Should you optimize content for simple elements?
episode
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
5 min
2 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHear Everything.com. Welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney. Next lightning round question. Trend or trash? Will optimizing for simple elements, a summary, an FAQ, pay off in traffic over the long run over creating long-form content like listicles or blog posts?
Is this a trend or trash?
I think we need both in that uh so I would say trash. Um I think uh LLMs are valuing structured content. Yes, you lower their crawl budget by giving them some conclusion earlier on. You also lower their crawl budget by giving them a listicle. Uh you know, I've seen people experimenting with I write my blog post as I would normally, but then I I'm gonna put the entire set same set of content in FAQs at the bottom of that, appended, so that I can make it easier for an LLM to crawl the site itself. You also see some trend towards longer rather than shorter, but longer not for the sake of being longer, longer for more likely having the answer the LLM is looking for. So, at least from what I see, it is not.
Even if they have infinite content context windows, I think they will still, at some point, make the economic decision to differentially crawl things that are easier for them. What do you think, Jordan? Are you seeing the long or short do better? What would
Your answer to that question be? You know, I think there's a lot of hype in the industry today around these summaries, these FAQs. There's just so much talk about, oh, well, this is what worked. If I just put it a list at the top of my page, suddenly the LLM just loved it, you know, and it didn't love it before. But to your point, I do fundamentally think that audiences need context, and context typically comes In these longer form pieces of content or experiences or pages. I ultimately think that it is going to be both, but brands need to understand where they have a strength or weaknesses around their content experience. And we don't evaluate content experiences by an expectation of a user. We evaluate content experiences by the page and template we have.
And I think that's the biggest falsehood that that many of us in the content marketing space have just kind of overly become reliant on, well, that's just what the template is. And the template just has that. And so, um, but that's not necessarily what users or in this particular case based off of users, what LLMs are looking for.
I so deeply appreciate that several times in this conversation you've been like What does the human on the other end actually need? What's actually valuable? Because that's ultimately true North. All the rest of this are mechanics to get there. Yes. But that is true North, full stop. Separately, going into speculation land, I do wonder whether, for sure, not speculating, right? Websites have to serve these two audiences, the humans and the LLMs.
What is the lightning‑round question about optimizing simple elements versus long‑form content?
Okay. Right. Speculating, I do wonder whether there's a world where you serve the humans, these, you know, visually stunning emotional. Engaging experiences, fine. And for the LLMs, LLMs.txt points to a markdown version of every page that you have just sitting there in parallel, right? Riding sidecar that summarizes it, or maybe it's all the content, but it makes it easier for them to parse. So instead of the video, you've got the transcript, right? Instead of the image, you've got the text that's in it, or a description, the you know, the accessibility alt text. context perhaps, I do wonder whether whether that is a path we will go in the future or not.
Uh there there's very likely a parallel path in some of that.
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