Julie Broad argues that keyword-focused SEO is dying for authors as AI-powered discovery takes over. Instead of optimizing for search terms, she says authors should create rich, substantive content and understand how recommendation systems work to get their books in front of the right readers.
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Authors. You may not realize it yet, but traditional SEO search engine optimization is fading. First, let's start with traditional SEO and this is all about exact match keywords and keyword phrases, also called long tail phrases. What you would need to do is find the highest performing, lowest competition keywords and then optimize your content for this. Without strategy around the keywords, you probably weren't showing up in Search AI powered discovery emphasizes content, user intent and semantic relevance if you've been spending all your time optimizing for keywords and enjoying search traffic for specific keywords, it's time to dig deep into content creation and create some really rich content on a variety of topics that are going to be related to what your ideal reader is working on. Ultimately, I think this is exciting because good content is going to win, not keyword stuffed articles and niche authors can celebrate because AI driven search and recommendation systems will be able to match books to reader interests based on a more granular and accurate understanding of content, sentiment and even style. Which leads me to what I hope you're now thinking how to get AI to recommend your books. Well, you got to pay attention to the training data sources. AI models like ChatGPT are trained on a diverse range of data including publicly available texts, books, articles, web pages, licensed content, digitized libraries. It also is using recommendation mechanisms and AI provides book recommendations based on user queries, pattern recognition, and contextual understanding. Let's celebrate, because if you're an author producing a great book for a specific reader and you're out in the world creating content, you're going to have even more potential reach to your reader than you ever did before.
