I wouldn’t say google seo is “dead-dead,” just “dead,” which means it’s not dead but is probably not worth your time either.
I get a trickle of Google traffic to my little blog here. It’s never going to be a waterfall. At most it might turn into a creek or even a stream. But never a river, and never anything I could hang my hat on.
Here’s a google search I did today:
The AI overview, which takes up well over half of my laptop screen, assures me that seo is not dead (thank goodness). To the right are citations nobody will click on. Underneath all of that is juuuuuuust enough room for one organic seo result, which is reddit.
All ya gotta do for seo is beat out reddit. How hard could it be?
Now, if you squint at the above AI overview, two things immediately catch my eye. 1.) Google AI tells us chasing clicks is “obsolete” and that we should instead 2.) focus on “a strategy focused on AI citations,” which is a word salad meaning they want us to continue to create content that will help them generate AI answers without providing us with compensation, either via traffic or money.
They also suggest “zero-click search preservation,” which, again, means providing content for the AI machine while not receiving any compensation.
Are you familiar with The Borg. Big Tech wants to us to voluntarily assimilate our work into The Borg in which they receive all the benefits (money) and we receive nothing.
Oh, not nothing! They say. We receive a CITATION. In the fine print of AI generated answers there will be a link that says “42 citations for generated answer” and if somebody clicks on that link (they won’t) our website will proudly be listed among the 42 websites that were CITATIONS. They want us to fight for a CITATION. How grand! The endless hours of writing is finally worth it.
bad news for old school bloggers
I am 100% an old school blogger. I still yearn for the days of 2009 blogging, when individual blogs and independent forums were the hubs of the internet.
I miss when a blogger just has to blog and then Google would send the traffic and I didn’t have to be an Instagram “influencer” to drive traffic.
When I write blog posts, I’m still unconsciously thinking about how Google would prefer I structure the post rather than what is the best way to write the post for a human reader.
This old dog will have to accept a hard truth: seo is dead.
Oh, people will tell you otherwise. They’ll show you a graph with an impressive looking line in which their website (which offers seo services) is absolutely all over Google search results…except when you look a bit closer you’ll see the website gets a ton of impressions (meaningless), not clicks (important).
“so are you still blogging even though you’re being all doomy gloomy right now”
Yes, of course. I love to write and I love to blog. Blogging is my favorite medium for writing and I want to bring it back, not that it ever really left.
What I want to bring back is how blogs used to make me feel–excited, happy, motivated, thoughts of new possibilities.
I want to bring that feeling and joy to both old-school and new-school readers. Blogging still has a ton of life and possibility. I’m still on a mission to be a full time blogger. I believe there is still a path.
the bright side of seo not mattering
So much of internet writing was written in a certain format with certain wording all because it’s what Google wanted.
We don’t have to play by Google’s rules anymore! Rejoice!
Google slaps a penalty on your website because you didn’t follow some vague “best practices” policy? Who cares! Google wants to bury your blog and de-index your articles because you criticized big tech. I could care less.
Isn’t this great? We don’t have to write for Google anymore and we can instead write for our readers, crafting the best articles we can for other human beings and Google can’t stop us.
It’s a new era of blogging, baby! Let’s have some fun and look at the brightside.
if seo doesn’t send us traffic where do we get our traffic from
Oh crap. I almost forgot about this. The dream is to just type words and readers appear to read those words. That world is gone and readers must be found through other means.
This sadly means we will have to go to third party platforms to attract traffic: X, Instagram, etc. There is work to be done on third party platforms my friend, and if I ever find a way to just write and get readers and make money, I will 100% let you know.
How bad do you want to be a full time blogger, friend? If you want it bad enough, you will need to put in the work that goes beyond the writing! I’ll see you on the other side.