It’s obvious at this point that the landscape of search traffic for publishers is rapidly changing, and not generally for the better. Every SEO I know is complaining about the same patterns: Google results getting swamped by low-quality content; the rise of quick fire-and-forget AI-generated SEO farms, which can impact heavily on short-term traffic in any topic area; and user-generated content being overvalued by Google.

Or, to summarise it: quality content is not, currently, winning the battle for attention.

And then of course there is Google and others’ experiments with putting more answers to search queries on the results page. I’m on record as believing that a lot of traffic, especially for pages designed to answer specific queries, is going to go away as AI gets better at answering questions. Even for affiliate content, I think the appeal of answers that you can have a conversation with, so you get a completely custom answer to, say, what laptop to buy, will be so high for consumers that publishers will see declines in traffic over the coming years. 

So then, publishers are facing a few years of transition from old models – where it was possible to get a lot of traffic from terms like “when is the Super Bowl” or “how much is a Ford Fiesta?” — to a future where every single question like that can be answered on the page. 

Knowing this, there is no point in setting a strategy for the coming year which doesn’t take account of this longer-term trend. But how can you do that, while also not losing large chunks of visits?

SEO strategies for the next year

The starting point is to look at keyword intent and analyse how likely it is that there is a long-term future for traffic. I follow a fairly standard intent-based split into four buckets:

• Informational: Getting specific answers, usually starting with how/why/whats and commonly answered with some kinds of tutorial
• Commercial: Usually showing some kind of purchase intent, at either early or late stages in the funnel. Almost always including bests, comparisons, reviews, product categories or product/service names. Best answered by reviews and comparisons, and, of course, the heart of affiliate revenue.
• Transactional: All about completing the immediate action of purchase. Usually involves keywords like “buy”, “cheap”, “quote” and sometimes also location-based, such as “buy cheap tires in Canterbury”. 
• Navigational: Site and brand names, typically typed in because you want to find a specific brand/product site. 

As SEMrush noted last year, transactional and commercial keywords are on the rise, while informational and navigational are declining. That’s good news if you’re looking to affiliate content to drive your revenue over the next year or so, but it also means that informational queries are both dropping in volume and will be answered more on the page through AI-driven features like Search Generative Experience (SGE). 

For entertainment brands that have come to rely on informational content about, say, Love Island and have no authority at all about products, this could lead to a particularly bad short-term squeeze. 

The temptation will be to try to turn entertainment brands into product focused ones, but it’s worth not going overboard with this, as over the long term it could dilute authority in other areas. To put it another way, if it doesn’t fit, don’t force it: no one really wants reviews of Love Island false eyelashes (sorry, Liverpool Echo).

Where you should be focusing across the board, though, is on quality, particularly in three areas:

• Originality
• Authorship
• Experience

For a long time, one of the dirty secrets of SEO work was the amount of time you could spend trying to steal traffic from your competition by creating “me too but better” content. Check out what keywords they were ranking for, and if you didn’t have equivalents, create them and go on an updating binge to get them to rank. This had the double whammy of both getting you traffic, and weakening your competition.

I told you it was dirty, didn’t I?

The problem with this was that combined with headings targeting related keywords, everyone ended up with content which was highly optimised but unoriginal. It all looked, and often read, the same. It’s no wonder that this is the kind of approach which has worked for using AI to generate quick sites for profit: any content approach which can be reduced to a mechanical process will ultimately be able to be done by an LLM. 

Unleash the quirk-en

To stand out, you are going to have to engage some originality in your approaches. That doesn’t mean abandoning the basics of on-page SEO, or never looking at your rivals for ideas. But it means that if your rival is taking an approach, thinking of an original way to answer the same need for the audience will help you stand out. And in a world of AI-generated grey goo content, you will need to stand out. 

How do you do that? Well, that is a creative question for you to answer – and you do still have some creative journalists left in the building, right? My personal favourite is The Verge’s magnificent pastiche of an affiliate article, but your mileage may vary – and more importantly, the things which make your audience laugh, cry, and so on are areas that only your experts can tell you.

Why Roland Barthes would have been a terrible SEO

The second area is our old friend authorship because far from being dead, the author is back at the centre of the universe. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you will already have good quality author pages which link to every single article from your author. You will also have purged your sites of those dreadful “Brand Byline” things which indicate either a confused content strategy or content with quality so low that no one wants to put their name on it. 

Now it’s time to go deeper, and that will mean using any means necessary to establish the authority of authors. Make sure that your authors are “out there” – no, not wearing tie-dye clothes and going to Grateful Dead gigs, I mean getting as many authoritative mentions on media you don’t own as possible. Guesting on podcasts, writing guest posts, being quoted by news organisations – encourage your authors to have and raise a professional profile. If one of your journalists is the go-to expert about a topic area, that will pay off over the long term in increases weight of their authority by Google, and the sum of their authority is your authority as a brand. 

There is no on-page or technical SEO fix for this. If your journalists spend all their time in the office churning out “me too” articles and never actually doing any work to raise their profile, they are never going to have enough authority. Set them free. Get them out making connections. Fly, my pretties, fly! 

Are you experienced?

This brings us nicely to the last point: experience. Not everyone noticed when, at the end of 2022, Google stopped talking about EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) and added an extra E: Experience. As they put it at the time, “does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced?”

Now, here’s another dirty little secret: quite a bit of affiliate-focused content out there is written with little or no actual experience of the product. Yes, that’s right, some people write reviews having never had the products in their hands. What, you think PRs are actually sending out products to hundreds and hundreds of big and small publishers for test? 

There was a good argument for this: doing reviews based on desk research was a time-saver. Rather than consumers having to comb through spec sheets and a thousand user reviews on Amazon, one journalist could do it well and get a better result, with the application of their expertise. But… it was always a bit of a cop-out, at least for major publishers who could get the real thing in for review.

In the era of experience, desk research is dead. You need to write from first-hand experience of the product, and you need to demonstrate it as often as you can in the copy. You are using first-person, right? Not only that, but you’re not still clinging to old-fashioned “we tested this” are you? If you are, 2024 is the year you stop doing that. It matters.  

Adapting to the new reality

This advice should be good for you in 2024, but it’s also vital as the foundation for the AI-driven search landscape to come. 

All three factors – originality, authorship, and expertise – are things that LLMs don’t have, and importantly probably will never have. Although a human can use an LLM to achieve original results, LLMs are, essentially, unoriginal thinkers. They are also not authors in their own right (no, LedeAI, you are not a journalist), so are unlikely to be able to build a profile outside your site. And while they have ingested a lot of expertise, LLMs are really experts in nothing – and, as good as it is, no one is going to invite Copilot on to the evening news to discuss anything (sorry Microsoft).

But here’s the thing: all of these human factors are expensive. Too many executives, particularly ones with boards that lack experience of frontline journalism (and yes, they do exist, and you can do your own research to find them) think that when journalists spend time not writing, they aren’t being productive. 

If your metrics are the number of articles, and not the quality of those articles, then you are going to struggle to adapt to the new reality. And then new reality really starts today.