Today, I’m thinking about reward systems and how SEO and content people are rewarded. We are rewarded by rankings, which hopefully those rankings drive revenue.

But we all know that if I get hired for content marketing work and the rankings don’t go up, I’m going to be in trouble. What if we got rewarded instead of reprimanded?

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Imagine if you could reward SEO and content work based on what people think of a post, not solely on what Google’s algorithm thinks of it. After all, isn’t Google ranking just a proxy for what Google thinks would be valuable to humans? So what happens when humans love your content but the algorithm doesn’t? Is that a loss?

To do that, we would have to re-think the key performance indicators (KPIs) for successful SEO and content projects.

What if there is a balance of value? Are ten visits to a piece of content from ranking on Google the equivalent of someone in a highly curated group posting your great content to a list of peers, and ten of them click on it?

I posit that writing the same old content to “outrank” the competitors based on semantic signals, which are based on what is already being done, will help you win in rankings. But now you have just fallen into the sea of sameness trap.

But what if I wanted to try to drive a massive wedge between my content and everything that ranks in the top 10?

We all have our own approaches, as SEO is a job won on the margins, but it usually requires:

• Competitive analysis

• Keyword research

• Link building (internal & external)

• Monitoring of rankings

Then, launch your content and see how the rankings move up. You’ve won, right? Not so fast — maybe you just lost.

In the immortal words of Lauryn Hill, you might win some, but you really lost one. What happens when you win rankings, but no one is thanking you for the content you wrote? You won the algorithm and lost the human.

Notice how we’re rewarded for getting an outcome that has nothing to do with improving how searchers feel about the brand or on the quality of the information we just gave them. So maybe your high ranking is an underutilized asset.

SEO and organic social are usually not a 1+1=3. They are completely siloed because the reward systems don’t line up.

What would happen if we were willing to sacrifice a high ranking to get more people to thank us for how much we educated them?

I have been playing with two new approaches to SEO and content using social. Let me share them with you.

Writing great content takes time, and in the future the hard marketing is what is going to get rewarded. Hard marketing is the stuff that takes hours and isn’t easy to copy, like building a brand, doing a video, or interviewing people.

Got an idea you think is great and revolutionary? Ask ChatGPT to shoot holes or tell you if it is common knowledge.

How would you know if the content you are preparing to spend hours writing is worth building in a search engine-less world? Give yourself ten minutes and use a prompt like this:

“You are one of the top thought leaders in the SEO industry. I am coming to you because I have ideas I want to write about, I have been writing content and posting it to LinkedIn, and no one seems to care; your job is to be a VERY tough judge of my ideas, be extremely blunt. Reply only with answers that tell me to come up with another idea or to start writing this one, ok? Do you understand?”

You may get a response like this:

Then, ask it why? Then you can check the thinking. Now you have an idea worth writing a hot take on:

OK, so now you have a new approach that isn’t the same old that everyone else wrote. Start writing your blog post… NO. Try it out on social first. My preferred “does anyone care” platform is Linkedin.

Every LinkedIn account has an engagement pattern. Once you take the time to know your pattern (i.e. most posts about my work get 15 likes, 4 comments, and 1 repost in 3 days), you can now post your spicy hot take.

Does the new LinkedIn hot take wind up outperforming your typical posts in your industry?

Take 1

First, I was listening to a podcast that got me thinking about AI and careers in new ways, so I posted a spicy, hot take from it.

Take 2, same topic, more spice

It stirred up something based on the commentary, data, etc., and I knew I had an outlier.

This time, I fed the algorithm a bit of what it wanted — an image, a quote, etc. Look at how that one performed. I now had two posts on the same topic that outperformed the usual pattern — and what I was thinking wasn’t the typical answer from ChatGPT.

So, in total, I put 8 hours into this post, the AI career survival kit for marketers. I de-risked the major time investment by comparing my two hot takes to my typical post and went in. Now, the big post didn’t outperform the hot take, but it did quite well with humans.

And it drove traffic:

Only now am I starting to think about tweaking this for search because I know people seemed to care enough about it to keep going.

Here’s a challenge: search “SEO RFP” on Google. Click on the results, and tell me how similar they are.

We did the same thing every other SEO does: We asked, “What words are thematically relevant?” Which themes have my competitors missed?” How can I put them in?” AND “How can I do everything just slightly better than they can?”

Then they do the same, and it becomes a cycle of beating mediocre content with slightly less mediocre content.

When I looked at our high-ranking content, I felt uncomfortable. Yes, it ranked, but it wasn’t overly helpful compared to everything else that ranked.

Ranking isn’t the job to be done; it is just a proxy.

Why would a high-ranking keyword make me feel uncomfortable? Isn’t that the whole freaking job to be done? Not for me. The job to be done is to help educate people, and ranking is a byproduct of doing that well.

I looked at our own content, and I put myself in the seat of a searcher, not an SEO; I looked at the top four rankings and decided that our content felt easy, almost ChatGPT-ish. It was predictable, it was repeatable, and it lacked hot takes and spicy punches.

So, I removed 80% of the content and replaced it with the 38 questions I would ask if I was hiring an SEO. I’m a 25-year SME, and I know what I would be looking for in these turbulent times. I wanted to write the questions that didn’t exist on anything ranking in the top ten. This was a risk, why? Because, semantically, I was going against what Google was likely expecting to see on this topic. This is when Mike King told me about information gain. Google will give you a boost in ranking signals if you bring it new info. Maybe breaking out of the sea of sameness + some social signals could be a key factor in improving rankings on top of doing the traditional SEO work.

What’s worth more?

Ten visits to my SEO RFP post from people to my content via a private procurement WhatsApp group or LinkedIn group?

One hundred people to the same content from search?

I had to make a call, and I was willing to lose rankings (that were getting low traffic but highly valued traffic) to write something that when people read it, they thought enough about it to share it in emails, groups, etc.

SME as the unlock to standout content?

I literally just asked myself, “Wil, what would you ask yourself if you were hiring an SEO company? Then I riffed for 6—8 hours and had tons of chats with ChatGPT. I was asking ChatGPT to get me thinking differently. Things like, “what would create the most value?” I never constrained myself to “what is the search volume,” I started with the riffs.

If I was going to lose my rankings, I had to socially promote it so people knew it existed. That was an unlock, too, if you go this route. It’s work, you are now going to rely on spikes from social, so having a reason to update it and put it back in social is very important.

Most of my “followers” aren’t looking for SEO services as they are digital marketers themselves. So I didn’t expect this post to take off HUGLEY, but given the content, I was shocked at how well it did and how much engagement it got from real actual people.

Then, I started seeing referrals from Microsoft Teams. This content is getting shared in intranets and other places.

The traffic did come — it was social, and we had won some hearts and minds!!!!

People responded with comments, shares, and my favorite thing… dark social… meaning it was likely getting shares in Slack, Teams, emails, private groups, etc.

In a world where there is just WAY too much average content already, and with AI likely just making the problem worse, people are looking more than ever for their networks to help them. I want to build content that gets more and more social. Once I see on social media that this thing takes off, now I know it's worth doing more optimization to the post because humans, not proxies for humans, said… “this is valuable.”

If you are trying to win at humans, there are two problems.

1. You can’t set it and forget it. You have to likely update that post every 3-6 months with valuable additions that aren’t already in the LLMs. Eventually, your content could be absorbed into the LLM and become common knowledge.

2. That means you need to make ongoing efforts to repeatedly get it in front of humans after you update it, meaning organic social media with your internal team and your corporate social teams needs to be taken into account.

How I am addressing those two problems

My next step for my SEO RFP post is to interview some procurement people so the post better empathizes with them. I am the SEO SME, but now I want the procurement SME to explain their side.

I don’t think most “semantic search” tools that look at all the pages that are ranking are going to tell me to include words that procurement people use in my post, but you know who wants me to use words that procurement people understand? PROCUREMENT people. Isn’t that the true audience for this post?

When I look at the sea of sameness on the SEO RFP side, no one interviewed the procurement teams, so that gives me a more unique angle. It also gives me an opportunity to get this into more procurement groups maybe. That traffic is very highly valued because I am taking up real estate as a brand in people’s minds. Sea of sameness content never takes up brand real estate because anyone from any company could have written it.

You see how what started as a post written by an SEO/content marketer leveled up with a SME (me), which now I want to level up with other interviews of SEOs and procurement people?

Maybe the future of content marketing is a combination of SEOs who are GREAT at asking questions to practitioners with spicy hot takes.

I once bought a client a tape recorder in 2015 to get his insights, and we’d call him to ask him questions. Then, he would hit record on the recorder and we’d talk on his drives. We produced content and skyrocketed to the top 3 for one of the most competitive terms I ever worked on.

Moving forward, I believe that leveraging subject matter experts will be key to creating unique, valuable content with hot takes that aren’t the same old stuff.

Our jobs will be to be really good at interviewing, pulling out of people what they believe, not what some semantic tool tells you to put on the page. We will still use those tools to help us structure those questions in ways that get them naturally, including keywords and phrases that we think will help ranking (Google & LLMs) and thanking (humans).