SEO Isn’t Dead – It’s Everywhere: Part 6

At this point, let me address a pitfall I see many businesses (and marketers) falling into: what I call “majoring in minors.” This is when teams spend an inordinate amount of time and energy on trivial or surface-level issues, while neglecting the big-picture strategy. In the context of “SEO is dead” and AI disruption, majoring in minors can take several forms, all of which we must avoid: 

• Obsessing Over Terminology: Debating endlessly whether we should rename SEO to AEO or GEO, or whether we need a new job title like “AI Search Optimizer.” These semantic debates are a distraction. As we discussed, the mission is the same. I’d rather my team spends time adapting our content strategy than coming up with clever acronyms. It’s fun water-cooler talk, sure, but it doesn’t improve your quarter’s KPIs. Don’t major in the naming minor – focus on the doing. 

• Chasing Algorithm Myths: In every era of SEO, folks have chased shiny objects. Today it might be some hack to “get my link in an AI answer 100% of the time” being sold by a guru, or obsessing about a single metric like keyword density hoping it will magically influence GPT-4. Remember when people used to fixate on PageRank sculpting or a 100/100 Lighthouse score as if those alone would skyrocket rankings? Those are minors. The major is overall relevance and authority. Right now, some are panicking that they need to, say, restructure all content into Q&A format or publish 100 AI-written articles a week to appease the new gods. Take a breath. Yes, experiment with new formats, but stick to your fundamentals. Don’t throw out your content strategy playbook for every rumor. Focus on what empirically moves the needle: great content, technical excellence, multi-platform presence. 

• Traffic Metrics vs. Visibility Metrics: Here’s a controversial one – we might need to adjust our KPIs. If an AI overview gives an answer that fully satisfies the user, you might not get a click, and your traffic might not increase, yet your content did its job. For example, if a consumer asks an AI, “What’s a good running shoe for marathons?” and the AI cites Runner’s World with your blog in its answer, the user might just read that and move on. No click. Traditional analytics would show nothing. But your brand was present in that answer, which has value! Perhaps the user remembers your brand and later searches it or directly visits. We need to educate stakeholders that being present in answers (even without clicks) is a form of success. It’s akin to an impression or a view in advertising. So, don’t just measure success by old metrics (clicks, sessions) – develop ways to gauge visibility. Maybe track how often you appear in People Also Ask, in featured snippets, or cited by AI. These are harder to measure, but not impossible. The worst thing would be to report “SEO down, we lost traffic” when in fact your content is getting seen via new mechanisms. That misinterpretation would be majoring in the minor metric (traffic) and missing the major shift (visibility without clicks). 

• Ignoring the User: One more “major vs minor” issue: focusing too much on what search engines or AI are doing, and not enough on what users want. It’s easy to get caught up in “algorithm watching”. But remember, search engines deploy AI and change the interface in response to user needs. People want faster answers, more convenience – hence AI summaries. If we always center our strategy on serving the user better (faster answers, accurate info, engaging content), we inherently align with where search is headed. So instead of fixating on every minor update from Google (minutia), spend that time making your content more useful (major). In my early days, I’d sometimes find myself deep in the weeds of say, whether to use an H2 or H3 tag for optimal SEO – a minor technicality. These days I coach teams to major in what moves customers: answer their questions, solve their problems, make the experience delightful. The algorithms, increasingly driven by AI that models human preferences, will naturally favor that approach. 

To retailers, publishers, and any business that lives on visibility: it’s time to realign with practical reality. The practical reality is that people are still searching – in more places and ways than ever – and you need to be where they are looking. Don’t get bogged down by doom-and-gloom headlines or buzzword bingo. SEO is not a dying art – it’s a growing, shifting art. The canvas got bigger and the tools got more varied, but the brush still works if you know how to use it.