“Google understands how RankBrain works but not really what it is doing” - Paul Haahr, lead engineer for Google on the algorithm that drives search results
Start-ups typically don’t spend on SEO until they get to Series B. This means 5+ years without focus on organic rank. This is at best a rent-transfer to Google and at worst a deadweight loss. Current enterprise and agency solutions around SEO focus on audits and on-page optimizations. And yet the blue ocean opportunity lies in producing content. Everyone knows quality content is hard to produce. Actually, make that statement broader: content is hard to produce.
But, content in reality is now very easy to produce. Advances in ML mean that bots are already writing most of your news. This is no secret - there is a whole wikipedia entry devoted to the topic. For now, the focus has been on collaborations between man and machine. Take RADAR - a UK-based project which allows a team of 6 journalists to write 8000+ news articles each month. Examples like this abound and the use cases are spreading to other verticals. Look at this deep-learning ‘sci-fi writing editor’ that auto-completes your lines. What is incredible is that this isn’t the effort of a team at a large tech firm. It is actually a hobbyist solo side project.
It is surprising that companies are not already using this technology for search results gamification. Ranking higher on Google is a P = NP type problem. Most companies have dedicated content and PPC teams devoted to just this venture. And this could not just bring these costs down but shrink the publishing lifecycle.
What does all this mean? Content writers and editors need not worry about clearing their desks just yet. Long-form well-researched content will likely survive and continue to thrive. The disruption will occur at the lower end of the market - the ugly short form blogs and opinion pieces that exist mostly to prop up domain authority. This long tail of short-form ‘filler’ articles will struggle against the bot invasion. Not only will machines write better blogposts, they'll generate more click-baitey headlines. And the ability to dominate long-tail searches via such growth hacks represents a massive opportunity in itself.
While I don’t have the data for the insurance industry, data from small businesses in general might offer some clues to how big the opportunity might be. Reading through it, I am convinced that many mom-and-pop brokers today won’t also have H1 tags. Think about it - what a simple way to give everyone a boost.
Most SEO service firms are small agencies and are outsourced this dirty work. Many senior marketing executives would even struggle to name the agency they work with. As a result, customer satisfaction (and loyalty) in the industry is relatively low.
There is a market opportunity to bundle SEO tools with a AI content generator. Given that insurance keywords represent some of the most expensive real estate in techtopia, this could be a big SaaS business one day.