Is Ranking On Google Worth It?

No, this isn’t another “SEO is dead” post.
I’m not here to tell you everything is doomed, your SEO career is over, or we’ve reached some kind of SEO Armageddon 😄

But I’m also not here to sugarcoat things.

What I will do is share what I see, candidly, and as objectively as possible. Because let’s be honest: there’s a growing sense of frustration with where search is heading. And Google hasn’t exactly been reassuring to the people who’ve long supported its ecosystem—publishers and SEOs.

Ranking on search is becoming more challenging, or "different" and the value it provides is becoming questionable since tons of studies show the decline in CTR.

In this blog, I'm sharing a personal experience, my learnings, and my take on one big question: Is ranking on Google still worth it?

I'm also sharing the results from last week's test that was part of the blog "measuring your brand in search" and also the ai content treasure hunt from my blog about how to win in serps with ai overviews.

TL;DR

• SEO isn't dead, but it's a hot mess right now. The landscape is shifting with AI overviews and we're all figuring it out as we go, despite some people getting worked up over new acronyms like GEO vs SEO 😄
• Even the big guys are getting crushed. Mail Online (literally the 8th biggest English news site in the world!) is seeing massive CTR drops from AI overviews. So much for "Google favors big brands" being your safety net
• My Python course experiment was a reality check. I Ranked 5th-6th for my target keywords, felt pretty good about it... then got basically zero conversions 😄 Turns out 10 searches/month isn't worth creating dedicated landing pages for
• The real money is in middle-of-funnel content. Stop chasing individual low-volume keywords like they're treasure. Bundle them into bigger, meatier topics that actually drive business
• Google made ranking easier by accident. I literally keyword-stuffed a fully AI-generated article with zero effort and ranked 7th for 1,100 monthly searches. It's like Google's attempt to make search better made it worse and easier to game
• AI content can rank but probably shouldn't. My spammy AI article worked, but let's be real - it's not helpful, accurate, or unique. Though if humans can't even spot AI content anymore, what does "quality" even mean?
• Google's transparency is a joke. We can't block our content from AI overviews without tanking our visibility, but we also can't get data on how those features perform. Cool, thanks Google 🙄
• Bottom line: Yes, ranking is still worth it, but forget your old playbook and focus on substantial middle-funnel content instead of chasing keyword scraps

The status of SEO

Few things are happening right now in SEO:

• Many people - including myself- have been yelling from the rooftops: SEO is changing and that we should focus on more channels than just search.
• An on-going debate if SEO is the same as GEO. Do we need another acronym? are they just the same "tactics", etc... I'm not one to debate terminology but seeing some SEOs feel strongly about it in their discussions just creates tension and hinders creativity within the community. "show me how they're different" attitude is not an argument, since the entire landscape is shifting and everything is new to all of us. I don't know if SEO is the same as GEO. But I know for sure that LLMs don't work the same way as Google search.

Let's shift our focus on more fruitful discussions. The way Rand Fishkin puts it helps make everyone happy! We can still use the term SEO, even in this changing landscape.

• It's clear that we love checklists in SEO. I've said it over and over, SEO is not a checklist. And because of this over-reliance on checklists we are struggling to adapt to something new that has no checklists "yet"

• Our voices are heard! Clicks from ai mode appeared as “direct traffic” in GA4, which was said to be a bug and they fixed it. But, that's not it. John Muller confirmed that AI Mode reporting is coming to GSC.

• Don't get too excited yet...Barry Schwarz directly asked Google's VP of search during the recent Google I/O event if Google will break down AI Mode or AI Overviews in search performance report and the answer was "NO". We also won't have controls to block our content from being used in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Vertex without impacting our websites' visibility in search.

• We've been saying that Google favors big brands for so long, but even now, big brands are not safe. Mail online is the 8th biggest English language news website in the WORLD… and it’s been hit bad by ai overviews!!!

It feels like a mess, and you're probably wondering is SEO worth it anymore?

Is ranking on Google worth it?

I'll start by a personal experience! As you know I offer a Python course for SEOs. And I decided to promote it using SEO. I created 3 pages!

• A landing page on my website
• A LinkedIn pulse article
• A landing page on the platform that hosts my course (podia)

The results? On ahrefs I can see the following:

• Pulse article no where to be found in SERPs. It's ok it helped promote the course on LinkedIn.
• Landing page on my website ranking 12th.

• Podia landing page ranking 5th and 6th for "python for SEO course" and "python course for SEO". That's pretty good actually, right? The 6th position even includes 3 sitelinks!

but what about the real deal, the conversions? I get nothing noticeable from search at all 😄 it's like it's totally not worth it ranking for those keywords... and that's actually true.

Both keywords have very low search volume (10/month). I've been an advocate of low search volume and zero search volume keywords, but this just shows that do not go after low search volume keywords on their own, maybe as part of larger blogs and topics. It's not worth it creating specific landing pages, at least in my situation here.

So what are you saying Sara? Google is not worth it anymore?

Nop!

I'm just saying some of our old beliefs are shattered right now and it became clear to me that the most important stage of the funnel is the Middle of Funnel.

So the answer to the question "is ranking on Google still worth it?" is:

Yes it is if you target middle of funnel topics/keywords and include any low search volume related keywords to those pages to maximize the benefit.

Is ranking on Google hard nowadays?

No, ranking on Google is not hard if you are willing to create LinkedIn articles 😄It's like in Google's attempt to make search better, it made it worse and easy to manipulate.

My experiment

I wanted to go after "best seo tools for agencies reddit" keyword to see if I can rank for a keyword with the "reddit" modifier which means users specifically want to get reddit results.

I create a fully ai-generated content and I put zero effort into it (remember that google takes into account the effort put into writing content 😄😄😄). I even keyword stuffed the title to be exactly "best seo tools for agencies reddit"... it cannot be more spammy that this 😁

The results

For "best seo tools for agencies" keyword that has a search volume of 1,100/month, I ranked 7th.

But the surprising result was when I ranked 8th for the same keyword with the reddit modifier "best seo tools for agencies reddit".

I discussed this on LinkedIn and some people wondered if this has to do with me being active on social media and having a personal brand. That maybe it.

But the point is:

You can outrank reddit on it's own branded keywords.

Is AI generated content good for SEO?

No 100% ai generated content should not be good for SEO as it is not helpful, not accurate and not unique. However, as you can see from the example above I was able to rank with it.

So if you're asking can I rank with ai generated content, the answer is yes at least in the short term. But if you're asking is this good for SEO and the users, my answer remains a solid no.

Speaking of content that's good for the users, in a previous newsletter "Beating Google at it's Own Game" I included a segment that's 100% written with ai and asked the readers to find it. No one did. It was this segment actually and I thought having the chatgpt generated image would be a tell.

So my thought on this is: is ai generated content still considered low quality/spammy if even human readers could not spot it?

That's an open ended question for today's newsletter. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks again for reading this, and see you next newsletter!

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.