(2024-12-23) Precopio Is Seo Dead Because That Would Make A Lot Of Sense

Joe Precopio: Is SEO Dead? Because That Would Make a Lot Of Sense. What if SEO died and no one told us? Who killed it? And what do we do now?

The conspiratorial among you will say, “Of course AI is to blame.” Because how could that not be true. Search was a process that was already plagued by low-grade, high volume garbage content and black-hat ethical tricks to sell you more phone cases, so it was already pretty ripe for AI to come in and just turn the whole science into a smoldering dumpster.

But it’s not like SEO was universally lauded in the days before AI went mainstream.

To underscore that, I’ve got one relatively new word for you: clickbait.
It couldn’t be more obvious that the term “clickbait” was born of the shenanigans employed by content publishers of all stripes to trick the wizard to game the algorithms to promote the content to sell the phone cases.

AI just automated that crap. Scaled it, if you will.

So who is actually to blame for the demise of SEO?

Of course it was Google.

The end game? Google doesn’t need SEO anymore, at least not in the state that it was. It needs an entirely different mechanism to return results and bait clicks and take a percentage off the conversion.

And it doesn’t need you or me or anyone else to create that content, magical or otherwise.

You want to know why your clicks have gone down? It would look a lot like that.

There’s a Way Out Of This

And it’s been staring us all in the face since the beginning of time.
Create good content.

the farther away I get from AI, SEO, or any sort of marketing monkey business, more people come, the engagement gets higher, the interaction gets stronger, the loyalty gets richer.

I’m writing shit people like.

I’d rather put my money on a human-first approach. For you marketers and business-folk, that means a customer-first approach.