What’s the future of SEO? What should you be focused on if you are creating web content for your brand?
Well, think about what Google’s ultimate goal is – at least in search. Quite simply, they want to provide their users with the best possible search results. Because of this, Google will prioritize pages and sites that deliver high-quality, expert content so that people will be happy with the results that are shown.
In other words, the most effective way to optimize your content for Google Search is to focus on quality, meaning it will meet the needs of users by being clear, entertaining, concise, and comprehensive. By prioritizing the user experience, your content will be more likely to rank well in Search and achieve long-term success.
Anyone with deep experience in SEO should have already been focused on creating expert content. Unfortunately, many SEO consultants instead try to find a trick or shortcut. Over the next few years, I predict that “trick” will involve using AI to write content rather than human beings.
Here’s how I see that playing out.
Faster, Cheaper, Hallucination-i-er
AI is the big new thing for good reason. ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots are able to generate written works in mere seconds that would likely take most human writers hours.
Not only is that impressive, it’s incredibly cost-effective. Imagine generating dozens or hundreds of pages of content in a day – all for the relatively low price of a subscription. That is super valuable for companies – particularly smaller businesses who may not have a big budget for creating content.
That’s the good side of using AI. And in the short term, businesses who follow this strategy may win in search results. But it won’t last.
Because, remember, Google’s ultimate goal is to provide users with the best possible content. And there are a number of ongoing issues with AI-generated content. Beyond the fact that it is literally recycled from existing content, making it sound a lot like everything else on the subject, AI-generated work is sometimes just plain incorrect.
Part of this may be due to the fact that AI-chatbots aren’t really creating anything, but rather compiling and regurgitating existing work like some kind of word stew. There’s more, though: sometimes AI just makes stuff up if it can’t find the information you ask for. Among other “hallucinations,” it has been known to quote laws that are not actual laws, provide research links that don’t actually link anywhere, and give the wrong answers for elementary-level math problems.
Put simply, it will create a lot of junk content.
Taking Out the Junk
As you might imagine, an abundance of this will lead to a decrease in the quality of Google search results. Since Google absolutely does not want that, their algorithm will get smarter at identifying quality vs. junk content. Because of this, the sites that continue to invest in quality content will continue to rank better in the long term.
This has happened numerous times already. While this version of AI may be new, Google has weathered countless SEO “trends” over the years, and quality content always wins out eventually.
What exactly is “quality content”? The easiest definition is that it is content written, ghostwritten, or at a minimum reviewed by people with hands-on experience and/or education in a particular topic. In many cases, the subject matter experts will need to be interviewed, and this will require more writers with interviewing skills.
Will Google SGE (Search Generation Engine) Change Things?
SGE works similar to search snippets, the difference being that the AI-generated overview appears at the top of the search page (a sort of “zero rank”) and contains only tiny generic link icons for the various sites used to compile the information.
Will businesses and brands change their strategies in an attempt to show up in this overview? Probably not.
Why?
Firstly, the value of gaining that zero rank is currently questionable. If users get the answer they need there, they don’t need to click through to your site. Worse, Google SGE even reduces the chance for brand exposure due to the generic link icons.
Because of this, the value of providing the type of content that can be captured by an AI summary will likely go down, and the value of quality content, which requires more nuance and depth, will go up. Additionally, sites that currently rely on running ads and getting traffic by providing basic information for users will suffer.
One thing that is already happening is that lots of people are using generative AI itself as a search engine. I already do this. I used to use Google Search for brainstorming or gathering basic data, but now I go to ChatGPT in many cases.
Eventually, traditional search will merge with platforms like Google Bard. Google SGE is already a step in that direction.
This offers, perhaps, the greatest possibility for big change. Right now, Google dominates the search industry, but if another search engine gets this right faster than Google, there is the potential for a new leader to emerge in the field.
If that happens, they would have a strong hand in determining how search – and SEO – works in the future.
