Everyone knows SEO is a long game.
But when we all use the same keyword and generative AI tools, argues Ryan Brock from DemandJump, we set back our efforts to create truly unique, one-of-a-kind content.
Ryan made his case and offered his solution to attendees of B2B Forum 2024. For Ryan’s perspective on where SEO is headed, watch this video clip or read the transcript below.
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We have this whole industry that’s cropped up since 2013 based on, “how do we figure out what people are searching for,” and how they got to your website.
Before this happened, it was incredibly easy to figure out how to engage with your audiences through the content that you put on your website.
We used to be able to cross-reference data about the keywords that drove traffic to our sites with basic metrics from ads API.
So maybe what I was doing was, I was looking at all of the keywords that were actually driving the most traffic. And then I was using that information to go to Google Keyword Planner and then searching for, “what are some related terms with similar volume that I can start targeting to broaden my net.”
You weren’t starting from a place of, “oh, I guess I’ll just pick this word because it looks like it’s got a big search volume number next to it,” which is what a lot of us end up doing.
Now with data restricted, suddenly we have these metrics from Google ads—like search volume, competition, and average bid—and they became the only metrics we had to work with, suddenly overnight.
And fast forward to today, what do you see?
We see the future development of SEO tools since then, following trends instead of working to improve the standard of data.
You think about what we see the last 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, even 10 years.
We see trends like backlinking.
We see whole companies built up, uber-companies if you will, built up, designed to help you get as many backlinks as you possibly can.
You have these industries coming up that have to help you with backlinks, because we don’t know a better way than backlinks to actually improve your site domain authority.
And so tools come out for backlinks. Tools come out for topic clustering.
But it’s based on the same semantic data that was really, really hot like five, six years ago where we have these semantic tools that are using these databases from Google Ads and they’re telling you, “hey, you need to write this content because this word looks like this word.”
And at the end of the day, all the data that we’re using in these tools is indirect.
That’s the main thesis that I’m making here.
Where we used to have all of this search data available to us freely where we could actually make intelligent decisions.
But like the Scarecrow, we moved to a place where we are trying to produce content using metrics that we’ve inherited from another industry.
PPC, paid search.
And at the end of the day, it ends up taking us six months, 12 months to know if the investment we’ve had in content even works.
What we’re doing is kind of crazy.
And so a lot of people are saying, “yeah, I’m good at SEO. I got stuff on page one that I wrote 12 months ago.”
But if I asked you what the ROI is on content for the last six months, you wouldn’t even know!
Because we’re all so used to just writing as much content as we can, throwing it out there, seeing if maybe 10% of what we write makes it to page one so that we can actually drive traffic.
It’s very difficult to pause and to just collect our thoughts and to say, “what is it that we are doing? What are we accomplishing here? What have we accomplished? And where should we focus our efforts?”
And so many people end up going about SEO in this just volume-shock-and-awe kind of way.
And the latest trend has been to use technology to do so.
Now, a little bit of history again…
Back when this was happening to the farmers who were suddenly stuck in a situation very much I think we are—where they kind of had to deal with these inherited best practices that didn’t really apply anymore in the environment they were in—a lot of Americans said, “hey, we’re going to go to industrial work instead because now Industrializations getting really big.”
So a lot of those same barons who were driving down the prices of goods were starting to employ a larger amount of Americans, who ended up in these horrible working conditions with no union representation, no rights, no anything. But were all becoming cogs in the machine.
And in fact, it was very, very common at the time for industrial workers to live in company towns like one here, right here in Massachusetts, Lowell, where the company controlled every aspect of life in commerce.
And so you bought your stuff from the company store and you would have your clothes deducted from your pay and you ended up sort of working for the company, but living for the company as well.
Of course, we can see why the Tin Man was a good representation of this in the story. He was rusted in place. He needed someone to help him out, but he was trapped by his situation. He was very efficient at chopping wood. That was his job. But he also couldn’t do anything under his own power anymore. He needed everybody around him to help him.
And many of us have begun trading our own straw hats.
What we did before with content doesn’t really work.
And so we try to use technology to help make SEO work for us again, because like I said, a lot of times I feel like SEO is a numbers game where it’s like: the more content you produce, the faster you get it out there, the more your odds go up of over a certain amount of time driving some organic traffic with that content.
So we use tools like ChatGPT to develop our content and help fill our websites faster and faster and faster.
But here’s the problem that I have with what we’re doing with AI right now.
While AI has made it easier to do keyword research and publish content, it’s still using the same broken data standard that drove us to want to use AI in the first place.
So when we ask AI for help, it’s still relying on those same metrics and on the same broken practices that go with those metrics.
And so it still takes forever for us to actually get results with it.
But now the race has begun and pressure to publish more, faster, is everywhere.
Google has even taken the time to add another E to EAT, to represent personal human experience, so that they can start telling the difference between an article that was written by an actual thought leader and one that was pumped out with an AI.
And they don’t have a problem with the AI…
But if that’s all that’s being written, they need another metric to judge whether or not your content is better than the next guy’s.
And so of course, they’re going to look for that unique perspective.
And then my problem, working in a software company, is that VC’s see AI as a modern gold rush. And so now every freaking tool out there has gotta have AI in it!
I’m putting AI into my tool right now.
But the point is, every platform at this moment is generative, which I think is a joke, right?
If every single platform can generate content, then that means the overall value of our goods, like the goods of the farmers and the scarecrow, is going down.
And if we’re not fast, if we don’t think hard about what we’re doing, it’s going to get us locked into the same sort of deflation that we faced before.
Published May 8, 2025
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