SEO Expert Insights: July 2023 News Round-up

In this month’s episode of our SEO Expert Insights series, our co-founder James Owen will be giving his take on:

• Where the SEO industry is going
• What type of Link BuildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. you should be doing in 2023 and beyond

Let’s get started!

Video Transcription

Where Is The SEO Industry Going?

To kick off this month’s instalment, James shared a recent interaction with a client that got him asking: Where is the SEO industry going?

Client Story

“An SEO client came to us and asked us to do a proposal for them looking at strategy and a technical audit. We provided them with the proposal, quote, timeframe, and expectations. We then didn’t hear back from them for a while other than on-off dialogue.

Eventually, they came back and said that they were in the process of revamping their website, the proposal looked really good, but they had a question for us. They explained that they’d been using SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to help them out and why did they need to employ an SEO agency if they had access to those tools?”

It’s an interesting question!

When James dug deeper, he discovered the client was also using AI tools like ChatGPT to write their content. Knowing this, the SEO Team had a chat about where they thought the SEO industry was heading.

Here are their thoughts:  

SEO Tools Are Great For Monitoring

The team agreed that SEO tools are great and that every client should have access to them to learn about their keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. rankings and the linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. they are getting for monitoring purposes only.

How to use SEO tools effectively:  

• To give you guidance
• To monitor your progress for keywords in the search engine results pages (SERPs)
• To check the number of backlinks you are acquiring through outreach and natural acquisition

What SEO Tools Aren’t So Great For  

The team agreed that things change when you want to use SEO tools for auditing because they are 1-dimensional and don’t give you the full picture. They work by you putting your URL in and only looking at your site from an error standpoint, highlighting the fundamental issues.

SEO tools will not:

• Give you an effective strategy
• Tell you the type of content that you need
• Advise you on how to set up your site correctly

The consensus was that to gain real insight and value from these tools, businesses should hire an SEO agency or employ an in-house expert to crunch the data to inform their strategy and get results.

AI Is Starting To Shape The SEO Industry

To determine where the industry is going, it’s important to look at where Google is going in terms of AI. At the outset, Google was leapfrogged by Bing and what it was doing with ChatGPT. A few months later, it launched Bard.

What Does Google Think Of AI Content?

Google will always favour helpful and useful content. It has never said that it doesn’t accept AI-generated content. Instead, it has said that if the content is high-quality, helpful, and useful to the users, it will rank it. This sounds great on the surface, but maybe the reality isn’t quite so sweet.

AI Content Limitations

While ChatGPT seems helpful, it has its limitations:

• AI-generated content still requires human editing
• It is better used as an idea tool as opposed to a writing tool
• Only use it for low-quality content
• It should be avoided for long-form content

How Is Google Currently Ranking Content?

Since the start of the year, James has noticed a shift in the type of content that Google is displaying in the SERPs:

• It prefers the bigger brands when targeting commercial terms
• It prefers sites with long-form content

Any content you create needs to match what Google already displays for specific search terms and phrases relevant to your business and industry. If you don’t do this, you won’t win.

SEO Tips: Link Building

We all know that Google’s Link Spam Update came into effect in December 2022. Since then, websites that are doing the same type of low-quality link building have seen an impact when