SEO Content Has a Packaging Problem — Whiteboard Friday
The author’s views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
In this episode
Bernard explains why SEO content overseas data has a packaging problem, introducing concepts such as perspectives to help address the issue.
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Hello, and welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Bernard. Founder of Clearscope, and I want to talk to you about why SEO content has a packaging problem.
The end of the “skyscraper technique” era
Now, you’re probably familiar with the skyscraper technique popularized by Backlinko a decade ago. This, as an SEO strategy, encouraged the enhancement of content by adding more and more density of subsections, related topics to your piece of content that improved its comprehensiveness and relevancy. And for a period of time. It worked really well in Google search. That era has been coming close to an end with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) overviews.
Google has been serving
users a quick answer populated by their large language model (LLM). Gemini, that’s designed to answer a lot of the high consensus answers that a user is likely to care about given a particular topic.
What we also know is that Google is really keen on understanding whether or not content is meeting searcher needs with the usage of user engagement signal. Which means that Google knows when somebody clicks on a site how long they spent. Whether that was a long click, a bad click, or a last click. And they’re using that to inform whether or not the content you’re producing is relevant.
Well, you can imagine with the advent of large language models, there has been a rapid commoditization of content being generated. And a lot of these LLMs struggle with serving users unique and interesting perspectives given the topic. But what they are really good at. Guess what. Is creating this stock kind of content that addresses the basics of what a topic is and how to do a specific topic.
How topic clusters are changing
Topic clusters and how they are changing
What this means is that 5 main advantages of regular oil changes in the car the traditional topic cluster model that you used in the past is really starting to lose a lot of relevance in how to create and architect an SEO content strategy. In the past, this, as an idea would work really well. You would create six pieces of content targeting the what. Best, how, why, pros and cons, and for the most part, if you built some links and you had some relevant content, it would work.
Well, you can imagine with
the advent of AI overviews, Google is actually cannibalizing a lot of that content from the what, why, how queries. And what they’re expecting is us, as SEO content creators, to offer searchers unique, original, and relevant, engaging perspectives eu phone number that are firsthand. That’s why we’re seeing this advent of UGC sites like Reddit, Quora, and different discussion boards really coming into the search engine results page.
