Navigating AI's Wild West - is SEO broken or evolving? #seoadvice #seostrategy
The SEO industry operates in a 'wild west' where content strategies and AI manipulation tactics create competitive pressure on teams doing things right.
Year-over-year data is unavailable for 3 years due to rapid technological change, forcing everyone to guess at strategy priorities.
Despite overall traffic declining, teams are seeing improved traffic quality and higher click-through rates, prompting a fundamental rewrite of SEO playbooks to understand where value creation happens in the new environment.
The other really tricky thing for what we're doing dealing with as an industry is it feels very wild wild west. Like there are a lot of aspects of SEO and content strategy and content marketing that can manipulate these these tools. And we don't know if that's by the nature of the technology a long-term issue that will always be the case or are you doing everything right right now that is sustainable long term but maybe losing to competitors who are doing more shady manipulative practices. Like it's a really tough conversation internally for teams right now of how to mitigate that. Do the right thing and not screw yourself over long term while maybe losing something in the short term. >> Yeah. On the recent episode I had with Alex Moss of Yoast, he he mentioned that we're not going to have yearon-year data for 3 years because everything is changing and it's just impossible just to even predict where to control. So everybody's just taking their best guess focusing on something. The conversation that we had is uh we've noticed that traffic is dropping but the quality of
traffic is increasing. We've had like the CTR like like I mentioned before that went up even though everything else went down. So we're really like rewriting our playbook even just to understand where to put a finger on where's the pulse now like is that even a thing. So yeah, it's a very interesting thing. [Music]
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“It feels very wild wild west. There are a lot of aspects of SEO and content strategy and content marketing that can manipulate these tools.” — Garrett Sussman
“It's a really tough conversation internally for teams right now of how to mitigate that. Do the right thing and not screw yourself over long term while maybe losing something in the short term.” — Garrett Sussman