendly, etc.

Honestly, the results can be quite amazing. For example, an article we’ve recently updated article got 20 times more traffic after just a few hours of work.

How to get started

The easiest way to spot content that needs optimization is to use Ahrefs’ Opportunities report.

1. Enter your site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
2. Open the Opportunities report.
3. Click on the Low-hanging fruit keywords to see keywords that potentially need a relatively small update to rank higher.
4. Or click on the Content with declining traffic to see all pages that could use a revamp.

Once you find your pages, head to our guide on content optimization for some tried and tested SEO tips.

10. Repurpose content to reach a wider audience

Repurposing content involves transforming existing content into different formats. For instance, a blog post can become a video shared on YouTube or a transcript of a video can be published as a blog post.

This tactic works because it helps you reach a wider audience who prefers different content formats and different platforms.

Here’s an example. We published our take on SEO checklists as a video on YouTube and then repurposed it as a blog post. The video got 240K views.

And the article gets an estimated 9.5K organic visits each month, on top of the video’s performance.

How to get started

You can repurpose any piece of content, but the best results you’ll likely get with:

• Content that has already performed well on social media. For instance, a well-received tweet thread can be expanded into a detailed article or a video script.
• Content on topics with search potential. Use a tool like Ahrefs’s Keywords Explorer to gauge traffic potential for topics you already covered.
• Evergreen topics. For example, a topic like “how to lose weight” will get attention no matter the time, platform, and format.

For more ideas and tips, head to our list of 13 ways to repurpose content.

11. Translate your best content to reach new markets

There are three key reasons why you need translations if you’re thinking about making your business international:

• Search engines like Google and YouTube personalize search results based on language.
• Most people simply prefer content in their native language, regardless of how well they speak other languages.
• Content localization works like content repurposing — it gives you more mileage from the same content.

For example, the Spanish translation of our post about affiliate marketing brings in an estimated 7.3K organic visits each month. And that’s on top of the English version which bring 28.5k monthly visits.

How to get started

Translating every page on your site may not be the most efficient approach. Search volumes can differ between countries, so it’s important to use your resources wisely. Focus on translating your top-performing content, but only if the search volume in the target country justifies the effort.

First, use a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to get a list of your top-performing pages. In Ahrefs, you’d use the Top pages report:

Next, you use ChatGPT to generate translations of your top pages’ target keywords. Use these translations with the free Ahrefs SEO Toolbar to simulate searches in different languages and gauge the traffic potential of a topic.

For instance, a leading French article on “free keyword research tools” receives about 714 organic visits monthly from France, suggesting potential value in content translation.

Sidenote.

If you’re using autogenerated AI translations, make sure to have them reviewed by a human, preferably someone who knows the language and culture well. AI translations are very good these days, but they can still contain mistakes or unnatural expressions that you might not catch otherwise.

12. Experiment with new topics and formats

The idea behind this tactic is super simple — if you keep doing the same things, you’ll keep getting the same results.

Trying out new approaches to content is important at every stage of your strategy’s maturity. In the early stages, it helps you discover what works for your business and your audience. But once your strategy is established, experimenting with new content is crucial to avoid hitting a performance plateau.

So here are some of the new things we recently tried and their results.

We released two traditional books. “SEO Book for Beginners” is our online guide to SEO repurposed in the form of a book (by the way, another great example of content repurposing we discussed earlier).

“White Haired SEO (Super Exciting Odyssey)” is an SEO book for kids, designed with parents in mind. It provides a kid-friendly answer to the question, “So what do you do at work, mum?”. To be honest, this is a bit beyond typical experimentation. It’s more like a “moonshot” but we think it’s worth making time for those, too.

Result: people love those books. When we bring them to conferences, the books fly off the shelves. For some, it’s a collector’s item; for others, it’s their kid’s favourite read. Either way, it turned out to be an effective way to delight our audience and put something tangible in their homes and offices with the “Ahrefs” name on it.

Bravo @ahrefs on creating a children’s book for SEO parents helping explain to their kids what it is we do. My favorite character is the sinister links salesman to help Jessy up Mount Fjoogle. Every story needs a heel. Great piece of content @timsoulo and ahrefs team! pic.twitter.com/cOONHwexoT

— Corey Trojanowski (@Trojanowski_) March 7, 2024

We’ve also experimented with video lately. It wasn’t easy because we were already investing a lot of effort into a quite successful formula that had been developed over the years.

So to try something new, we went from keyword research-based topics presented in “how to” style videos like this one:

To non-search topics served in a more entertaining and “light” way with elements of storytelling:

Result: this new approach led to new monthly watch time highs in several countries, including our main market, the US.

How to get started

Here are some tips that can help you spark some new ideas and get them into production.

1. Organize regular brainstorming sessions with a few people. These sessions should encourage open, uninhibited discussions where everyone can contribute their thoughts and suggestions.
2. Try a few courses. Enroll in courses that focus on content creation, digital marketing, or any specific area relevant to your field. These courses can provide fresh perspectives, new skills, and innovative techniques that you can incorporate into your content strategy.
3. Book a consultation with a pro. Seek advice from professionals or mentors who have successfully navigated the path you’re aiming to take.
4. Use new tools to source ideas. Try tools like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Sparktoro, Buzzsumo, or Glimpse.
5. Embrace a mindset of experimentation. Trying out new content formats and topics involves taking risks, but big rewards too.

Final thoughts

In marketing, it’s not really about how many tactics you use or how smart, creative, or unique they are. What matters is how you execute them. You can have a thriving business by employing just a few tactics but doing them well enough to bring you visitors on a constant basis.

So feel free to try all of the ideas we shared in this article, but we encourage you to double down on the things that work.

Got questions or comments? Find me on X or LinkedIn.

SEO guarantees are one of the biggest tools agency sales teams use to turn prospects into clients. But they can often be scams or promise results that are achieved unethically.

For instance, here’s a popular SEO guarantee: 

And another possibly too-good-to-be-true guarantee: 

Not to mention this oh-so-safe and completely risk-free guarantee offering a “huge amount” of “naturel” backlinks 🙄 

Sarcasm aside, I get it. 

As a business owner, guarantees like this offer peace of mind that your limited marketing budget won’t be wasted. So, here’s everything you need to know to avoid the risky types of SEO guarantees that are nothing more than thinly veiled scams. 

I’ll also share the only type of SEO performance guarantee that’s not a scam so keep your eyes peeled. 

In fact, it’s the only lawyer-approved SEO guarantee I’ve ever come across.

1. Rankings cannot be guaranteed, under any circumstances

Google warns business owners about this: 

Anyone who guarantees rankings is, at best, over-confident in their ability or, at worst, straight-up lying to you. 

2. Fast results often mean dangerous or unethical tactics are used

The most common way people earn short-term results is by using black hat SEO tactics. 

These tactics are aimed at manipulating search algorithms to rank content higher. They also often violate search engine policies and can lead to penalties or your site being blacklisted altogether. 

In my opinion, business owners who try to minimize their financial risk by using a low-cost, guaranteed SEO service are exposing themselves to far greater risks. Fear of losing money in the short term is a short-sighted way to think about SEO. 

For instance, what’s worse? 

Scenario A (no SEO guarantee)
You invest in an SEO service without a guarantee. The campaign runs at a loss initially since you don’t start seeing results until month 6. But by month 12, you’ve made your money back and also received a decent return.

Scenario B (with a guarantee)
You invest in an SEO service with a guarantee that you’ll rank on page 1 in 30 days, or you get your money back. Within 30 days you rank on the first page of Google for some keywords (i.e., the guarantee is met). But, a few months later your site is penalized, and you lose all your SEO performance.

Obviously, the answer is scenario B. 

For example, here’s a site that has experienced multiple traffic losses until it was eventually penalized in early 2024. It will be very difficult for this site to overcome the penalty and grow. 

Most business owners don’t think this far ahead when shopping for SEO so they often pass up the agencies that deliver results similar to scenario A. 

In scenario B, since the guarantee has technically been met, there’s no chance you’ll be getting your money back or growing your business. It’s also likely that you need to invest in rebuilding your website on a new domain that has not been penalized by search engines. 

So when you hear about guaranteed SEO results being scams, this is why. 

Learning how a service provider delivers their service can save you from far bigger risks and greater financial losses in the long run. 

3. Guaranteed SEO results probably won’t deliver a return on investment

The keywords that do grow your business are often more competitive and take longer to rank for. There’s simply no way to shortcut the process, so performance for these keywords likely won’t be guaranteed. 

Another consideration is that most SEO guarantees only focus on vanity metrics. Vanity metrics sound good on paper, but they don’t grow your business or allow you to make better decisions. 

Rankings won’t feed your family. Neither will traffic. 

So, if you’re considering using a guaranteed SEO service provider because you think it’s the best way to see a return on investment, think again if they only guarantee vanity metrics. 

4. Initial results do not guarantee continued success

SEO is not a cheap service. 

Most business owners don’t even consider the biggest risk (until it’s too late): the financial implications of signing a long-term contract based on a short-term guarantee. 

I’ve seen a lot go wrong in this scenario. 

For instance, let’s say you sign a 12-month contract with a guarantee like “first page rankings in 30 days or you get your money back.” 

If your service provider ranks your website for a single keyword, any keyword, on the first page of Google they’ve technically met the guarantee. And it doesn’t even matter how long your site holds this position. For instance, this page ranked on the first page of Google results for less than a day: 

It also doesn’t matter what happens after the 31st day. The guarantee doesn’t cover you for any of the following after it’s been met: 

• Performance plateau
• Performance losses
• Site penalties

You might even pay for the remaining eleven months without the service provider completing further work on your website. 

An extreme example of how things can go wrong is the website conch-house.com. This website scraped content from Amazon and published 6,000 posts a day. It was doing shady things to begin with. But, in the space of two months, it grew to over 6 million monthly users and just under $20,000 in revenue per day.

And during its third month in this peak performance period, it was penalized and blacklisted by Google. 

Here’s what the traffic graph looked like: 

Hypothetically, the results of this website would have met most SEO guarantees like: 

• Rank #1 in 90 days or less
• First-page in 30 days, guarantees
• Explode your traffic in 60 days

It’s too bad it couldn’t sustain its performance in the long run due to the spammy tactics it used to grow. 

TL;DR

Don’t sign a long-term contract on a short-term guarantee. There are too many loopholes and technicalities that aren’t in the favor of business owners. 

If you choose an SEO provider that uses unethical tactics to grow your website quickly, you can also be exposed to far greater risks that completely sacrifice your future performance. 

There’s only one type of SEO guarantee I’ve seen that’s legally sound and not a scam. I may be biased here because my lawyer drafted it for my consultancy. 

As a service provider, I wanted to offer a “peace of mind guarantee” to my clients. But it’s difficult to do that ethically and with full transparency. 

Here’s an example of what we settled on: 

What does this type of guarantee offer that most others don’t?

• It holds the service provider accountable for delivering relevant results, or they work for free.
• It has long-term performance baked into it.
• It considers all metrics that indicate SEO performance, including organic revenue.
• It specifically excludes granular results based on vanity metrics.
• It clearly and transparently communicates what is and what isn’t covered.
• It isn’t based on loopholes or rankings for specific keywords with no business value.
• It has been written and approved by an SEO-savvy lawyer.

My favorite part is that it doesn’t assume that a service provider can control specific SEO results. 

Rather, it implicitly acknowledges that rankings and organic traffic improvements will be byproducts of the services—as they should be. 

They focus on growing your business

A good SEO provider will align their strategies with your core business goals and measure SEO success according to the metrics that matter to you. These can include:

• Conversions
• Leads
• Sales
• Revenue
• Profit
• ROI

Unlike rankings and traffic, these are not vanity metrics. 

They have a track record of delivering long-term results

I also recommend going deeper than face value by verifying the performance claims in third party tools. For example, you can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to verify: 

• Organic traffic growth
• Traffic value growth
• Backlink growth
• Keyword ranking improvements
• Improved keyword breadth

You can also use more specific reports like Top Pages to check improvement over a specific period of time. For example, here’s a project where there’s a clear correlation between the addition of more content and organic traffic growth: 

So if you’re reading a case study that mentions content creation, this is the graph you need to see to verify the performance claim is true. 

They are transparent about what they do and how they’ll do it

It pays to educate yourself on black hat SEO tactics to avoid.

When chatting with SEO providers about how they approach their SEO services, pay attention to whether they mention things that sound spammy, like: 

• Building a huge amount of links
• Having a network of blogs they can guest post on
• Creating a very large volume of posts in a short time frame
• Manipulating traffic signals to your content 

Instead, choose an agency or service provider that uses a white hat approach. Check out our guide on white hat SEO to learn how to rank without breaking Google’s rules. 

However, going beyond this, the best agencies will also offer clarity on monthly deliverables for things like the hours worked on a campaign, specific tasks completed, quality delivered, or their efficiency. 

These things are all 100% within the SEO provider’s control and are also safer elements to include in a guarantee. 

They track and report on performance regularly

Accountability is an essential part of any service. Many SEO agencies and service providers do not hold themselves accountable for delivering long-term results. 

I recommend asking how often you’ll be receiving performance updates and reports. Some agencies have dashboards they can give you access to so you can check progress at any time. Others will hop on a call with you monthly or quarterly to discuss how things are going. 

The most important thing here is that your SEO service provider reports on what you care about. Make sure they consider the actual growth impact they’re having on your business, not just the vanity metrics. 

For example, my favorite metrics to report on in client meetings are ROI or organic revenue (if the tracking and attribution are properly set up). 

Month	SEO Spend	Organic Revenue	SEO ROI %	SEO ROI $
Jan	$5,375	$114,257	2126%	$21.26
Feb	$5,375	$344,430	6408%	$64.08
Mar	$5,375	$425,632	7919%	$79.19

These metrics show my clients how much money they’ve made for every dollar invested in my service. 

As long as these numbers go up, there’s no need to worry about the minutiae of how many keywords you’re ranking for or which keywords changed rankings. That’s all a distraction from what matters most: growing your bottom line. 

Note that as a business owner, you’ll need to share sales data with your SEO service provider if you want them to report on organic revenue and ROI. If you do not provide this data, the best they can report on is the metrics available in SEO tools like Ahrefs. 

In particular, the “organic value” metric is used by many agencies to substitute ROI as it quantifies the dollar value of your SEO traffic. 

Don’t be swindled: Track your SEO results for free with Ahrefs

Whether you want to track the performance you were guaranteed or just keep tabs on general SEO visibility, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools can help. It’s a free tool allowing you to track:

• Technical fixes made 
• Backlink growth
• Keyword performance
• Overall SEO growth

If you have any questions about SEO performance guarantees or how to avoid SEO scams, reach out to me on LinkedIn.

The relationship we used to have with Google was simple. It was a fair-use argument: we give Google content to index, and we get traffic in return. We do a good and ethical job at creating that content, we get rewarded with better rankings than those who do not.

AI has essentially turned all that on its head. Google I/O 2024 announced several AI-powered applications, the most notable being AI Overviews, which has since been rolled out in Google US. 

It’s the beginning of a disruptive search landscape, and we have very little idea how that’s going to go. And, considering how Google plans to use AI Overviews, one has to wonder whether or not this is still fair to websites. 

Worse, it brings us to this question: “What will happen to Google — and is it still valuable for me to work towards ranking in Google’s search results?” 

The State of Google Search in 2024

Google search results today are almost unrecognizable from what it was a few years ago. Gone is the era of 10 blue links, replaced now with dynamic, “enriched” search features, displayed in such a way that, theoretically, makes it easier for a user to gain more and more information right on the results page. 

In essence, Google is becoming less of a search engine and more of a portal for users.

The biggest step towards that was the launch of the Search Generative Experience (SGE). Though all their documentation and PR say that this phase is an experiment, it’s clear Google is trying to lay a foundational long-term change to the way people search on their platform. 

To create this new search experience, SGE was powered by generative AI, which added another layer of input and output, enabling Google to not only understand more complex questions but answer them and guide users to new ones. 

But that’s all in theory, and most technology sounds really, really good when it’s just in theory. But the reality of this shift in search is more consequential than most people think.

Moving towards an AI-powered search experience means reshaping how billions and billions of people find information online — and how Google makes money. 

What Are AI Overviews

Using Google’s AI models, search queries are analyzed, and an answer is formulated. This then provides an AI card with links to publishers beneath the overview section. 

They differ from featured snippets because they don’t directly show and link relevant content from websites. Instead, content is scraped, analyzed, and mashed together to provide what the AI thinks is the most comprehensive and accurate answer to your query.

If you’ve ever tried to teach yourself something complicated and reword those super technical concepts into what you think are layman’s terms, you know this is a difficult task, and one that can easily be done wrong. 

And yes, even AI trained on countless datasets can be wrong. Other articles have covered how bad the results of Google’s AI Overviews are so far, so I won’t even bother. But it’s bad, and not very reassuring to anyone using it.

Why it Matters for Websites

Ok, so Google’s newest tool isn’t doing great, why should you care? It’s not like Google hasn’t been changing things up in the last decade, and this isn’t the first time its newest products have flopped. It’s not the first time that Google’s decentered organic results, either.

But this change won’t just push organic search results further below the fold — it’ll completely change the traditional search journey of a Google user. 

By taking steps towards becoming a search portal, Google enables users to get answers to their questions without ever having to visit a website. And, it’s not unlikely that in the next few years, Google can evolve to allow users to fulfill transactions within the search interface itself.

How it Affects Independent Websites

Where is AI Overview getting its answers? From us, from SEOs, content creators, and webmasters. Google is doing this to millions and millions of websites — taking their content, without permission, for profit. All while taking that profit from our websites.

It’s unscrupulous, and is zero comfort for those who have already been negatively affected by algorithm updates in the past year. 

And Google CEO Sundar Pichai doesn’t seem to worry about how it affects the very websites their search engine indexes and uses for profit. In a recent interview with the Verge, Pichai is optimistic that Google AI Overviews and Search will drive more traffic and engagement to websites — but then also does not commit to giving us a way to definitively see that ourselves just yet.

The reason? “The more we spec it out, then the more people will design for that,” he says. Pichai also says whether or not that data will be eventually given to websites is up to the Search team, not him. 

I want to emphasize that Google definitely has that data, but they just won’t give us access to that in the Google Search Console performance reports. So we have no idea if our links in the AI Overviews have a higher or lower CTR than the normal search results 

So, we have to trust Google. But after the recent antitrust case, the Search API document leak, and the validity of their statements being called into question, can we really trust them? 

The Downfall of Google Search…

The trust in Google has been waning for several months now, if not years. Many SEOs and affiliates even say that Google search has died — an article from Edward Zitron, called “The Man Who Killed Google Search,” details how Prabhakar Raghavan ousted people like Ben Gomes from the helm of search and made its quality less of a priority, all for the short term bottom line.

And now we’re moving into what many call a “zero-click search” era, where users are becoming less and less inclined to click on organic search results. And Google is trying to capitalize on that with its AI Overviews, and failing miserably. Worse, it’s late to the game. 

AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity did it much earlier, and arguably, much better than Google is doing now. 

…and Rise of AI Chatbots

Google’s whole point is that it’s supposed to provide the best search experience to users. So when it fails, what do people do? They abandon ship and go to what serves them best.

And right now, that’s AI chatbots like Perplexity. 

I’ve been using this for a couple of months now, and the experience is great. Sources are provided and put at the priority — always placed on top of the generated answer. Answers were factual and included citations, and so far I haven’t seen any AI-generated nonsense. 

It’s a step above other chatbots like ChatGPT as well, since it does have access to the internet and a proprietary search database, so answers are, generally, more accurate and up-to-date. I also found the generated answers to be much more detailed in Perplexity than when I tried out Google Bard (now known as Gemini) a while back. 

One of the biggest complaints about Google Search is that the results are flooded with YouTube videos and Reddit forums. Perplexity avoids this completely by allowing users to opt out of those kinds of results and providing specific focus settings for those who are looking for forum answers and videos. 

Using this, it’s not hard to see why many users have switched. After all, Perplexity does what AI overviews should be doing, and it does it better. And if Perplexity can give you the answers you want, why bother with Google and other websites at all?

The Next Step for SEO

This brings me back to the first question I posed at the beginning: If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing answers for you, why would you bother with organic search results? And if users shift towards that mentality, what’s the incentive for websites to continue their work? Why put new content on the web? 

Is this new era fair to independent publishers? And critically, what does this mean for the future of SEO and website traffic? 

It might not happen this year, or the next, but soon enough websites will be fighting for what little organic traffic is left from Google. 

So how do you stay at the top? How do you keep getting more people to visit your website?

There are really only a few things I can recommend for this new era.

Focus on Your Customers

Chatbots like Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot all need sources to cite. Providing detailed and accurate answers increases your chances of becoming that source. We may not be able to stop chatbots from using our content, but at least you can still gain some clicks whenever they do. 

Aside from that, I’m still of the mindset that there’s plenty of value in providing insightful, useful answers to the people who are looking for them. It helps you connect with your audience, proves your authority in your niche, and builds trust. Plus, high-quality content for nuanced answers is something that chatbots and AI writing tools have a hard time replicating anyway.

The recent Google search document leak, in my opinion, also proves just how important producing customer-centric content is. Their algorithm wouldn’t factor in so much click-related data for nothing.

Utilize Structured Data Markup

Making sure your content is easily understood by machines is the next step. Applying schema or structured data helps them understand and categorize web content, and increases the odds of you being featured in AI-generated results.

Diversify Your Traffic Sources

It’s becoming increasingly clear that relying solely on Google for traffic will become riskier as time goes on — even if you do end up building a strong brand presence, authority, and readership. 

Diversifying traffic sources and including social media and direct engagement strategies will be essential for keeping your website alive. It’s how you’ll get featured on publications, listicles, directories, and other platforms for users to find out about you.

Key Takeaway

Did Google just effectively kill independent publishers and websites? Are we entering the “zero-click search” era? Maybe, but what’s sure is that Google search will push organic search results down in favor of what they believe is an enhanced search experience. 

As Google transforms into an AI-driven search portal, what websites like mine and yours can do is shift SEO tactics, expand to other platforms, and adopt a holistic approach that emphasizes content quality, relevance, and user engagement.