About the Author
Corey is the owner and President/CEO of VOLTAGE. He is also founder and author of The Digital Marketing Success Plan® and the START Planning Process. Corey has spent 20+ years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's the recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award and his team at VOLTAGE has won nearly 100 local, national, and global awards for ROI-focused client work in the past decade.
Search engines and large language models (LLMs) are evolving fast—and if your SEO strategy still revolves around a relentless push to publish more content, you may be falling into a trap.
Content has always played a critical role in SEO. It fuels visibility, educates audiences, and helps brands earn trust. But lately, the pressure to keep producing—more blogs, more landing pages, more copy—has created a false sense of progress.
It’s easy to confuse activity with effectiveness. Just because you’re publishing regularly doesn’t mean your visibility is improving or your results are growing.
The real danger? Content becomes the entire strategy, rather than a component of it. And when that happens, businesses often wind up with bloated websites, diluted messaging, and flat performance.
This article explores how to reset your SEO approach by looking beyond content volume—and focusing instead on visibility, usability, authority, and alignment with business goals.
Here are the key shifts worth making:
Re-evaluate and remove low-value content
Start with a clear-eyed audit. Whether you use a crawler, AI-powered platform, or manual review process, identify pages that no longer serve a purpose. These often include outdated, duplicative, or off-brand content that clutters your site and clouds your positioning. Removing or consolidating these assets can dramatically improve performance.
Reset SEO goals around outcomes, not just tasks
If your marketing KPIs are tied primarily to content creation—word count, page count, or publishing frequency—it may be time to refocus. Revisit your strategic objectives and map them to real business outcomes. Look at where content fits into the funnel and how it contributes to conversions, not just clicks.
Don’t neglect technical SEO
No matter how great your content is, it won’t perform if search engines can’t find, index, or prioritize it. Visibility depends on site health, architecture, and crawlability. Poor rendering or broken site logic can block performance—and even strong content can fail if technical issues go unaddressed.
Equally important is user experience. Speed, design, and functionality all influence how visitors interact with your content—and how search engines assess its value.
Pair content with authority-building efforts
Even the best content needs distribution and validation. Earning links, mentions, and media coverage remains central to SEO success. These authority signals help both search engines and LLMs understand the relevance and trustworthiness of your content.
Rather than waiting for organic recognition, plan outreach, PR, and influencer strategies alongside your content calendar to amplify results.
Adopt an agile, sprint-based workflow
SEO often suffers from blurred lines and perpetual backlogs. Teams keep adding to-do items without clear start or end points. That’s where sprint cycles come in.
Working in sprints forces prioritization and allows time for retrospective analysis. It also reduces the urge to publish for publishing’s sake. Instead, you evaluate results, make course corrections, and plan the next phase with intention.
Avoid “checklist” SEO
Routine can be helpful—but it can also be dangerous. If your SEO efforts have become a set of boxes to tick without critical thinking behind them, it’s time to pause.
Ask yourself: Why are we doing this? Is it helping? What could we do instead with the same time or resources? Without this reflection, SEO becomes busywork instead of strategy.
Strengthen alignment across teams and channels
SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Search visibility now intersects with UX, branding, paid media, social, and product marketing—especially in an AI-first landscape.
To be effective, your strategy needs buy-in and support across functions. That means coordinating with IT, product, and leadership—not just marketing.
When SEO is siloed, it’s harder to justify investment or show impact. When it’s integrated, it becomes a cross-functional driver of growth.
Conclusion
If your SEO approach feels like a treadmill—endless content with diminishing returns—it’s time to reassess. The solution isn’t just publishing more. It’s building a smarter, more balanced strategy that includes content, but doesn’t rely on it alone.
Visibility today depends on authority, technical soundness, strategic alignment, and thoughtful execution. Break out of the content trap, and you’ll find that SEO can do a lot more than just fill up a blog.
Read Corey’s full article on Search Engine Land:
When SEO becomes just content production – and how to break free: https://searchengineland.com/seo-content-production-trap-459749