Blogging Like It's 2020? You're Doomed
45sGrabs attention by challenging common practices and referencing the AI disruption that everyone fears.
▶ Play ClipAI Summary
The video addresses whether blogging still helps with SEO in the age of AI. It argues that while traditional blogging for backlinks or generic answers is losing effectiveness, focusing on topics where human experience is irreplaceable can still drive significant business value. The creator introduces the BARS framework to qualify content topics and discusses the emerging opportunity of optimizing for AI-driven search.
Chapters
[00:28]
Blogs Help Only in Specific Cases
Blogging still helps with SEO, but only when used for earning backlinks or answering solution-unaware customer questions with a human perspective.
[01:06]
The BARS Framework
The BARS framework is used to qualify content topics for business value. The 'A' stands for 'Will someone be satisfied by an AI answer?'
[01:32]
Focus on Human Experience Topics
Topics where people want firsthand experience and a perspective, not just factual information, are the ones to focus on.
[02:32]
Low Value of AI Overview Citations
Click-through rates on citations in AI overviews are in the low single digits, meaning there's little value in getting cited there.
[02:57]
Query Fan-Out as Future Opportunity
Query fan-out is when AI performs dozens of searches to synthesize an answer. Being part of that result could increase your likelihood of being recommended, but it's still speculative.
Blogging still works for SEO, but only when you target topics where human experience and perspective are irreplaceable. The future lies in optimizing for AI-driven search, not just traditional rankings.
Mentioned in this Video
💡 Key Takeaways
💡
Blogs Help Only in Specific Cases
Clarifies that blogs are not dead, but their effectiveness depends on the strategy behind them.
00:28
🔧
The BARS Framework
Provides a practical tool to qualify content topics for business value before investing time.
01:06
📊
Low Click-Through on AI Citations
Reveals that being cited in AI overviews is not as valuable as many think.
02:32
💡
Query Fan-Out as Future Opportunity
Highlights a speculative but promising area for SEO optimization in AI-driven search.
02:57Full Transcript
[00:00] Do blogs still help with SEO? Not if you're blogging like it's 2020. Look, I've driven traffic increases like this to websites, mainly through blogging, but also some other procedure pages, only to see the drop off that you've seen in the last couple of years, mainly because of
[00:15] AI. Now, this was largely unforeseen, but now that we have seen it, I know how to avoid it. And I'm going to share that with you in this video. All right, so let's get into it. To start off, do blogs help with SEO?
[00:28] Well, sometimes, but the way it gets done most of the time, it doesn't. Let me explain. If you're using blogs as a way to earn backlinks from other websites as part of like a digital PR strategy or a way to passively earn links,
[00:41] great, it's going to help your SEO. If you're using blogs in a way to answer your solution unaware target customers' questions and then presenting what you do as a solution, that's not only going to help with SEO,
[00:53] No, that's gonna help with your bank account. But as you doing that how do you future the whole thing So we have a framework that we use to qualify content topics to make sure that they going to have business value before we spend time on them It called Bars
[01:06] I'm going to link to it in the description. Not going to get into super detail about it, but I am going to talk about the A in Bars. Someone going to be satisfied by an AI answer. So for lots of topics, people are going to perform the Google search and just take the information they get from the AI overview.
[01:20] And that's it. And as the years go by, more and more people are going to bypass Google entirely and go to chatgpt for that information. At the same time, there will always be topics where people are not going to want to hear from AI.
[01:32] They're going to want to hear from people with firsthand experience with a topic and a perspective. Those are the topics that you need to be focusing your blog content strategy on. So let's take a look at an example. What are the types of intraocular lenses
[01:44] that you can get implanted when you have cataract surgery? AI can do a good job of giving you that answer. Honestly, you don't really need to hear from an ophthalmologist for that. And unfortunately, that's the kind of traffic that goes away like the screenshot that I showed you earlier and your ability to get in front of that potential patient for the first time basically is gone On the other hand let take a topic like how common are starbursts with multifocal
[02:08] lenses, specific type of lens that they can implant that sometimes when you're driving at night, all the lights that you see look like they have massive stars around them. Yeah, it sounds pretty terrible, right? People are going to want to hear from surgeons and people that have had these procedures
[02:20] before, not AI and that traffic isn't going anywhere. It can help put money in your bank account. And frankly, that's the kind of content that I'm going to tell you you need to be focused on. Now, what about getting cited in AI overviews?
[02:32] The studies that I have seen up until this point are showing low single digit percentage click-through rates on those citations. In other words, there's not a lot of value that you're going to get from getting cited there.
[02:44] And frankly, the same thing goes for chat GPT. And I think that that argument is coming from SEOs that are terrified about their livelihood possibly drying up. But what about doing blogs for AI optimization? In particular, when you're optimizing for query fan out.
[02:57] All right so what am I talking about here On ChatGPT in Google AI mode when someone types in a query they very rarely three questions People aren using it like they use Google They'll type in something like,
[03:09] I need a digital marketing agency that has experience both in social media and SEO and that has a track record of success working with dermatologists. ChatGPT in the AI mode will now take that phrase, perform dozens of searches,
[03:24] pull together all of the information that it was able to uncover, and then basically synthesize everything into the results that you get when you're using ChatGPT or Google's AI mode. Now, this is something that I think over time, we're going to have to reverse engineer on a,
[03:39] let's say, search basis. And your website being part of that whole result could actually increase your likelihood of being recommended in what ChatGPT or AI mode is delivering to people. But the truth is, today, we don't know.
[03:52] This is speculative and theoretical at this point. So the short of it is, some blogs help with SEO, but a lot fewer than in October of 2022 before ChatGPT came along.
