How the smartest SEO I know is AI-proofing their career

Blog posts, traffic, keywords... Jess Joyce is over them. Here's what she's doing instead...

Author

David Broderick
June 05, 2025

In partnership with

All your work, all in one place

Stop losing track of your articles scattered across the internet.

Authory automatically gathers everything you’ve published in one place, making it easy to search, find, and share your work.

Need to show a potential client your articles matching their requirements best? They’re just a click away.

Thousands of writers are streamlining their careers with a portfolio that’s organized, discoverable, and ready to impress. Authory really makes it that simple.

Wanna know how one of the smartest SEOs I know is AI-proofing their career?

The incredible Jess Joyce joined Ross Hugdens on Siege Media’s Content and Conversation podcast the other week.

And she revealed three things she’s leaving behind in 2025 to make sure she’s still delivering SEO results in the age of AI Overviews and zero-click content…

Let’s dive right in to the things Jess said she’s ditched for good in The Word ‘Blog’ Is Holding Us Back w/ Jess Joyce…

🪦 Blog posts

Jess isn’t creating blog posts anymore. Not as a go-to strategy, anyway – and especially not ones targeting ‘What is’ queries. 

“You’re not going to be able to answer a ‘What is’ query better than an AI is going to be able to answer that at this point, unfortunately. That’s where we’re seeing a lot of client traffic going down.”

In fact, she wants to kill the word “blog” altogether:

“I honestly think if we killed the word ‘blog’ and just called it content, that would give us so much more flexibility in what we’re creating. It would remove the barriers.”

Instead, she says we should be thinking beyond 1,500-word articles:

“I live and die by Ross Simmonds’s ‘create once, distribute forever’ philosophy. Make the ‘create once’ the best thing you can make. Then set it up to work for you across all these zero-click places. So, you make it into a graphic, you make it into a video, you make it into social posts.”

If you’ve got a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But as content folks, we’ll drive the best results for our clients – and become as indispensable as possible – if we think beyond blog posts:

“I’m not just making a blog post to make a blog post. Sometimes that becomes deep research into some other topic. Or it might end up being a programmatic play. Or maybe we make a white paper. Or maybe we make a landing page that targets an industry that the client hasn't targeted yet.”

Want an example of the kind of content that’s killing it in the zero-click world? Look no further than the infographics Jess posts on LinkedIn. These have driven tonnes of leads for Jess’s agency – a lot more than if she’d published the same info as blog posts instead 👀 

🪦 Traffic as a core metric

Stopping measuring traffic? In this economy!? 

Yup. Here’s why Jess really doesn’t care about traffic anymore:

“We have one client that’s still tracking traffic as their core metric, and we’re trying to move them away from that. Because their traffic is decreasing month-over-month, but their conversions aren’t decreasing. So to me as an SEO, that makes me feel like the content is still resonating with the people that it needs to be resonating with.”

So, what is Jess tracking instead? 

“We try to get as close to the money as possible. So we track whatever our clients’ core marketing metric is, which in the SaaS world is usually the number of demos booked.”

🪦 Keyword research (and keyword research alone)

Jess still starts her SEO strategies with keyword research. But she doesn’t think it’s anywhere near as valuable as it used to be:

“We’re heading to a zero-click world. We’re in this new world of LLMs and attribution being in the garbage at the moment because who knows where anything is coming from? And people aren’t typing keywords into social networks, right? They’re not going to LinkedIn and searching ‘B2B SaaS companies’.”

So, she adds an extra layer of research to every SEO strategy – mining the transcripts of the sales team’s calls with prospects:

“Sales people talking to prospects are the most valuable conversations you can get hold of. Because you’re going to hear prospects talking about their pain points. They’re going to ask questions you might not have answered on your website that your website could be solving. And they’re going to talk about any blockers in their way.”

Jess takes those conversations, anonymises them, and puts them into AI to get content ideas from it: 

“And that stuff isn’t keyword driven, ever. But I feel like it’s more valuable than keyword research in some cases, because you’re actually solving a problem that maybe a prospect hadn’t verbalised before, and then surfacing that up on the website with content.”

🙃 Oh so just the complete opposite of what we were doing five years ago then?

To recap, these days Jess doesn’t:

  • Base her content strategies around blog posts

  • Track traffic as a core metric

  • Rely just on keyword research

Just complete 180 on the traditional SEO playbook then 🙃

Jess is betting her career that the best way to survive in the age of AI is:

  • Creating one piece of 10x content, then distribute it forever

  • Tying your work to revenue-led metrics, like number of demos

  • Adding a layer of audience research to every content strategy

Get more of her insights in her full interview on the Content and Conversation podcast (and follow her on LinkedIn to catch her banger visualisations of her SEO processes 🔥) 

🧵 This week’s best TOFU threads 

TOFU Community Manager