#14: 15% of all Google searches are dominated by just 148 terms
Dec 9, 2024
AI and the Future of SEO
Hey friend!
Two fascinating gems in this week’s email:
A research analysis looking at Google search data—actual search queries, not their results
A detailed guide on using AI to produce genuinely good content (read: content that doesn’t come across as robotic and AI-generated)
Definitely worth reading both resources in full for content strategy direction as well as for production ideas.
–Thenuka
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What’s new in AI and content?
🔍 Google now lets you search without personalization
Google Search has introduced a "try without personalization" option at the bottom of its search results. This allows users to instantly view search results without personalized adjustments like regional tweaks or previous search data. (In case you’re curious what exactly Google’s personalization entails, the search engine’s got a help page with more explanation.) While personalization helps tailor search results, this toggle offers a neutral, objective search experience—useful for getting unbiased research, product comparisons, or exploring diverse perspectives.
What this means for SEO: A couple of different angles here. First, with more users opting out of personalization, websites may face more competition for visibility since personalized results often help match customers to specific sites. On the other hand, with less personalization and behavioral targeting, it might be easier to reach broader audiences. Note that while Google has long claimed personalization is minimal—focused on location and recent queries—some speculate it actually digs deeper into user behavior.
🧐 15% of all Google searches are dominated by just 148 terms
The audience intelligence platform Sparktoro partnered with Datos for an in-depth analysis of Google searches, asking questions like: What percent of all Google searches are for brands as opposed to generic terms? What percent are navigational, commercial, transactional, or informational? How do searches break down across different topics? The study, based on 332 million queries from January 2023 to September 2024, uncovered quite a few insights, including:
15% of all Google searches are dominated by just 148 terms, primarily navigational queries like “YouTube,” “Amazon,” and “Facebook.”
Branded searches account for 44% of all queries, while generic searches make up 56%.
Search intent skews heavily toward informational (51%) and navigational (33%), with commercial queries at 14.5% and transactional ones at a mere 0.69%.
Long-tail keywords represent only 3.6% of search demand.
What this means for SEO: Lots of interesting findings from this research, which on the whole, suggests that search behavior is increasingly consolidating around fewer, high-volume terms and major brands. That could mean more of an uphill battle for small businesses and long-tail content. The big takeaway for marketers here: diversify beyond Google Search to platforms like social media, YouTube, and newsletters. While you should still leverage SEO to capture existing intent, other platforms can help build more discoverability through omnichannel marketing.
Expert Insights
🖊️ Andy Chadwick: How to use AI to write actually good content
Last year, SEO consultant Andy Chadwick published a 4,500-word article about tangential SEO on Search Engine Journal, earning 21K+ views and more than 140 social shares. Ordinarily, you might expect such a comprehensive piece of content to take something like 10 hours to put together—but thanks to AI assistance, it took Andy just three hours. In this in-depth guide, Andy shares how he used AI to speed up his drafting process and save time without compromising quality. “This guide isn’t about replacing writers with AI or generating thousands of generic articles,” he explains. “It’s about showing you how to use AI as a powerful assistant to elevate your content, save time, and keep the human touch intact.”
❌ Ben Goodey: Two common SEO mistakes
Search expert Ben Goodey highlighted two common SEO mistakes that can derail content performance in a recent issue of his newsletter, How the F*ck. The first: treating keywords as separate topics—for instance, writing multiple posts for keyword variants like “content marketing,” “digital content marketing,” and “online content marketing,” which can risk cannibalization. The second is ignoring search intent. For instance, targeting “online meeting software” with a blog post about the software’s importance fails since searchers are more likely looking for tools, not theory. Ben offers tips for fixing as well as avoiding these two mistakes.
🧑🔬 Andrew Speer: A pSEO experiment in the travel space
Andrew Speer, founder of the automation agency Two Cores, shared on LinkedIn the results of his experiments with pSEO over the past year. Using tools like Make.com, Airtable, and Webflow, he built out 6,500+ pages for a UK travel site. According to Semrush, the site’s seen an impressive upward trend in organic keywords in the past few months, perhaps as a result of Google’s most recent algorithm updates.