5 Ways I'm Preparing My SEO for 2027

0:00SEO is changing so fast right now. It can feel really overwhelming. And as someone that's been in SEO for over 10 years, I've seen it all. Countless Google updates, the rise of mobile search, featured snippets, AI overviews, and now the shift towards people using AI search tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Even with all those changes, I feel fully prepared for my SEO in 2027, which let's face it, is right around the corner. So, in this video, I'm going to outline my entire playbook for SEO in 2027. I'll of course show you lots of real-life examples of what I'm doing, plus tangible steps you can use

0:34to get more traffic from Google and AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. The first thing I'm doing to prepare for next year is doubling down on human-first content. Well, I've noticed a huge trend in the search results that a lot of people are missing. Specifically, I've noticed content that's performing best right now contains someone's real first-hand experience and perspective. For example, look at housefresh.com. As you can see here, they're performing great in Google. And one of the main reasons they're doing so well is they include insane amounts of first-hand experience in every piece of content that they publish. Unlike most product review sites, they're not publishing generic

1:09best air purifier articles. They're actually testing the products. They're showing original photos. They're also including personal opinions, test data, and first-hand experience. SEO content has been traditionally pretty neutral, but the sites I see doing best right now are moving away from that. They're publishing content based on someone's first-hand experience. Google has actually talked a lot about experience as one of the pillars of trust and authority on a website. And the sites I see doing this best are including the

1:37expertise inside of the content itself. Another example of a site doing great with this is gumloop.com. Their organic traffic speaks for itself. Up into the right, baby. On the surface, their content looks kind of like generic B2B SaaS content. You got best AI tools, best productivity tools, best tools for a specific job. But when you actually read their content, it has this unique first-person style. The content still has that nice structure a reader would want when they're looking for a best tool for the job. But, it also gives this person's perspective from working with these tools. So, why is this

2:10approach working so well right now? First, I think Google actually wants to surface this type of content more often. Because otherwise, people will just go use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. These tools can give a generic answer, no problem, in 2 seconds. But, they can't give you someone's real experience from testing a product, using a tool, or making a decision. Second, I think users want to see this stuff, too. You can see this with how many people type into

2:33Google where they add Reddit at the end. And there's a good reason for that. People just don't want to read a generic piece of content that's optimized for SEO and was written by a committee. They want someone's own real perspective. The second strategy is moving away from definition and how-to keywords. Actually, I call all these types of search terms commodity keywords. Because that's really what the content optimized for these key words have become. It's content that could easily be written by ChatGPT. And honestly, ChatGPT and Claude can do a better job of answering these questions than a lot of the content out there. And to be clear, this

3:05type of content used to be the lifeblood of a lot of websites. What is X? How does X work? What does X mean? For years, these were great SEO keywords. You could publish a straightforward explanation, rank in Google, get clicks, and get people to your website. But, now I'm not really going after these keywords as much anymore. Because people are just going to skip Google and ask ChatGPT directly. Or, if they do use Google, they're going to get the answer in an AI overview. So, there really isn't a lot of point of publishing this type of content anymore at scale. Now, I'm not saying you should never publish

3:35definition or how-to content. Definition content, specifically, can have some value. It can help build topical authority on your site. And the content can still get cited by AI systems, including AI overviews. As you can see here, this site is cited as a source for an answer to a definition question. And I'm sure they get some clicks from it. So, I'm not completely abandoning commodity keywords, but I'm not publishing nearly as much of it as I

3:58used to. So, what am I doing instead? Well, I'm focusing much more on bottom of the funnel searches. These are searches where people are close to making a decision. So, instead of focusing a lot on these broad informational top of the funnel keywords, I'm focusing more on the thing that someone will be searching for when they're trying to decide which product is best for them. At Exploding Topics, we've really doubled down on these types of searches. For example, here's a bottom of the funnel blog post that's

4:22performing really well for us right now. Now, to be clear, this content doesn't bring a huge amount of visitors every month, but the traffic we do get converts great. So, why is this so important? Well, with these bottom of the funnel searches, in my experience, people are still clicking on the search results. In other words, they're usually researching several different sources to help them decide which option is best for them. For example, our customers tend to search for things like best trend spotting tool or tools for finding trending products when looking for Exploding Topics. And during this search, they're usually not just going to click on one list and sign up for the

4:55first tool that they see. They're going to compare multiple different options on multiple different platforms. In our case, Google, YouTube, Reddit, and even software-specific sites like G2. The point is they click, unlike a lot of searches where people just get what they need to get out of an AR overview and leave, which in 2027 is going to be huge. The fourth strategy I'm focusing on is giving each piece of content multiple jobs. It used to be that you'd publish a piece of content and its only job was to rank in Google. And if it did that, that was a win. But, that's not really enough in 2026, and it's not

5:28going to be enough in 2027, because there just aren't as many clicks from Google as there used to be. So, for a piece of content to be considered successful, it needs to do more than just rank in Google. For example, this blog post about legal trends at Exploding Topics has generated a ton of value for us using this multiple jobs approach. Post itself ranks for keywords like legal trends, but like I said, that's not really enough anymore, which is why we've also used this post as a basis for a YouTube video that's racked up over 50,000 views. And it repurposed snippets of that content as social media

6:00posts. It's also the type of thought leadership content that our sales team can use to show potential customer that we understand the legal space. Now, these jobs used to be split across several different pieces of content. You had content for SEO, content for social, content for sales, content for YouTube, content for brand building. And back when one piece of content could rank in Google and bring in a ton of traffic, that was fine. But now one piece of content needs to be able to do multiple different jobs. To be clear, this makes creating content more challenging, but it's also kind of a must. Because if you

6:31spend a lot of money creating a great piece of content, it ranks in Google, but you get 75% fewer clicks, is it really worth it? Maybe, but only if the content is helping your business in other ways. The last strategy I'm focusing on is building more original data assets. I'm talking about surveys, studies, benchmarks, statistics pages, pricing analysis, trend reports, and proprietary data. For example, we published this page very early in ChatGPT's life and have updated it every time a big announcement gets made. This relatively simple page still brings in a ton of traffic. It also gets cited by AI tools quite a bit. And it has links from

7:07hundreds of different sources including Forbes, HubSpot, and Fast Company. Now, this type of thing, proprietary data, may sound really intimidating if you've never done it before. But it doesn't have to be hard. Back when I ran Backlinko, we used to do these incredibly expensive and complicated analysis studies. And they did well, but they were really hard to make. You needed a big data set, you needed analysis, you needed custom visuals. It was a whole thing. Over time, I realized you can create simple versions of this type of content and sometimes it performs even better. And the reason

7:36this stuff works so well is simple. These pages give people something specific to cite and reference. If a journalist, blogger, YouTuber, or AI tool wants to reference how fast ChatGPT is growing, they need a source. And if your page is one of the clearest, most updated sources on that topic, you become the page that people reference. So, original data doesn't always need to be this massive industry report. It can be a simple page, like in our case, it could be a simple page that tracks one

8:01number and keeps it updated over time. And these pages over time can help build your authority in your space. If AI is making content less valuable, original data becomes more valuable. And that's because AI can largely summarize, but it can't create anything new yet. So, when you add original data to the ecosystem, LLMs will cite it in AI answers. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to subscribe to the Semrush YouTube channel right now. We're consistently putting out videos to help you navigate

8:28marketing in an AI world.