Sean Sandhurst

Google mapped out how every search works back in 2015. Every search is one of four things: know, go, do, buy. Most brands only show up for buy. AI is filling the other three right now. Answer the Public shows you exactly what to make. One piece per moment. That's how you stop being invisible. #SEO #AISearch #ContentStrategy #DigitalMarketing

AI doesn't eleminate all of the steps in content marketing, but it does make it 37.5% more efficient. On average, the 300 marketers we surveyed have 8 steps in their content creation process. When they use AI they on average are able to eliminate 3 of the steps.

We analyzed 12,037 sessions of 1013 people searching on Google to better understand how people use search and what they click on. Here’s what we learned: 1. Only 11% of people scrolled to the bottom of page 1. In most cases, people clicked on a result towards the top of the search results page as they found what they were looking for. 2. From all the sessions, 58% of people clicked on an organic listing, 8% clicked on a paid result (not all results pages contained paid ads) and 34% had no clicks. 3. When a search result page contained a video above the fold, searchers clicked on it 61% of the time. 4. For local queries, the maps results got 52% of the clicks. 5. 7% of searchers modified their search query, typically because they didn’t find what they were looking for. 6. 19% of the time people used one of the suggested search queries provided by Google autocomplete. 7. When people searched for a product, 14% of the time they clicked on a Google Shopping result. And they were 3.3X more likely to click on a shopping result over an Amazon organic listing. 8. Of the users that clicked on an organic result, 35% of the time people clicked the back button. 9. The average search duration was 59 seconds. And of the users that clicked on a listing, 54% of the time they only clicked on 1 result.

Content strategies that always work. I’ve been creating content for 23 years now. And even though there have been a lot of updates to algorithms for both search and social, there are few things that have stayed consistent. 1. Don’t hire writers to write content – hire industry experts. If I wanted to create content about fixing a clogged toilet, I would have a plumber help me, not a writer. You can always hire a writer to review and spruce things up. 2. The basics always work – you don’t need to create a masterpiece like Hemingway. Writing how-to guides and list-based posts keeps working. 3. Evergreen content is the best content – writing something that is news-related is great if you want a quick burst of traffic. If you look at the type of content that makes up most of a site’s SEO traffic it’s evergreen content. 4. Thoroughness has always won – this doesn’t mean longer is better. Just make sure your content covers every angle and you’ll be fine. Try to of course do that in fewer words. No one wants to read 5000 words when you could have gotten the message across in 2000 words. 5. Content is only good when fresh – even if you have evergreen content, people expect it to be updated continually. No one wants to read something 3 years old when it could be 3 weeks old. This is why Wikipedia ranks so high. They keep updating their content.