If your SEO agency still builds its business around publishing more articles and more landing pages, you have a problem. AI has made content production cheap, Google is hitting large scale content hard, and what looks like rapid growth can disappear with the next Core Update. The model can work for a while, but it is a dangerous foundation for a business.
Many SEO agencies have built their delivery around content. Keyword research shows which searches the client is not yet visible for, and the solution is often the same: publish a new page. It might be an article, a guide, a category page or a landing page. The next month, you do the same thing again. On larger sites, the model is scaled up with Programmatic SEO. A template is combined with data to create hundreds or thousands of pages for different products, services, locations or search queries. Done properly, this can create value.
It is always the same old strategy: find more keywords, create more URLs and try to occupy more space in the search results. For many agencies, publishing volume has become the engine of the entire SEO operation.
Demand Media already did this
This has happened before. In the late 2000s, Demand Media built an enormous business around finding searches that could make money and then producing content for them at industrial scale. A network of around 13,000 freelancers wrote articles, often for about $20 each. Millions of guides covering almost anything people might search for were published on eHow, and the model worked extremely well. When Demand Media went public in 2011, the company was valued at around $1.9 billion. The entire machine was essentially built around the same idea that drives much of Programmatic SEO today. Find demand on Google, create a page that matches it and repeat the process as many times as possible.
Then Google changed the rules. The Panda update pushed down sites with large amounts of thin and repetitive content, and eHow was hit hard. Traffic fell, and the stock, which had reached $24.57 in March 2011, was trading at $5.62 in October. In roughly six months, around 77 percent of the stock’s value had disappeared.
Demand Media started removing content, raising its quality standards and cutting back on mass production, but it never became what it had once been.
Content agencies are in trouble
The first problem is economic. Content has become much cheaper to produce. What previously required keyword research, a brief, a writer, proofreading and publishing can now largely be automated. For an SEO agency that mainly charges for the production itself, a large part of the work has become a commodity.
The next problem is Google. The old model was built around finding more search queries and creating more pages for them. Google warns that large numbers of pages do not make a site more relevant and warns against creating separate pages for every possible variation of a search. The bigger risk is that this kind of large scale content production makes the site significantly more vulnerable when Google rolls out core updates and spam updates. That does not make Programmatic SEO worthless, but it does make programmatic content much less attractive. If the only thing separating 5,000 pages is a location, a product or a few rewritten paragraphs, you have a weak product.
The difficult part is that the strategy can look very good at first. If you quickly go from 100 to 1,000 pages, traffic can grow quickly as well. More pages get indexed, more keywords start ranking and the reports look like proof that the model works. The problem comes when a core update or spam update hits the site. The loss can then be larger than the entire previous gain, leaving the site worse off than it was before the content expansion started. Once Google has reassessed a large part of the site, recovery is often much harder than generating the traffic was in the first place.
There is also a less technical risk. The client may discover what they have actually been paying for. If the agency’s delivery essentially consists of finding keywords, ordering articles and publishing them in WordPress, it becomes difficult to defend the same price once the client sees how much of the process can be automated. At that point, the agency is no longer competing primarily with other SEO agencies. It is competing with software.
For an agency that mainly sells new content and new URLs, that is an uncomfortable combination. The product is becoming cheaper at the same time as both Google and users have less need for it.
Three ways to change your model
Sell analysis instead of content. Help the client understand which pages are actually needed, which should be removed, how the site should be structured and where the real business opportunity is. That is much harder to automate than writing another article.
Build things that cannot be copied immediately. Proprietary data, tools, databases, tests, research and content based on real experience give both Google and the user a reason to choose the client’s site.
Take responsibility for the client’s entire visibility. SEO is not about publishing more URLs. Technical SEO, links, digital PR, AI visibility and how the brand is mentioned outside its own website are becoming a larger part of the job. The agency needs to move its value away from production and toward things that are genuinely difficult to replace.
