SEO is Well and Truly Dead. Are You Willing to Cut Your Losses?

“Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find”

That’s the headline on an article this week from 404 Media, and it confirms the experience of just about everyone who regularly uses the internet.

When you go to search for something now on the internet, particularly when you’re looking to find a specific product or service, you’re no longer being served a useful set of recommendations. Instead, you’re seeing a tasting menu of cobbled-together, keyword-heavy blog posts that were written for one purpose and one purpose only — to get that company’s website to the top of the charts.

This terrible customer experience shows us that SEO has outlived its usefulness. I have long believed that SEO is less useful than it gets credit for, particularly for tech companies that are trying to go to market with an expensive product or service. But the rise of generative AI — and the accompanying explosion of SEO content overflowing with keywords — has made SEO obsolete even for its previously limited use cases.

If the internet is the ocean, then it has now reached a critical mass of pollution from SEO. Investing in these strategies will no longer provide a return on investment. The question is, are companies ready to cut their losses and pivot to a strategy that will actually deliver value?

Historically overrated: the SEO story

I’ve been banging my head against the wall about SEO for about four years now.

If you’re selling a printer, or if you’re a dentist trying to grow your client base, then SEO has some utility. You can imagine a customer typing “best home printer” into their search engine, or “dentist Fresno” if they’re looking for dentists in their area. Those companies and service providers can gain a lot of value from being at the top of those search results.

But imagine you’re selling a software product that has an average deal size of $80,000. Or that you’re a company bidding on multi-million dollar government contracts.

Your deals are not being decided as a result of search results. An enterprise CTO is not typing “best cybersecurity software” into Google and then going with whoever’s blog post pops up first. It simply doesn’t match with the way companies buy expensive services and products.

To make matters worse, SEO experts have essentially been playing a drawn out game of whack-a-mole. They sell their clients on a set of tools and strategies that will get them at the top of search results, but within a few months, Google has changed its priorities and adjusted its algorithms — what worked in January no longer works in July.

Is there value in having the shiniest garbage?

SEO’s previous utility was in bumping the visibility of consumer goods and services. The 404 Media article shows that even that use case is on its last legs:

The researchers warn that this rankings war is likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam, and that it genuinely threatens the future utility of search engines: "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention."

The best way to use content to sell your product or service is by providing value to the reader/potential customer. Educate them on your market and your solution, and help them to understand why they should choose you over a competitor. When you put value into the market, that value will return to you in the form of new customers and clients. Writing (or generating) SEO content doesn’t put value into the market — instead, it demands value from the market in the form of strong search results.

When every company can game search results using ChatGPT, the result for the end user is fundamentally useless, unreadable. Those who win the SEO battles with their AI-driven content will end up having the shiniest garbage in the trash heap — but is that actually worth anything?

Investing in an SEO strategy no longer makes sense. Those who continue spending money on SEO content and consultants would be better off setting that money on fire — at least that will generate some heat for a little while.

Tear off the Band-Aid

Businesses — especially B2B companies — need to stop throwing good money after bad by making SEO the focus of their content marketing.

SEO has historically been a solution for distribution, making it more likely that your message reaches your intended audience. It no longer performs that function, so organizations should rethink how they distribute their content as a result. They could identify the communities where their audience already spends time — whether that’s LinkedIn, platforms like Discord or large public Slack channels, or specific trade publications — and publish their content there. They could deliver their content directly via email, eschewing Hubspot automations in favor of personal messages delivered from sales leaders or C-suite executives.

This should be a freeing moment. When you realize that you no longer need to focus your strategy and your money on how to game an algorithm, you can instead focus on the content itself — how to deliver value to the end reader and persuade them to buy your product. This is an opportunity to embrace creativity and quality.?

Generative AI has taken everything you knew about content marketing and razed it to the ground — talk about a level playing field, an opportunity for the best messages and writers to rise to the top.