Day Three...Email Three
Originally sent to the GrindstoneSEO email list.
By Grind — Founder of GrindstoneSEO. Building links since 2006. @GrindstoneSEO
The streak(ing) continues...
23 unsubscribes, 265 recipients that haven't opened either email yet.
On day 5 I'm just going to unsubscribe all the rel = noopeners.
Good riddance.
Why the focus on pruning the list?
Because I'd rather have 500 engaged readers than 5000 nonresponsive subscribers.
Subscribers is a vanity metric.
Engagement is where the wins happen.
In email and in SEO.
Yeah, I finally got there...deal with it.
Re-reading yesterdays links (you did, didn't you?), I feel like there's a real elephant in the SEO room that needs addressed.
AI content, for the most part, really sucks.
Sure, it's full of flowery prose and can even turn a phrase or three but honestly, it was never great and it's getting consistently worse.
My theory is that it's self learning, so the more generic AI content it spits out, the more generic AI content it learns from.
A real race to the bottom.
Custom models are the leverage point here but that's not what I'm going to write about today.
AI iterating itself is the equivalent of optimizing your content to the SERPS with Surfer or Frase or Cora and now suddenly you have derivatives of derivatives.
Sure, it's easy.
But easy isn't where the wins are in 2024.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
One step back....AI for testing purposes, 100% on board.
AI for fluffing out supporting topical content you don't care if anyone really reads it as long as Googlebot makes the proper associations, absolutely.
But AI for pages you want to rank long time...AND...and this is the big important AND...convert visitors to desired actions, this is not the way.
Those pages, you should be treating like your baby.
Craft them, edit them, continually add to them.
Make them awesome.
Then make them better.
I set up recurring Trello cards weekly for each important site that says simply 'Improve Content'.
Tweak the title.
Rewrite the intro paragraph.
Flesh out a thin section.
Turn a messy paragraph into a bullet list.
15-30 minutes once a week for your good ranking pages (or your pages you want to rank well) is well worth your effort.
Like Eli said, match and exceed.
Yeah, it's boring.
Hell, even writing about content is boring.
So I'm probably done.
I'll leave you with two things to consider on the topic.
This will get you further than tuning your content to page 1 (against sites with radically different backlink profiles than yours) ever will:
https://twitter.com/GrindstoneSEO/status/1741507371388813544
And this is an excellent read on the topic, not exactly how I do things but close enough for government work.
https://minuttia.com/topic-cluster-case-study/
That's it, no more boring up your email with content bulldazzle.
Tomorrow, if this storm doesn't suck up too much of my time, we'll talk links.
Cheers,
Grind
P.S. If you'd rather talk about things you want to talk about than read what I feel like talking about, feel free to book some time.
We'll go over whatever you want to.
Even how Joe Biden is the best President in US history (you'll be talking a lot if that's the case).
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