The term “in-house seo” has a reported search volume of 90-200 in the biggest rank trackers but doesn’t actually deliver any clicks.
To know what pages to create without keyword research, talk to customers and analyze what topics and questions they care about.
Analyze platforms like Reddit and YouTube for engagement and reverse engineer what topics work.
And, we can – and probably will have to – use paid search data to inform SEO because it’s more reflective of topics with the way that Google shows (Performance Max) ads to users in Search, which are similar to user intent.
To project traffic, look at domains or pages that are already visible for topics we care about, just not on the keyword level.
Clickstream data that reflects how users browse the web is much better because it doesn’t project potential traffic based on a keyword position.
Where keywords still make (some sense) is for analyzing historical search volume to project whether a topic is growing or shrinking, but I suggest using only large amounts of keywords.
A huge benefit of the aggregate traffic approach is that it transfers well to LLM because they don’t give us queries either, but we can track referral traffic on the domain and page level.
ChatGPT even adds a URL parameter to outgoing clicks that makes tracking easier.
LLM Defense: Activated
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
The real reason Google enforces JavaScript crawling is not to hurt SEO professionals but GenAI competitors.
ChatGPT and Perplexity are gaining significant ground. ChatGPT has already surpassed the traffic of Bing and Google’s Gemini. Perplexity is on the way there.
However, LLM crawlers can’t execute JavaScript, which means they can now no longer crawl Google’s search results to ground their answers.
(By the way, you need to make sure your content is accessible without JavaScript. Otherwise, LLMs can’t crawl it, and you can’t appear in their answers.)
The quality of some LLMs might decrease due to Google enforcing JavaScript, but only temporarily. LLMs can still get SERP data in other ways.
But one potential consequence of Google’s decision is that LLM developers build their own models or web indices to weigh answers and become independent of search engines.
The second-order effect of that would be that it’s no longer enough to do good SEO to appear in LLMs. We would have to reverse engineer LLM results like we did with Google.
If SEO is a game, winning in SEO now requires adjusting based on the flow (intent) of the game instead of counting cards (keywords).
The future of search is not keywords but intentions.
Let this be my official eulogy.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
1 Semrush Sensor
2 Almost Half of GSC Clicks Go to Hidden Terms – A Study by Ahrefs
3 2024 Zero-Click Search Study
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal