Writing and SEO Word Soup Manga – Marketoonist

I recently met Jono Alderson, former head of SEO at Yoast, at the Brno Marketing Festival. He gave an interesting talk about the current state of content marketing.

Some of his observations resonated with me. That includes the insularity of using the same search engine optimization checklist as everyone else as a starting point for creating something.

The result is a pool of similar articles written for search engines rather than humans. The actual writing is often treated as an afterthought.

Jono said in a recent interview:

“You’re recursively optimizing a very small corpus until it’s just a soup of words.”

Now that content marketing is rapidly evolving with AI, the word soup is endless. And as LLMs digest existing word soups as source material, future word soups will become even more of the same.

This reminds me of what Ian Whitworth used to describe AI-generated content as “an infinite number of words that no one wants.”

Jono also said the race is heading toward rock bottom as search engines reinvent themselves using AI to provide people with answers rather than endless search results. He implored people to remember who their real audience is and what problems they can solve.

I don’t know what the future holds for content marketing (actually, I’ve never been that crazy about the word “content”). However, I still believe that the lost art of writing is important in communicating with others. It could be assisted by AI tools. But the path of least resistance is to leave everything to AI. And it feels like a race to the bottom to me.

When I have questions about the state of my writing, I always turn to Anne Handley (who was kind enough to write the foreword for my last book). She publishes a fresh and insightful newsletter about her writing and marketing called “Total Anarchy.”

Anne has some suggestions on how to incorporate AI as a tool to help you write more efficiently. For example, ask ChatGPT what their work is missing. But ultimately, she recommends that AI is a tool for better writing, not a replacement.

Anne’s latest advice was refreshingly analog: “Start with pen and paper.”

She explains:

“Don’t worry about ‘writing’. You are building the scaffolding to make your idea a reality. Become write.

“Why this works:

“I write slower than I type. Using analog tools slows me down. Your high-speed locomotive brain isn’t screaming ahead to get to the next sentence depot. Like a car driver waiting for a caboose at a railroad crossing, you have to wait patiently until your hand catches up.

“That slower pace ultimately gives you better insight.”

And at the end of the day, there’s not much point in writing without better insight.

Here are some related comics I’ve drawn over the years.