Generative AIs like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini have already changed how SEO is being carried out. If you follow the SEO industry you may already be aware of the dozens of tools and thousands of Youtube videos on using AI to generate content at massive scale to appeal to the Google algorithm to rank a site. For an industry that loves a quick and easy win, AI has been better than Christmas for them.
With the release of OpenAI’s new model, GPT-4o mini, which is powerful enough to generate readable content, its pricing at 60 cents per million output tokens has pushed us across a new threshold. And it is scary.
Content is cheaper than dirt
You can now produce content dynamically for less than the advertising revenue you would receive for a single page visit. In this article, the author shows that generating an article with GPT-4o mini can cost as little as $0.00051525, 5 hundredths of a cent. Google’s Adsense calculator shows that for a site that gets 50,000 visits a month, a single page impression with advertising generates about $0.0026 in revenue per page visit.
This is what they call an arbitrage opportunity.
Whatever approach you take with SEO for your business, this is the competitive environment we will all be operating in.
Fighting back against infinite SEO content
The current standard practice in SEO is based mainly on winning through volume of content. That content has gone through “on page optimisation” to make sure that it is long enough and that not only does it have all the proper keywords, it has more than the competitors. The pages have been interlinked into “topic clusters” and linked also to “pillar pages” to make them more enticing for the Google Algorithm.
SEO practitioners used to do this by hand. Sometimes with “spinners” that would generate semi-sophisticated mad-lib style articles in bulk. But now it can all be automated.
What is also being automated is the low quality of this content. Content produced to maximise ranking in Google Search results has always been low quality, whether it has been written by hand or generated by AI.
And this is where not just quality, but looking beyond the page, can give you an edge in SEO.
Search Result Ranking is not just about keywords
A leak of Google Search related documented earlier this year has given some potential insights into what factors Google uses to rank search results.
One of the most important factors is user experience – how people are interacting with your site when they visit it. Clicks on a page, scrolling through your articles, and how much time they spend on your page, are all major signals.
This is simply engagement and it is so simple it makes sense. High quality, interesting content that visitors engage with results in higher rankings in Google Search results.
Freshness of content is also another factor. This can be a bit of an unfair bias against evergreen content. And forcing sites onto a treadmill of content refreshes of such content feels unfair, but has anyone ever felt the Google Algorithm was fair?
Links from other websites to your own content is also still worth pursuing and has value – depending on the site linking to you.
Finally, Google is not just tracking visits from its own search results pages. It is also tracking visits that arrive from other places, like social media. This is another clue it uses to calculate a site’s ranking.
Good SEO can no longer be just SEO
What does that mean? SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – can’t only be about optimising your content for search engines. Search engine. It’s really all Google, right?
The signals that Google is relying on are richer than just keyword counts on the page. And this is pushing SEO out into the broader spheres of marketing and branding.
And this is a good thing. Because it makes it possible to compete against AI generated content and sites full of keyword heavy content that no human would willingly read.
“Keywords” were never “magic words”
Choosing the right keywords is still part of SEO, but “keywords” doesn’t mean “magic words”. “Keywords” means clear titles that tell visitors what a page is about. And it means that the content on the page is going to cover the information they are looking for. Without repeating them dozens of times.
It means you need to communicate clearly, and to understand your audience well enough to know what they are looking for, how they are looking for it, and how they themselves talk about it.
Clear communication and understanding your audience. See, SEO is just marketing once you start focusing on quality over quantity.
SEO extends into social media
If visits from social media are a signal to the Algorithm, then of course social media needs to be looked at through the SEO lens.
And it is simply the same formula – clear communication and understanding your audience. Provide them what you know they value and they will interact with your posts, they will follow your links, they will visit your site and they will do business with you.
Learn to think in formats beyond the article. Think short, think concise, think nuggets of wisdom novel insights, and clever “soundbites”. And consider how those same valuable communications, short as they are, can be incorporated into the content on your website and how an insight shared on social media can lead your audience to deeper engagement on your website.
At this level, interacting with your audience, your potential customers, on social media and providing them value – be it knowledge, insight, amusement – you are no longer doing SEO, you’re building your brand.
SEO in the age of AI is quality beating quantity
SEO has been a volume game for years. If you’ve ever used on page optimisation tools you’ve seen it in action. You want to compete for a keyword? Simple, analyse competitor pages that are ranking for those keywords and write a longer article than theirs with more keywords than theirs. You will pop up in the rankings. Until they do the same back to you.
The best thing about this kind of stupid cold war game is that the results are terrible. Adding AI to the mix is making it all happen faster, but the results are not any better. There is a reason that the term online for AI generated content is “slop”. It’s the new spam.
Spending time to understand your audience, providing value and crafting content that they engage with, isn’t simple, but with thought and patience it’s doable.
It won’t be a quick win, but that’s what will allow you to compete against an industry that won’t stop believing in the easy win while they fill the internet with words no human will ever read.
