@tjrobertson52

As someone who's been doing SEO for clients for 16 years now, one thing that happens a lot is that clients will come to you and say, hey, this other SEO. Says we should be doing something different. And whenever this happens, I always look into whatever this other SEO is saying we should do.

Of course, when you've been doing this long enough, most of the time, whatever this other SEO. Is saying we should do, it's something we've already considered and we have good reason for not doing it. But I always look into it out of respect for the clients.

And every once in a while, someone has a good idea that we can use. But recently I've been seeing a new version of this that I wanna talk about. A lot of my clients have been coming to me and not saying, hey, this other SEO said this, but ChatGPT said there's this other strategy we should try.

And while ChatGPT's advice is very predictable, the one thing that's different is that it almost never has terrible advice. In fact, most of the time the advice is pretty good. Now, I can already hear the other SEO saying, what are you talking about?

TJ? ChatGPT just regurgitates the most common response online and most common SEO advice is terrible. And I do think that's partly true.

I think if you're in the top 20% Of SEO, ChatGPT is not gonna offer anything new and sometimes it's just gonna say things that are outright wrong for the most part though you're getting an aggregate of what all the other SEOs online are saying however, if you're using one of the thinking models like ChatGPT 0 3 it's actually gonna go one step further it's gonna collect a bunch of ideas and

then reason about which idea is best so while an experienced s e o who's keeping up with Google changes can still give you better advice than ChatGPT I think we've reached the point where ChatGPT can give you better advice than the average s e o or even an experienced SEO that isn't keeping up with the changes and that's a fundamental shift in what makes SEO agencies and SEO consultants valuable it

used to be that businesses had to pay people in agencies like us because that was the only way to gain access to the knowledge about how to rank in Google but now any business owner can go to ChatGPT just make sure you're using the O3 model and in my experience get better advice than they're gonna get from most SEOs in fact, a lot of times when clients come to me now

and say they heard some advice from some other SEO I just tell them to run it by ChatGPT it's the easiest way to show when A terrible idea goes against common consensus without them having to just take my word for it so right now ChatGPT is probably as knowledgeable as 70 to 80% of SEOs and it's just gonna keep getting smarter pretty soon it'll be 90% 95% of SEOs so as

the value of that knowledge goes down where is the remaining value of an SEO agency or consultant?

I think there's two places where we can still be very valuable at least for a few years one is that we can keep up with the changes faster than the L L m's can even though ChatGPT can search the internet its training data cut off is months ago at best with things changing as quickly as they are right now there are going to be new opportunities every month and ChatGPT is

going to have a hard time reasoning about those new strategies that being said it seems like it's only a matter of time before ChatGPT can do that very well and the other place for valuable is on execution because SEO of course isn't just about knowledge it's also about doing the work and that's why I think in the future SEO and digital marketing more generally is really gonna break off into two

different camps you'll have the top 1% that the best in the world of what they do and they can charge premium prices and then you'll have some kind of commoditized service.

Agencies were consultants who figured out how to do high quality work at scale at a really good rate. So if you're paying in an SEO agency or consultant right now, they should either be one of the best in the world or you should expect them to be lowering the rates, giving you more value for the same amount of money. AI is making it way easier to do our job, and there's no reason why you shouldn't get some of that benefit.