I started practicing SEO in 2007, when I was searching for ways to attract more attention to one of the Internet's very first music blogs, betterpropaganda.com. (Now defunct, sadly: the RIAA comes for us all...)
What started as a quest to get more eyeballs on my humble little album and artist reviews turned into a full-fledged career directing SEO and content marketing strategies for eCommerce brands large and small (mostly small—I have a soft spot for that sort of thing). Early in my career, I promoted a handful of tech startups in the SF Bay Area, focusing first on live music, then in the ed-tech and career development space.
In recent years, I have found myself at home in the solar industry, publishing educational content for enterprising DIYers looking to install their own solar power systems. My work has helped several leading retailers improve their rankings in organic search results, including SolarTown, GoGreenSolar, and Unbound Solar (formerly Wholesale Solar). If you go out and search for "solar kits" or "DIY solar" or "off-grid solar," these are some of the companies that turn up.
Thought the search landscape has evolved, the strategies that help you succeed in search remain largely unchanged. Sure, you can upload an LLMs.txt file, and use Schema markup, and structure your content with a clear "questions & answers" architecture to help AI tools parse your content. And those are even things I would advocate for.
But most of what works to land in the AI-generated results is the same stuff that worked before any of that existed: create really high-quality content that genuinely helps users, optimize the heck out of it, and then get people off-site to talk about it, so that the algorithms start to understand your brand is trustworthy.
Crucially, the kinds of things that help you rank are not created by AI.
And so we come to the reason I founded Intentionally Orange. I have some very specific ideas about content creation. They are ideas that have not always been popular with my bosses. But they are Ideas That Work. And it pretty much boils down to this:
- Your content should be useful to your visitors. Don't worry about selling stuff. People buy from people they trust, and trust is built by looking out for the best interests of the people who come to you for answers. If you prove to people you're trustworthy, sales come naturally.
- Be radically honest. If your products or services aren't right for people, tell them. Not only does this disqualify the problem customers who aren't a good fit for your business, it helps the customers who are qualified understand that you won't upsell them on shit they don't really need. (I guess this is just the "be trustworthy" point again, but in different packaging.)
- Expertise matters. You go above and beyond by being smarter, more thorough, more experienced, and more insightful than anyone else in the room. Again and again, I've found that if you can produce the most complete and useful resource on any particular topic that people are searching for, you will be rewarded with front-page rankings for those search terms. But you have to put the effort in. You can't half-ass it.
AI can do none of these things.
The Internet is now flooded with lowest-common-denominator AI slop. And yes, it is slop: just a heaping pile of nondescript words, some mushy, oatmeal-gray approximation of a nourishing meal.
AI, by definition, cannot create insightful content. Because it doesn't have any insight into anything. What it does instead is parses the content from other creators who have previously published some insightful things*, and then parrots that information back to you, in an attempt to sound smart. By its very nature, AI can't say anything that hasn't already been said before; it can't add anything to the conversation, other than a whole lot of regurgitated drivel.
*It might be more accurate to say that it pulls from sources that sound insightful. AI has notoriously been trained on a bunch of content that sounds convincing, but is actually just wrong. So you get patently false information presented with the conviction of the Kool-Aid Man bursting through a brick wall. OH NO!!!
And I tell you what, dear reader: people are tired of it. We've been on the Internet for a long time. We have finely-tuned BS detectors. We can tell when someone has asked Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini to whip up this landing page or that blog post to make us sound like they know what they're talking about.
Businesses are trying to catfish us with AI, but we're not falling for it.
Like Justice Potter Stewart once famously said, "I know it when I see it." The short, choppy sentences. "It's not this, it's that." And the dreaded em dash—which they can pry from my cold, dead hands, by the way.
We know AI-generated content when we see it, and we are clicking away, like, so fast. Many a small business (and also the large ones) has absolutely cratered their traffic by handing content creation and SEO strategy over to AI tools.
AI has produced content which is written by no one, belongs to no one, and helps no one. And it is not being rewarded. The output is mediocre, at best, and the results have been disastrous, at worst. Their site traffic takes a nosedive because nobody wants to read what they're publishing.
Human-made content is more important than ever. Google's North Star for quality content goes by the acronym E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust. And these are qualities which only humans can embody. We want to learn the things that real experts, with real-world experience, can teach us about their area of expertise.
We're looking for the information we can't find anywhere else. We need the house cleaner to tell us to loop the phone charger cable between the slats of the headboard, so we don't have to pick it up off the floor every night. We need the trucker to tell us to turn off recirculating air on road trips, because trapped C02 accumulates in the cabin and makes us feel sleepy on long drives. We need the solar installer to tell us that installing your all-in-one DIY solar kits can void certain product warranties and make it harder to sell your home, because who wants to buy a house with an electrical system that wasn't installed by a licensed and insured contractor? (My bosses didn't like that one, but I can promise you my customers appreciated it.)
I'm rambling, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It's part of what makes me human. And what I've found is that other human beings don't care about your imperfections. In fact, we tend to celebrate them. We want the typos and the "I'm not sures" and the impassioned screeds that don't follow the five-paragraph essay format. We're adding "reddit" to the end of our Google searches, desperate for honest, neutral feedback from forum users who we presume are real people (though the savviest marketers are astroturfing those spaces now, as well). If you can set them right with great advice, they're ready to hear it, warts and all.
As the Internet becomes overrun with generic, low-effort content, the businesses that truly stand out are the ones that can demonstrate 1) a deep understanding of the thing they are talking about, and 2) a deep willingness to help people get the answers they need, regardless of whether that person plans to give you any money or not. That's how you build the authority and trust that search engines hold in such high regard.
My point is this: if you want to become a thought leader in your space, start by having thoughts.
AI could never.