@tjrobertson52

Blogging has always been an important part of SEO, but that's been changing a lot lately because of AI. Even today, implementing an SEO campaign that didn't involve blogging is pretty much unheard of. What's changing are the types of blog posts that are effective and the method we use to write blog posts.

Over the weekend, I did an audit of a website that has become really the leader in their industry for information around their product and service. One thing we do with these audits is we run about 50 different prompts through all the big large language models to see which websites ChatGPT, and other large language models look at before they recommend this client or one of their competitors.

For this particular company, their website was actually the second most cited source by ChatGPT and other large language models. In other words, when people go to a large language model to ask questions about the product and service that this company offers, the second most cited source is this company's website. I think the first was Wikipedia.

However, if you look at the actual response from ChatGPT and other large language models after receiving one of these prompts, they were typically recommending one of the client's competitors over them. Even though this company was one of the primary sources of information the large language model was using to make the recommendation, there were five competitors being recommended more often than the company. And ultimately, that's all that really matters, right?

Is that recommendation. So how could that be? Well, the pages that these large language models are citing from the company's website are purely informational.

This is what we would call top of the funnel content. This content never really performed well, even in traditional search. But at least in traditional search, it brought people to your website, and from there, you might be able to convert them into customers.

When a large language model is pulling information from your website, all that matters is whether or not they recommend you. And so most SE0s that have been paying attention are switching to middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel content. Middle of the funnel content is gonna be buying guides, comparison articles, top 10 lists, anything that helps people make that purchase decision.

And bottom of the funnel content are gonna be your transactional pages, your product category or service pages. These are the ones that people will find when they're ready to buy something and they're just trying to decide which brand to go with. However, that doesn't mean there's no opportunity left in top of the funnel content.

For example, a how to article can perform really well if you're part of the solution. It's also worth noting that when these articles do well, they can attract backlinks. And at least for now, backlinks do still help.

My guess is they're gonna help less In the future, but they matter now. The important thing is that wherever the large language models are getting their information, you're being recommended on those pages. And that's whether or not the content is on your website.