Is the future of SEO less content?

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of Keywords People Usecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hi, this is episode 87 of SEO is not that hard? And today I'm going to ask you the question is the future of SEO, less content? Now? I'm saying this because, with the recent updates we've been having and the sites that have been hit by HCU and the whole niche site community and how that community sort of spoke over the past couple of years about content was always about how many posts per month they were going to produce, how many posts they aimed to get on their websites over the course of a year or however period. It was always about content velocity although they didn't call it that Just churning content really being like a content mill in many respects. This kind of theory has seemed to be taken to the next level by people who were producing AI content, really ramping up that level of content, using AI to produce huge amounts of content, huge numbers of posts and pages, over a very short period of time. That concept of drawing in more traffic by generating more content was something that Google's clearly trying to hit at at the moment. That's why we're clearly seeing, with sites being de-indexed and helpful content updates and things like that, where I think Google's trying to target those kind of pages which aimed to those kind of websites that aimed to grow purely by growing the amount of content on their sites. This whole constantly producing new content isn't one I've really in the past that I've actually bought into.

If you go back and if you look at Broadbanded Code at UK, you'll see that over the many years that we owned it, we didn't actually produce a huge number of pages. There was certainly a programmatic side to that site and there still is which is where pages get created based on the database of broadband suppliers and broadband deals that those suppliers have. So as providers come and go, new pages will be put in and old pages will be removed. As suppliers go out of bust or rebrand, you will see that deal pages would come and go as deals came and went. Some suppliers kept their deal names the same for many years. So those pages would stay, others would go. But the actual core number of pages there was not huge we're talking a few hundred maybe.

And then we had our informational content, kind of topofone content, which was things like guide pages, and there's only actually so much you can write about a subject and we tried to find new angles all the time. There was only so many. When we're talking, we're talking a small three-figure number of these guide pages and tip pages and things like that, which, when you consider how long that site was in existence and it's to the in existence, it's a 20-plus year old site. That's actually not a lot of actual pages. So we never concentrated on trying to have a velocity of pages.

What we were about was the quality of the pages, making those pages useful and helpful, and this was way before Google was talking about helpful content. We just wanted to make sure that that content was good, and that was for several reasons, because what we generally wanted to be useful be we wanted good enough that people would link to. So, with that said, I think it's clearly that I think you know that quality is gonna trump quantity even more than it previously has done. Now. That's not to say there is like a defined limit of the number of posts you should put out in a period or the number of posts or pages that a website should have, and but it's clearly gonna be very topic dependent and I think that the time of taking every single question you could think of related to a topic or you could find related to a topic and creating a single page on that question is probably gone. I think that that is clearly I don't know that it's gonna be helpful.

And we've got this new functionality that we've added to Keyword's people use, which is keyword clustering, and this is where you can put in a group of keywords or group of questions or do a search with a seed keyword and we'll find a whole bunch of questions or keywords related to the seed keyword you've given us and we'll then go to Google and do a Google search for each one of those keywords in turn and then find which keywords have search engine results you know in common. How many of the top organic results do those keywords have in common? And we can clearly see the results that we're finding from that is that Google is ranking the same pages for multiple keywords, so particularly apparent with questions. So you know you need to answer more questions on a single page rather than having a single page for each question, and it's key to group and cluster question the related questions together and get them on the same page for Google, because Google is clearly looking to, it's looking at all these questions and it knows which ones are semantically similar and it would ideally like an individual page to cover as many semantically similar questions and keywords as possible, rather than having huge numbers of different pages for each different keyword. So this is where I think you know there is the future is potentially less content.

Now, it doesn't mean less writing, necessarily, or less content production, but it definitely, I think, means less pages and more focused pages. So, yeah, so if you've got a say of 20 questions and they actually cluster over two pages maybe eight and one and 12 on the other then that's clearly two pages of content you need to create, not 20. I don't think there's any benefit in creating 20. It's more indexing for Google. If it's got indexed more pages, it's clearly trying to reduce the amount of pages it's indexing. Well, I say reduce the amount of pages indexing in total, isn't that maybe wrong? It's still got a big index, but I think what it's trying to do is stop the indexing, getting away from it. It's clearly made a decision that it can't index every single page that's being created, especially in the age of AI, and you know there's definitely there are crawl budgets. There are limits to the amount of pages that Google will index for anyone's site, especially for newer sites.

So if you can reduce the number of pages while still covering the topic and the questions and the keywords that you need to do to reduce the number of pages, that clearly to me seems possibly like the way it's gonna go and, like I say, it harks back very well to when we were running board by Nutcutter UK and we didn't have huge numbers of pages. We covered the topics well on the pages that we did have and picked up lots and lots of keywords for every single page. Rather than having a page for each keyword we're targeting, we just essentially were clustering them ourselves, but we didn't have the data that we have now that we can get, say, with the clustering tool, that we've got the keywords people use. There's a lot now we can do and I just wish we had that tool back a few years ago because we could have improved our content, we could have ranked for even more keywords and done it much more efficiently if we'd had that in the past. But so to be you know, the reason I built it is because it wasn't there in the first place for us, and that's how we built it now.

But yeah, just to sort of conclude, I think that there's gonna be a definite shift potentially here in how people approach creating content to try and rank. Google's saying don't create content to try and rank, but everyone does. You know, we're not creating content just for the fun of it. At least most people aren't. And while we are always trying to be useful I'm sure everybody is there's always an eye on ranking. But I think that hitting arbitrary post or page limit a month and trying to churn out a certain number to try and grow traffic that way, that possibly needs to be reversed, and it could be as much as going back and actually thinking right, we've got pages that are ranking. What can we add to them to actually rank for more things? How can we bulk these out, rather than how do we, you know, just create more and more pages?

But just where my thinking's going at the moment and it's just something that I want to share, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you think differently, if you think along the same lines but or maybe think something completely different, yeah, just let me know. I'd love to hear there's. All the ways to contact me are in the outro at the end of this episode. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode.

Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel five on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO. It's not that hard.