Should We Stop Creating Informational Content?

There’s a growing conversation in the SEO industry about declining clicks, and AI Overviews are at the center of it. 

Many brands and SEOs have reported a rapid decline in organic traffic for informational queries, causing content teams to ask an uncomfortable question: Should we stop creating informational content?

While I could give you a simple yes or no answer, that would be a disservice. There are deeper issues at play, the most significant being the bloated content moats we created for SEO. 

We told ourselves it was for the user, but in reality, it was always about pleasing Google. 
While we achieved traffic, rankings, and revenue, we also contributed to a rot we fed on just as much as Google did. 

In this piece, I want to dig into three things:

How did we get here?

What mistakes did we make?

More importantly, what is the way forward for content teams in this new age of large language models (LLMs)and AI search?

How did we get here?

Startups would hit Series B and invest heavily in building content moats with aggressive velocity.

I worked with content teams publishing an average of 100 blog posts monthly, with 40-50 writers on payroll.

One SaaS company published 1,000 blog posts, and everybody clapped. We wrote case studies about it and called them visionary because they dominated Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and drove a ton of traffic.

These companies scaled quickly, covering entire topic clusters in weeks, whether or not those topics were relevant to their product.

The goal was coverage, always more coverage, and if we’re honest, we didn’t create that content for the user; we created it for SEO.

Google never had a way to measure content quality

Google claims to prioritize quality over optimization, but I can cite countless examples that show otherwise. 

I suspect Google never had a reliable way to evaluate quality. Instead, it leaned on traffic and engagement as measured in Chrome, and vanity signals SEOs could easily manipulate.

Great content was never enough. You had to:

• Build backlinks from other websites to signal authority
• Throw in a bunch of entities so bots could “understand” the page
• Pay people to say nice things about you
• Create a ton of supporting pages because your competitors were doing it
• Match competitor subheadings to stand a chance at ranking
• Bury real value deep in the page to increase time on-page
• Stick to arbitrary word counts, even if it means sacrificing depth

Nearly everything we did for on-page SEO was unnatural and detrimental to the user experience. It felt like a rat race to the bottom, and the user paid the price.

Google prioritized brand recognition over quality, and the only way to gain popularity was through volume…hence, the bloated content clusters.

We were incentivized to prioritize SEO over the user

Take this search, for example. The user wants a simple answer, but they have to scan three articles to find an answer. 

They click on Medline Plus, scroll to the section titled “Is it safe?” and eventually land on an answer buried in small text.

Concerned about accuracy, they would likely read two or three more articles from other reputable sources just to be sure. Tom Anthony described it as “post-search browsing” in a previous Whiteboard Friday episode.

The user experience was flawed from the start:

• Type a query
• Open three to five tabs
• Use control-F to find the keyword you typed
• Scan for something that looks reliable
• Cross-check with another article
• Hope for the best

AI Overviews removes the gruntwork. Now, you can type a detailed query and get a summarized answer on search result pages.

While they’ve included links to WebMD and Healthline on the right, my eyes are drawn to the answers on the left that satisfy my search intent.

And therein lies the problem: the detailed answers in AI overviews remove the incentive to click, which explains lower CTRs for many websites. 

We are hardwired to see traffic as the end goal, and it has to change

Traffic was the goal, and bloated clusters helped them build content moats that reinforced authority, whether relevant or not.

Because ranking was the objective, there was no incentive to go deep, resulting in shallow content that barely meets user needs.

When we attempt to cover a topic, we often use the SERPs as a baseline, leading to a situation where everyone creates subpar content because that’s what Google ranks.

Friends, this is the origin story of cookie-clutter content in the SERPs.

Stop using entity optimization to measure quality

If you use a content optimization tool, you’ll likely know how it works. You enter a keyword, and it generates a content brief based on what’s covered in the SERPs. I like this part because it automates the research side of content writing.

The part I detest is what comes next. 

Upload your written draft to the content optimization tool, and it scores your content based on:

• The entities you included
• The frequency of entity usage
• Subheadings from the  top competing content that you covered
• Internal and external links
• FAQ questions you answered
• Word count
• Images and multimedia content

Unfortunately, entity usage is the biggest factor in content scoring, which can make the writing seem unnatural. 

Entity optimization promotes “word salad” and prioritizes checklists over creating engaging content.

Alright, now that I’ve got my rant out of the way, I’ll answer the original question you’re asking.

Should we stop creating informational content?

That’s useful. If I’m learning about product marketing, I’ll gladly exchange my email for that asset.

The page:

• Ranks
• Drives traffic
• Signals to Google that HubSpot is a thought leader
• Converts visitors into leads

The content includes videos with actionable advice, and the internal links feel like a natural next step in the learning journey.

When I reached the bottom of the page, I saw more related content, which kept me in the ecosystem and deepened engagement.

Give more value than everyone else

A few weeks ago, we launched a new product at Moz called Keyword Suggestions by Topic. In the past, we would create a short announcement post on the blog that only a few hundred people would read and then call it a day.

Instead, I decided to do something different:

• What if I wrote this article based on my experience with topic clusters instead of modelling what’s on the SERP?
• What if I provided the best resource on the topic, better than anything anyone had done so far?
• Am I strong enough to write content that prioritizes the user over Google?

I thought about everything I wished someone had told me when I built my first cluster, and I put it in the article. I wanted to create a resource folks would read like a bible for a specific task, so I made it the most comprehensive resource, going deeper than competitors.

I created the following assets for the topic:

• A how-to guide written in the first person
• A quick YouTube tutorial
• Two templates (for content briefs and keyword research)
• A Google Colab script for data collection (courtesy of our VP of Revenue)
• A keyword research checklist
• A cheatsheet for writing pillar and cluster pages
• A Whiteboard Friday video detailing the research process
• A webinar on BOFU research
• Social media graphics and carousels

If someone is building a topic cluster for the first time or trying to improve their process, I’ve given them everything they need.

This is the kind of value we should deliver with informational content. We might get less traffic from SERPs, but we’ve diversified with video, webinars, and social media.

Most importantly, we’re collecting emails in exchange for assets and helping our users get the most value from our tools.

Use interactive tools to show the product in action

We are often so eager to send visitors to product pages that we overlook the opportunity to engage them right where they are. 

A few years ago, I worked with Guru to drive traffic to their template card section. The goal was to provide downloadable templates that helped users apply the advice from Guru’s informational content.

Instead of just linking to the template section, they embedded a preview of the template on the page so users could see what they were getting upfront.

A static button at the bottom led to the full template library when users were ready to explore more.

Informational content alone is not enough; we need to provide resources that enable our audience to take action, while simultaneously achieving our business goals of conversion. 

However, the asset must be genuinely valuable, or it doesn’t work.

Optimize the product pages they land on to convert

If I’m reading a “what is” article, and you immediately send me to a demo request, it won’t work.

I’m just learning about the concept, and you should treat me like a frightened child who can skedaddle at any time.

CTAs in informational content should guide readers to the natural next steps. For example, if I’m learning about tracking brand mentions, I’m more likely to sign up for a free trial if you show me how it works first.

I experienced this on BrandMentions.com while reading an article and clicked a link to “track social mentions.”

The free report provided enough information to grasp the tool’s value and an overview of my social mention analysis. 

SERPs→blog post→product page→see tool in action→convert.

The challenge for many companies is that the growth team typically manages the product pages, the content team oversees the informational pages, and SEO sits in silo. You need to combine CRO, SEO, and content to get more conversions from informational pages.

CTA testing must be iterative on informational pages and CTA destinations. A few questions I like to ask include:

• Which type of asset converts best for this topic?
• Where should we surface the CTA?
• Which button color and text drive the most clicks?

A/B test everything until you find a balance that converts consistently.

Make educational content a part of the onboarding and retention process

There’s no rule that says informational content should only live on the blog. 

Think about the user’s journey to learning software and associated skills. They feel extremely overwhelmed the first time they log in. 

How about we show them contextual content to help them understand what they’re looking at?

Maybe include the informational content in your onboarding email flow for trial users and ensure account managers have these handy for enterprise customers. 

Create informational content around the top questions your customer-facing team receives. Is there a feature request that’s covered, but customers don’t know how to access it? This sounds like a great opportunity to create helpful content tied to product use cases.

You don’t need keyword volume to justify informational content. If it helps your users or improves product adoption, that’s a win.

Combine organic discoverability with brand discoverability

We’ve built entire strategies around organic discoverability: show up in the SERPs, drive traffic, and capture demand.

Sadly, that model is breaking right in front of us.

Google is testing AI Overviews on product searches, and it’s only a matter of time before they become standard for all queries.

The SERP isn’t a gateway anymore but the final destination and content marketers are still optimizing for clicks that are never coming back.

I am calling for a shift, not away from organic, but beyond it.

Louise Linehan at Ahrefs recently published an analysis of factors that correlate with citations in AI Overviews and brand influenced the top five factors.

Brand discoverability means people seek you out. They search for your name on their preferred platforms, click your link in newsletters, watch your webinars, and engage with your content through direct channels.

You build an audience that chooses you, not one that stumbles upon your content in SERPs.

Here’s an article with more information on improving brand discoverability:

You need an integrated digital strategy, not SEO sitting in silo

Jono Alderson says we need to start thinking like publishers: I agree

How can we create thought-leadership content that is helpful to our audience, relevant to ongoing conversations, offers new insights, and ties back to our product?

There has to be an end goal in sight, because we don’t want to make the same mistakes that led us here — velocity for its own sake.

Our new objective is to tie content to product, but do it naturally, and in a way that feels like eating sugar.

I want to produce more informational content, similar to the topic cluster guide I created. 

I want to write more opinion pieces like this one. 

Most importantly, I want to stop focusing solely on what Google wants and start listening to my audience.

We’re in a fight with Google for the first click, and addictive content is how we win

There’s scientific evidence that highly enjoyable foods activate dopamine, which makes me feel good. My brain encodes that feeling as a memory and keeps me returning for more.

Content should feel like an experience that activates dopamine and leaves your audience wanting more. Great content informs, but more importantly, it creates stickiness, and I’ll quickly share two examples of SEOs who do a great job with sticky content.

Glen Allsopp

Glen Allsopp is one of my favorite content creators because of his playbooks and reports.

Source: Detailed.com

Forget traffic for a moment and let’s talk about the engagement numbers on these pages.

Source: Detailed.com

Most of his content pieces are not keyword-focused and tend to take an editorial, opinion-style approach. Writing such pieces requires extensive research, data analysis, and pulling relevant findings for his audience.

It’s not a skill everyone has, but something we must develop to stand out from the sameness in the SERPs and AI content.

Lars Lofgren is another favourite

Source: larslofgren.com

Though he doesn’t post frequently, his content is engaging, and there are several lessons we can glean from his writing style:

• Write in first person
• Allow your personality to shine
• Do a thorough breakdown based on your personal experience 
• Don’t be afraid to call out bad marketing practices
• Bring receipts for every claim
• Make readers care by exposing the issues at hand
• Tell people what to do next

And this begs the question: How many marketers and SEOs can write content based on an original idea they had that wasn’t informed by search volume or the SERPs?

I visit Lar’s blog at least once a month, hoping he’s posted something new because I love his work. This is the type of content ecosystem that creates stickiness and keeps your audience coming back for more.

Final thoughts: The future of informational content is demand-led