The Seotistics newsletter is written by Marco Giordano, a Data/Web Analyst with the goal of combining business and web data. Tired of the usual boring Analytics content without any business impact? Seotistics teaches you how to use Analytics, web data and even content in your workflow while helping you with Strategy.
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Beyond Traditional Content Views
Published about 8 hours agoΒ β’Β 6 min read
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Use Data Or Be Used By Data!
The October 27 issue of Seotistics is here for you!
Content this, content that... but does it work?
Yes of course it does! The issue is that too many people do the same mistake and think of content as homework.
This also goes to measurement, no wonder it doesn't work.
I will integrate some concepts from the past issues too.
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We've been taught to think about content as a way to get rankings or be noticed.
It's not wrong per se but it's a reductive way that polluted the Internet with slop.
You still see this today, especially when Ecommerce agencies propose X articles per month to "boost your rankings".
The process was simple and what many of us were taught:
Let's not deny it, this is how SEO was done not many years ago... and even today if you look at the SERPs.
This was also called copycat content and reached its peak before August 2023 when people were investing in content websites.
I've audited many websites on sale on broker platforms and 99% of them had the same patterns:
templated design
slop content, no originality and answering basic questions
Needless to say that almost all of them were annihilated in less than 2 years lol
The LLM/AI Era
Look, I don't think AI is the only cause why Google started prioritizing authority even more.
It's undeniable that now there are countless examples of AI written content in the wild.
Tool makers didn't waste a second to publish studies and speculations on the impact of AI content.
Ask yourself: "Would I actually read some commodity content I can generate myself with ChatGPT?" β The answer? Probably not.
What LLMs actually helped with is to make our life easier.
Yes because now I can create my personal knowledge base and ask AI to help me.
Or even create great Excalidraw visuals with Claude's help.
Or even produce code in 1/50 of the time it took me years ago.
AI Overviews / AI Mode
As of today, we have no 100% reliable way to gauge their impact.
But after all, who does with Web Data? π€£
Still, the effect is there and websites have noticed traffic drops and are interested in checking what happened.
My favorite solution is an API like DataForSEO, as I show in my Handbook (if you subscribed, you got it).
Need to check if something changed as DataForSEO has a new endpoint.
You could also use GTM to track them partially.
In terms of ranking, there is no real actionable item that differs from good omnichannel marketing.
Get good links, be mentioned, have a proper HTML structure, make sure your page is accessible to bots. β Not many actually do them all and this is SEO 101.
What I Matured Over The Years
After almost 8 years of content experience, I can say that you must practice consistently.
I've never followed the processes you read on mainstream publications and suchlike.
You need to test on your websites and see what works, consistently with their business model.
There is no need to talk about ICP or complex topics if you are a publisher.
To succeed, you need to churn content out, that's it.
This is completely different for a B2B SaaS. You can't even compare the two.
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The formats you use and even the quality are heavily affected by your niche, business model and country.
Ranking in the US is remarkably harder, this is no secret.
The Data Side
There are too many things to say about this topic, so I recommend you check out my other resources.
Anyway, there are some fatal mistakes people make:
removing content because "no SEO traffic"
not having content at all because "Amazon doesn't have it"
only using GA4 or GSC
I've assisted to cases where "SEOs" deleted 100s of pages for no reason and caused massive damage to websites.
Pruning is an art and you must know how to do it.
And so is an art using the data to create new content and sustain your content calendar π
As covered recently in my articles and content, we have too many choices for content.
There is a LOT of data, even if your website is small. It's also quite cheap!
Publishers do it all the time, especially for Google News and Discover.
Storing your data in a warehouse let you have control over your content workflows.
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Protecting & Managing Content
The concept of content database is still underrated, not many companies actually do it.
The reason why I mention this so often it's because it simply works!
Software like Airtable and NocoDB are ideal candidates as they are a mix between databases and Excel.
You can store your data there and augment it with more metadata:
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But... for my personal work and for many of you, a tool like Obsidian or Notion do the trick.
Obsidian in particular is my MVP and you can combine it with Claude MCP to summarize or order your text data:
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And the great thing is that pretty much all the content you read from me I plan there.
Labeling your content is a great exercise:
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In this way I am able to track different details about my LinkedIn posts, for example.
And every post is a "note", meaning I can open it as a separate page and store its content there.
No more reliance on 3rd-parties, these are simple markdown files!
This matters because I am creating my personal wiki or knowledge base... useful for LLMs in the present and next future.
I'll write an article on this flow because it's beneficial to most of you.
And if you want to know more about the mindset to analyze content and data in general:
LLMs resurfaced most of the branding concepts people ignored for years. I covered them in this past issue.
This includes monitoring your branded vs non-branded traffic:
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Of course the CTR will be sky high for branded keywords...
the point is to assess the ratio of the clicks and impressions across the 2 groups.
While you want to target "unaware" users with non-branded queries, you want to increase your branded share over time.
I monitor branded queries to see if people associate some topics to my name. β For example, people look for content decay + my name, which is a GREAT indicator.
Preserving Competitive Advantage
It'd be a pity if you spent a lot of money and time on content to lose it all, right?
This is what many companies go through after they publish and forget.
The most common reason is Content Decay, a natural phenomenon for which pages lose traction over time.
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You don't need to compulsively update your pages or do it every 6 months.
Be sure to monitor your performance properly and be prepared to take action.
Yes, there were changes in the SERPs recently but...
I am not even convinced AI has anything to do with it.
You'll see, not many things will change as they claim.
Organic Traffic By Not Doing SEO
As you can see from my stats below, I do get organic traffic but I don't exactly have content "for SEO".
The reason is simple, this is brand-building at its best.
When many armchair SEOs say build brands and don't do pure SEO, they are right.
Mind you, this is session scoped. But still, I never optimized anything, it's part of how I work.
The issue is that you must have done it in the past to realize it takes years of grind!
If you have the patience and resources to wait, this is the best way to go.
Proper SEO should be ingrained in your processes, not considerate as magic dust you sprinkle on content!
OK... But When Is Content Successful?
Let's keep it short:
it gets you "good" visibility
it aids sales
it helps people
These points will be covered in my future content but it's easy.
Don't overcomplicate it.
π₯ Join Our Community
Our Discord community offers a small place where we can talk business and web data.
If you hate all the noise of social media, then this place is for you.
I will start posting more there as we have a forum channel now.
This is the best way to stay updated in real time on Seotistics:
The Seotistics newsletter is written by Marco Giordano, a Data/Web Analyst with the goal of combining business and web data. Tired of the usual boring Analytics content without any business impact? Seotistics teaches you how to use Analytics, web data and even content in your workflow while helping you with Strategy.
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