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3 Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & Opportunities

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3 Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & Opportunities

This post was sponsored by SE Ranking. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Wondering how to best integrate AI into your marketing workflow?

Unsure which parts of your content creation strategy can be safely delegated to machine learning?

You’re not alone.

While 46% of business owners resort to AI to craft internal communications, 30% of them are concerned about misinformation AI can cause and 33% are worried that AI implementation could lead to a workforce reduction.

Still, the demand for high-quality content continues to grow, and at least 12% of businesses are turning to AI-powered tools to optimize their content writing process.

The SE Ranking team is no stranger to AI.

We’ve been actively integrating this AI-powered Content Marketing Tool into our team’s workflow to create compelling SEO copy that outperforms competitors in search engines.

Important note: we have no intention to replace our human writers with AI. Instead, we use AI for creating more content than we ever could without AI assistance. We hope to finally test all the ideas we had for a while but never had a chance to implement because of a lack of resources.

Let’s dive into how these AI tools have helped us every step of the way:

  • AI Writer, which is based on GPT neural networks.
  • Extensive content optimization capabilities.

But first, let’s share why 44% of businesses are using AI technologies now, and why 56% are not.

How Missing AI Opportunities Right Now Can Leave You Behind In The Near Future

The market for Generative AI is booming, with market size expected to reach $51.8 billion by 2028.

44% of respondents adopted AI content writing.

Myth

52% of experts believe that automation will displace people from their careers.

That fear is the main reason why people are refusing to try out new technologies.

Fact

AI writing offers numerous benefits to marketers, giving them access to high-quality content at scale and at low cost.

If you need to produce high volumes of content in a short amount of time, such as product description pages or blog posts, AI can help you get ahead without the need to raise capital.

The earlier you incorporate AI tools into your workflow, the faster you will gain a competitive advantage.

Now is the best time to learn how to capitalize on these tools, while everyone is learning at the same time.

The usage of content automation tools and AI is just a skill, not a replacement, and we will show you how to master it.

So, let’s see how automation with AI tools works during each step of the content writing process.

How To Automate Your Workflow With Content Writing Tools

The content creation process starts with topic research and then includes the following stages:

  • Brief creation.
  • Content writing.
  • Content evaluation.
  • Additional optimization.

Each of these steps is time-consuming and requires you to focus on different variables during the process.

Here’s how to automate your writing routine with the help of SE Ranking’s Content Marketing Tool.

1. Build Briefs Faster With An AI Tool

Estimated Time Savings: 20 minutes vs 2 hours

First things first, let’s talk about brief creation.

Step 1: Set Up Your Content Parameters

Start in the Content Editor.

Image created by SERanking.com, May 2023

Select your parameters, including your target keywords, which you can choose with the help of the Keyword Research Module.

3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, April 2023

Then, the software analyzes the top-ranked content on the selected topic.

Step 2: Select Your Relevant Competitors For Automatic Analysis

To help inform your smart brief, choose all relevant competitors from the list based on:

  • Total traffic.
  • Domain trust score.
  • Page trust scores.
  • Total number of referring domains.
  • Word count.
  • Website visibility.
3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

Depending on the pages you chose, the tool recommends:

  • Content length.
  • The number of media elements to use.
  • Terms to use (and their placement).

All of these recommendations play a crucial role in helping web pages rank higher.

Step 3: Select Your Must-Have Keywords

This AI offers you a list of natural language processing (NLP) terms. NLP algorithms will look for these terms in your content to prove their relevance.

SE Ranking prioritizes terms based on how top-ranking pages use them in their texts and how well these pages perform in the SERP.

You can also go through the list and hand-pick the terms that you feel are the most appropriate.

3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

The next step is content structure.

Step 4: Confirm Content Outline Structure

SE Ranking’s Content Editor shows how competitors structure your texts.

While you can add your competitor’s H1-H6 headings to the SEO technical assignment, content writing best practices require you to use them as a reference to create your own structure from scratch.

3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

With AI owning the creation of a smart, data-driven content writing brief, you can save valuable time, allowing you to focus on ensuring your content is as strong as possible.

2. Delegate Content Writing To AI

Estimated Time Savings: 1 hour vs 3 hours (or more if you had writer’s block)

When the brief is all set, you can choose to pass most of the writing routine to the GPT-powered AI Writer within the Content Editor, as we did here.

Step 1: Add Your Keywords From Your AI-Generated Content Brief

Once you transfer your terms from your brief, AI Writer will generate different types of content using your target keywords.

3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

Step 2: Automatically Get A High-Engagement Headline & Rough Draft

Once you input your keywords and voice, you can use the writing assistant to generate:

  • An intriguing headline.
  • Text structure.
  • A rough draft of your content piece.
3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

Step 3: Quickly Edit A Near-Complete Rough Draft

In our example, we were surprised to find that we loved the first paragraph generated by the AI Writer.

However, we ultimately decided to put it in the Summary section, since what it wrote included the main things we wanted to emphasize in our text.

We also felt like changing one sentence in it.

To do this, you just need to select a piece of text and ask the AI writing software to rephrase it:

3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

Step 4: Evaluate The Content

Now that our first draft is finally ready, it’s time to do some editing and polishing.

To make it easy, AI can help you:

  • Evaluate its content score.
  • Check the text for grammar.
  • Uncover spelling errors.
  • Determine uniqueness.

This is to ensure that the piece is of high quality and can win our competitors’ traffic.

In our example, here’s how we used the Content Marketing tool for this purpose.

AI Content Score

SE Ranking’s Content Score offers valuable insights into how your content stacks up against the competition in terms of quality and impact.

It also provides hints on which adjustments can help your copy perform better. The tool also scans texts for common grammar and spelling errors to ensure that the content is professional and error-free.

Here are the results we got:

3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023
3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

AI Plagiarism Checker

Another useful tool is the plagiarism checker.

Plagiarism is a serious issue that can damage the reputation of any website if not handled properly.

But with the help of this tool, you can be sure that every piece of content you’ve created is completely unique and of the highest quality.

3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

Thankfully, that’s our overall uniqueness score. 100%! What a relief!

Step 5: Don’t Worry About Job Replacement

As you can see, AI does not remove content creators from the responsibility of creating work.

Your business and teams are still in charge of all the produced pieces, including text quality, trustworthiness, data, advice, and so on.

Whenever you use an AI writer, it’s important to fact-check and verify any information that the system provides you with. AI cannot determine which information is true and can generate misleading and inaccurate content.

3. Optimize Content For Better Search Performance

Estimated Time Savings: 30 minutes vs never getting a click from Google

You might have noticed in the screenshot above that the first draft of this text received a Content Score of 51.

Naturally, the results should be better if we wanted our content piece to be visible in the highly competitive SERP environment.

Step 1: Follow The Automatically Generated Recommendations

Follow the tool’s recommendations to improve the score, which, in this case, includes:

  • Increasing the word count.
  • Adding some images.
  • Integrating suggested terms into the copy.

As a result, we managed to increase this text’s Content Score to 66.

3 Exciting Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & OpportunitiesImage created by SERanking.com, May 2023

3 Benefits Of Using SE Ranking’s Content Marketing Tool

First and foremost, AI content tools save time.

By automating many of the tedious tasks involved in content creation, such as researching the topic and generating briefs, and crafting the copy, an AI writer frees up time for writers and content managers to focus on more high-level tasks.

With the help of the Content Marketing Tool, we crafted the copy four times faster and spent minutes instead of hours creating the brief.

AI Writers are an incredibly cost-effective alternative to hiring more content writers to manually create content. Automated content creation can help you fulfill your content needs and quickly generate high-quality results.

Improved quality: AI tools don’t just help you save time and money; they also help to produce copy that is more SEO-friendly. By understanding which keywords your audience is searching for, as well as the keywords that search engines expect to see in your text, you can make sure your content is being seen. AI writing tools also help you keep your content on topic and focused, ensuring that your content is concise and convincing.

Considering AI as your teammate and delegating some of your tasks to it will help you build new skills in using AI for your work and leverage the technology’s potential. If you’re looking to automate your content creation process, our Content Marketing Tool can be your go-to solution. The platform’s AI can also provide suggestions and feedback so that writers can refine their work and produce higher-quality content.

The fact of the matter is this: AI-powered content creation solutions are the future of content creation. As the market continues to grow, businesses that embrace AI tools will be better equipped to create high-quality content efficiently and effectively. At this point, not using AI solutions is like washing dishes by hand when there is a dishwasher. You can do it, but why bother?


Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by SE Ranking. Used with permission.



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The Lean Guide (With Template)

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The Lean Guide (With Template)

A competitive analysis (or market competitive analysis) is a process where you collect information about competitors to gain an edge over them and get more customers.

However, the problem is that “traditional” competitive analysis is overkill for most businesses — it requires impractical data and takes too long to complete (and it’s very expensive if you choose to outsource). 

A solution to that is a lean approach to the process — and that’s what this guide is about. 

In other words, we’ll focus on the most important data you need to answer the question: “Why would people choose them over you?”. No boring theory, outtakes from marketing history, or spending hours digging up nice-to-have information.

In this guide, you will find:

  • A real-life competitive analysis example.
  • Templates: one for input data and one for a slide deck to present your analysis to others.
  • Step-by-step instructions.

Our template consists of two documents: a slide deck and a spreadsheet. 

The Slide deck is the output document. It will help you present the analysis to your boss or your teammates.

The spreadsheet is the input document. You will find tables that act as the data source for the charts from the slide deck, as well as a prompt to use in ChatGPT to help you with user review research.

Competitive analysis template — spreadsheet sneak peek.Competitive analysis template — spreadsheet sneak peek.

We didn’t focus on aesthetics here; every marketer likes to do slide decks their own way, so feel free to edit everything you’ll find there. 

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the process. The template consists of these six tasks: 

  1. Identify your direct competitors. 
  2. Compare share of voice. 
  3. Compare pricing and features.
  4. Find strong and weak points based on reviews.
  5. Compare purchasing convenience.
  6. Present conclusions.

Going forward, we’ll explain why these steps matter and show how to complete them. 

1. Identify your direct competitors

Direct competitors are businesses that offer a similar solution to the same audience. 

They matter a lot more than indirect competitors (i.e. businesses with different products but targeting the same audience as you) because you’ll be compared with them often (e.g. in product reviews and rankings). Plus, your audience is more likely to gravitate towards them when considering different options. 

You probably have a few direct competitors in mind already, but here are a few ways to find others based on organic search and paid search ads

Our basis for the analysis was Landingi, a SaaS for building landing pages (we chose that company randomly). So in our case, we found these 3 direct competitors. 

Slide 1 — direct competitors.Slide 1 — direct competitors.

Look at keyword overlap

Keyword overlap uncovers sites that target the same organic keywords as you. Some sites will compete with you for traffic but not for customers (e.g. G2 may share some keywords with Landingi but they’re a different business). However, in many cases, you will find direct competitors just by looking at this marketing channel. 

  • Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and enter your site’s address. 
  • Scroll down to Organic competitors
  • Visit the URLs to pick 3 – 5 direct competitors.
Top organic competitors data from Ahrefs.Top organic competitors data from Ahrefs.

To double-check the choice of competitors, we also looked at who was bidding for search ads on Google.

See who’s advertising 

If someone is spending money to show ads for keywords related to what you do, that’s a strong indication they are a direct competitor. 

  • Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
  • Type in a few broad keywords related to your niche, like “landing page builder” or “landing page tool”. 
  • Go to the Ads history report. 
  • Visit the sites that have a high presence of ads in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). 
Ads history report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.Ads history report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

Once you’re done checking both reports, write down competitors in the deck. 

You can also take screenshots of the reports and add them to your deck to show the supporting data for your argument. 

 Slide 2 — direct competitors by organic traffic. Slide 2 — direct competitors by organic traffic.

2. Compare share of voice

Share of voice is a measure of your reach in any given channel compared to competitors. 

A bigger share of voice (SOV) means that your competitors are more likely to reach your audience. In other words, they may be promoting more effectively than you. 

In our example, we found that Landingi’s SOV was the lowest in both of these channels. 

Organic: 

Slide 3 — share of voice on Google Search.Slide 3 — share of voice on Google Search.

And social media:

 Slide 4 — share of voice on social media. Slide 4 — share of voice on social media.

Here’s how we got that data using Ahrefs and Brand24.

Organic share of voice 

Before we start, make sure you have a project set up in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker

Create a new project in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.Create a new project in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.

Now: 

  • Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis and enter your and your competitors’s sites as shown below. 
Create a new project in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.
Create a new project in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.
  • On the next screen, set the country with the most important market for your business and set the filters like this:
Content gap analysis filter setup.Content gap analysis filter setup.
  • Select keywords that sound most relevant to your business (even if you don’t rank for them yet) and Add them to Rank Tracker
Common keywords found via Ahrefs' Competitive Analysis.Common keywords found via Ahrefs' Competitive Analysis.
  • Go to Rank Tracker, open your project, and look for Competitors/Overview. This report will uncover automatically calculated Share of Voice
Organic share of voice data in Ahrefs.Organic share of voice data in Ahrefs.
  • Add the numbers in corresponding cells inside the sheet and paste the graph inside the slide deck. 
Filling the share of voice template with data.Filling the share of voice template with data.

It’s normal that the numbers don’t add up to 100%. SOV is calculated by including sites that compete with you in traffic but are not your direct competitors, e.g. blogs. 

Social share of voice 

We can also measure our share of voice across social media channels using Brand24.

  • Go to Brand24.
  • Start a New project for your brand and each competitor. Use the competitors’ brand name as the keyword to monitor. 
  • Go to the Comparison report and compare your project with competitors. 
Using Brand24's Comparison tool for competitive analysis.Using Brand24's Comparison tool for competitive analysis.
  • Take a screenshot of the SOV charts and paste them into the slide deck. Make sure the charts are set to “social media”.
Social media tab in share of voice report.Social media tab in share of voice report.

3. Compare pricing and features

Consumers often choose solutions that offer the best value for money — simple as that. And that typically comes down to two things: 

  • Whether you have the features they care about. We’ll use all features available across all plans to see how likely the product is to satisfy user needs.
  • How much they will need to pay. Thing is, the topic of pricing is tricky: a) when assessing affordability, people often focus on the least expensive option available and use it as a benchmark, b) businesses in the SaaS niche offer custom plans. So to make things more practical, we’ll compare the cheapest plans, but feel free to run this analysis across all pricing tiers.

After comparing our example company to competitors, we found that it goes head-to-head with Unbounce as the most feature-rich solution on the market. 

Slide 5 — features vs. pricing.Slide 5 — features vs. pricing.

Here’s how we got that data. 

  • Note down your and your competitors’ product features. One of the best places to get this information is pricing pages. Some brands even publish their own competitor comparisons — you may find them helpful too. 
  • While making the list, place a “1” in the cell corresponding to the brand that offers the solution.
Filling data in the spreadsheet.Filling data in the spreadsheet.
  • Enter the price of the cheapest plan (excluding free plans). 
Adding pricing data inside the spreadsheet.Adding pricing data inside the spreadsheet.
  • Once finished, copy the chart and paste it inside the deck. 

4. Find strong and weak points based on user reviews

User reviews can show incredibly valuable insight into your competitors’ strong and weak points. Here’s why this matters:

  • Improving on what your competitors’ customers appreciate could help you attract similar customers and possibly win some over.
  • Dissatisfaction with competitors is a huge opportunity. Some businesses are built solely to fix what other companies can’t fix. 

Here’s a sample from our analysis: 

 Slide 6 — likes and dislikes about Competitors. Slide 6 — likes and dislikes about Competitors.

And here’s how we collated the data using ChatGPT. Important: repeat the process for each competitor.

  • Open ChatGPT and enter the prompt from the template.
ChatGPT prompt for competitive analysis.ChatGPT prompt for competitive analysis.
  • Go to G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot and find a competitor’s reviews with ratings from 2 – 4 (i.e. one rating above the lowest and one below the highest possible). Reason:

businesses sometimes solicit five-star reviews, whereas dissatisfied customers tend to leave one-star reviews in a moment of frustration. The most actionable feedback usually comes in between.

  • Copy and paste the content of the reviews into ChatGPT (don’t hit enter yet). 
  • Once you’re done pasting all reviews, hit enter in ChatGPT to run the analysis.
Sample of ChatGPT output with charts.Sample of ChatGPT output with charts.
  • Paste the graphs into the deck. If you want the graphs to look different, don’t hesitate to ask the AI. 

There’s a faster alternative, but it’s a bit more advanced. 

Instead of copy-pasting, you can use a scraping tool like this one to get all reviews at once. The downside here is that not all review sources will a have scraping tool available. 

5. Compare purchasing convenience

Lastly, we’ll see how easy it is to actually buy your products, and compare the experience to your competitors. 

This is a chance to simplify your checkout process, and even learn from any good habits your competitors have adopted.

For example, we found that our sample company had probably nothing to worry about in this area — they ticked almost all of the boxes. 

Slide 7 — purchasing convenience.Slide 7 — purchasing convenience.

Here’s how to complete this step:

  • Place a “1” if you or any of your competitors offer convenience features listed in the template. 
  • Once done, copy the chart and paste it into the deck.

Step 6. Present conclusions

This is the part of the presentation where you sum up all of your findings and suggest a course of action. 

Here are two examples: 

  • Landingi had the lowest SOV in the niche, and that is never good. So the conclusion might be to go a level deeper and do an SEO competitive analysis, and to increase social media presence by creating more share-worthy content like industry surveys, design/CRO tips, or in-house data studies.
  • Although the brand had a very high purchasing convenience score, during the analysis we found that there was a $850 gap between the monthly full plan and the previous tier. The conclusion here might be to offer a custom plan (like competitors do) to fill that gap. 

We encourage you to take your time here and think about what would make the most sense for your business. 

Tip

It’s good to be specific in your conclusions, but don’t go too deep. Competitive analysis concerns many aspects of the business, so it’s best to give other departments a chance to chime in. Just because your competitors have a few unique features doesn’t necessarily mean you need to build them too.

Final thoughts 

A competitive analysis is one of the most fruitful exercises in marketing. It can show you areas for improvement, give ideas for new features, and help you discover gaps in your strategy. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it’s fundamental to running a successful business. 

Just don’t forget to balance “spying” on your competitors with innovation. After all, you probably don’t want to become an exact copy of someone else’s brand. 

In other words, use competitive analysis to keep up with your competitors, but don’t let that erase what’s unique about your brand or make you forget your big vision. 

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Critical WordPress Form Plugin Vulnerability Affects Up To +200,000 Installs

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Critical WordPress Form Plugin Vulnerability Affects Up To +200,000 Installs

Security researchers at Wordfence detailed a critical security flaw in the MW WP Form plugin, affecting versions 5.0.1 and earlier. The vulnerability allows unauthenticated threat actors to exploit the plugin by uploading arbitrary files, including potentially malicious PHP backdoors, with the ability to execute these files on the server.

MW WP Form Plugin

The MW WP Form plugin helps to simplify form creation on WordPress websites using a shortcode builder.

It makes it easy for users to create and customize forms with various fields and options.

The plugin has many features, including one that allows file uploads using the [mwform_file name=”file”] shortcode for the purpose of data collection. It is this specific feature that is exploitable in this vulnerability.

Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability

An Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability is a security issue that allows hackers to upload potentially harmful files to a website. Unauthenticated means that the attacker does not need to be registered with the website or need any kind of permission level that comes with a user permission level.

These kinds of vulnerabilities can lead to remote code execution, where the uploaded files are executed on the server, with the potential to allow the attackers to exploit the website and site visitors.

The Wordfence advisory noted that the plugin has a check for unexpected filetypes but that it doesn’t function as it should.

According to the security researchers:

“Unfortunately, although the file type check function works perfectly and returns false for dangerous file types, it throws a runtime exception in the try block if a disallowed file type is uploaded, which will be caught and handled by the catch block.

…even if the dangerous file type is checked and detected, it is only logged, while the function continues to run and the file is uploaded.

This means that attackers could upload arbitrary PHP files and then access those files to trigger their execution on the server, achieving remote code execution.”

There Are Conditions For A Successful Attack

The severity of this threat depends on the requirement that the “Saving inquiry data in database” option in the form settings is required to be enabled in order for this security gap to be exploited.

The security advisory notes that the vulnerability is rated critical with a score of 9.8 out of 10.

Actions To Take

Wordfence strongly advises users of the MW WP Form plugin to update their versions of the plugin.

The vulnerability is patched in the lutes version of the plugin, version 5.0.2.

The severity of the threat is particularly critical for users who have enabled the “Saving inquiry data in database” option in the form settings and that is compounded by the fact that no permission levels are needed to execute this attack.

Read the Wordfence advisory:

Update ASAP! Critical Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload in MW WP Form Allows Malicious Code Execution

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Alexander_P

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How SEOs Make the Web Better

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How SEOs Make the Web Better

SEOs catch flak for ruining the web, but they play a crucial role in the search ecosystem, and actually make the internet better for everyone.

Let’s get the criticism out of the way. There are bad actors in SEO, people who seek to extract money from the internet regardless of the cost to others. There are still scams and snake oil, posers and plagiarists. Many parts of the web have become extremely commercialized, with paid advertising and big brands displacing organic and user-generated content.

But while there are situations where SEOs have made things worse, to fixate on them is to ignore the colossal elephant in the room: in the ways that really matter, the web is the best it’s ever been:

  • It’s the easiest it has ever been to find information on the internet. Searchers have a staggering array of tutorials, teardowns, and tips at their fingertips, containing information that is generally accurate and helpful—and this was not always the case.
  • Bad actors have a smaller influence over search. Search is less of a Wild West than it used to be. Once-scam-ridden topics are subject to significant scrutiny, and the problems and loopholes in search that need fixing today—like big brands and generic content receiving undue prominence—are smaller and less painful than the problems of the past.
  • More people use search to their benefit. Online content is the most accessible it has ever been, and it’s easier than ever to grow a local business or expand into international markets on the back of search.

SEOs have played a crucial role in these improvements, poking and prodding, building and—sometimes—breaking. They are Google power users: the people who push the system to extremes, but in doing so, catalyze the change needed to make search better for everyone.

Let’s explore how.

SEOs help regular people benefit from search

SEOs are much-needed intermediaries between Google and the rest of the world, helping non-technical people acquire and benefit from search engine traffic.

There is a huge amount of valuable information locked up in the heads of people who have no idea how to build a website or index a blog post. A carpet fitter with a bricks-and-mortar business might have decades of experience solving costly problems with uneven subfloors or poor moisture management, but no understanding of how to share that information online.

SEOs provide little nudges towards topics that people care about and writing that’s accessible to people and robots. They help solve technical problems that would hinder or completely block a site from appearing in search results. They identify opportunities for companies to be rewarded for creating great content.

It’s a win-win: businesses are rewarded with traffic, searchers have their intent satisfied, and the world is made a little richer for the newfound knowledge it contains.

SEOs turn helpful standards into real websites

SEOs do many things to actively make the web a better place, tending to their own plot of the Google garden to make sure it flourishes.

Take, for example, the myriad standards and guidelines designed to make the web a more accessible place for users. The implementation of these standards—turning theoretical guidelines into real, concrete parts of the web—often happens because of the SEO team.

Technical SEOs play a big part in adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a set of principles designed to ensure online content is “perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust” for every user. Every SEO’s fixation with Core Web Vitals fuels a faster, more efficient web. Content teams translate Google’s helpful content guidelines into useful words and images on a page.

(Case in point: check out Aleyda Solis’ Content Helpfulness Analyzer.)

Screenshot: Aleyda Solis' helpful content GPTScreenshot: Aleyda Solis' helpful content GPT

There is a lot of overlap between “things that help users” and “things that improve search performance.” Even if the motive behind these changes is as simple as generating more traffic, a well-optimized website is, generally speaking, one that is also great for real human beings trying to engage with it.

SEOs pressure-test Google’s systems

The biggest criticism leveled at SEOs is that they break things. And they do! But that breakage acts as a type of pressure testing that strengthens the system as a whole.

Abuse of spintax and keyword stuffing forced Google to develop a better understanding of on-page content. Today, that loophole is closed, but more importantly, Google is much better at understanding the contents of a page and its relationship to a website as a whole.

Hacks like hiding keywords with white text on a white background (or moving them beyond the visible bounds of the screen) forced Google to expand its understanding of page styling and CSS, and how on-page information interacts with the environment that contains it.

Even today’s deluge of borderline-plagiarised AI content is not without benefit: it creates a very clear incentive for Google to get better at rewarding information gain and prioritizing publishers with solid EEAT credentials. These improvements will make tomorrow’s version of search much better.

This isn’t just Google fixing what SEOs broke: these changes usually leave lasting benefits that extend beyond any single spam tactic and make search better for all of its users.

Illustration: how fixing problems leads to smaller future problems and improved search experienceIllustration: how fixing problems leads to smaller future problems and improved search experience

This is not to argue that blackhat SEO is desirable. It would be better to make these improvements without incurring pain along the way. But Search is huge and complicated, and Google has little incentive to spend money proactively fixing problems and loopholes.

If we can’t solve every issue before it causes pain, we should be grateful for a correction mechanism that prevents it—and more extreme abuse—from happening in the future. SEOs break the system, and in doing so, make future breakages a lot less severe.

SEOs are the internet’s quality assurance team

Some SEOs take advantage of the loopholes they discover—but many don’t. They choose to raise these issues in public spaces, encourage discussion, and seek out a fix, acting like a proxy quality assurance team.

At the small end of the spectrum, SEOs often flag bugs with Google systems, like a recent error in Search Console reporting flagged independently by three separate people, or Tom Anthony famously catching an oversight in Google’s Manual Actions database. While these types of problems don’t always impact the average user’s experience using Google, they help keep search systems working as intended.

At the other end of the scale, this feedback can extend as far as the overarching quality of the search experience, like AJ Kohn writing about Google’s propensity to reward big brands over small brands, or Lily Ray calling out an uptick in spam content in Google Discover.

SEOs are Google’s most passionate users. They interact with it at a scale far beyond the average user, and they can identify trends and changes at a macroscopic level. As a result, they are usually the first to discover problems—but also the people who hold Google to the highest standard. They are a crucial part of the feedback loop that fuels improvements.

SEOs act as a check-and-balance

Lastly, SEOs act as a check-and-balance, gathering firsthand evidence of how search systems operate, letting us differentiate between useful advice, snake oil, and Google’s PR bluster. 

Google shares lots of useful guidance, but it’s important to recognize the limits of their advice. They are a profit-seeking company, and Search requires opacity to work—if everyone understood how it worked, everyone would game it, and it would stop working. Mixed in with the good advice is a healthy portion of omission and misdirection.

Google Search plays a vital role in controlling the flow of the web’s information—it is simply too important for us to leave its mechanics, biases, and imperfections unexplored. We need people who can interrogate the systems just enough to separate fact from fiction and understand how the pieces fit together.

We need people like Mic King, and his insanely detailed write-up of SGE and RAG; Britney Muller and her demystification of LLMs; the late Bill Slawki’s unfaltering patent analysis; or our own Patrick Stox’s efforts in piecing together how search works.

Screenshot from Patrick Stox's presentation, How Search WorksScreenshot from Patrick Stox's presentation, How Search Works

Final thoughts

The web has problems. We can and should expect more from Google Search. But the problems we need to solve today are far less severe and painful than the problems that needed solving in the past; and the people who have the highest expectations, and will be most vocal in shaping that positive future, are—you guessed it—SEOs.

To SEOs: the cause of (and solution to) all of the web’s problems.



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