@tjrobertson52

Blog posts are gonna stop working pretty soon, right?

I talk a lot about how effective blog posts are right now for SEO, among other tactics, and one of the comments I get most often is, this is gonna stop working soon, though. Google's changing, AI is getting smarter, and these kind of tactics, we're just not gonna work much longer. We should focus on what's actually gonna work in the future.

And this makes sense in theory. A lot of SEOs think this way. The problem is, the future is really hard to predict.

I remember about eight years ago, 2018, Google had just started incorporating AI into their ranking systems. Google was saying, you don't need to create all these landing page variations targeting different keywords. For example, if you're a local business, you don't need to create a version of your homepage for every service area.

And that made sense to me. According to Google, their systems were now smart enough to understand what areas you serve, and you just need the one version of your homepage. In fact, it made so much sense to me that I decided to stop recommending this for my clients.

For about one to two years, I stopped doing this, saying, you know what? Google's changing, and this tactic isn't gonna make sense in the future.

Well, here we are, eight years later, and landing page variants work better than they ever have. And that's not the only thing.

For about as long, Google has also told us to stop focusing on keywords. Just create helpful content sharing your experience and expertise. But despite what Google says, if the content you're creating doesn't have a title that matches what people, or more often these days, AI is searching for, it's just not gonna get found.

And I'm not saying you need to match keywords exactly. Google's pretty good at understanding synonyms and intent these days. The title needs to match the intent of what people are searching for.

The truth is, for the last 20 years, the best SEO strategy has always been to do what's working now. And as I say that, I can hear all the SEO screaming about the Penguin and Panda update, so let me address that one potential exception to this rule.

Before 2011, the best SEO strategy was to stuff your content full of keywords and spam low quality links all over the internet pointing back to your website. The Penguin and Panda updates change that. And by 2013, this strategy mostly stopped working.

So yes, if you had predicted those updates, you could have saved yourself some trouble, but you also would have missed out on the biggest gold rush in SEO history. And let's be honest, no one was predicting that.

However, for the last 13 years, a lot of SEOs are trying to predict the next Panda or Penguin update, and for 13 years we really haven't had one. Now don't get me wrong, a lot has changed in the last 13 years, and AI is changing things dramatically. But at any point over the last 13 years, you would always be better off doing what works now than trying to predict what's gonna work in a year or two.

As of right now, blog posts and landing page variations are more effective than they've ever been because of AI. Will that still be the most effective strategy one or two years from now? It's impossible to predict.

But the chances that you're going to guess best strategy one or two years from now with the amount of information we have right now is very unlikely.

Personally, I think common investing advice applies here. Time in the market beats timing the market. Obviously, don't do anything that's gonna get you a penalty or make your brand look bad, but otherwise, use the data available to us and do what's working now.