The Truth About “Set It and Forget It” SEO
Remember that search is constantly shifting and changing and great marketers know how to adapt.
It has been proven that AI results change rapidly based on many factors—including freshness of content, relevancy, and more recently, personalization, showing why relying on a Set It and Forget It SEO approach is no longer effective.
In other words, your AI results can be affected by who you are, where you are, where you’ve come from, what your preferences are, and any other data they know about you, AI (and Google) results and answers can be wildly different for you than me.
These are a few important points to keep in mind as you wade deeper into the SEO (cess)pool:
Search is Not Static
Algorithms change. Competitors evolve. Customer behavior shifts. What worked six months ago can flatline tomorrow.
Content Decays Over Time!!
Even the best content loses relevance over time. Search engines and AI favors freshness, so make sure to regularly update content. Here’s a simple hack using AI:
Then monitor your rankings and see if there was an effect!
1. Grab a URL for the published content page you want to update
2. Feed it into Gemini and use this prompt: “Visit this URL and give me a TL;DR summary with 3-5 bullets of the key points from this article. Make sure you are speaking to the ideal customer. Output without emojis.”
3. Edit the prompt to include notes on your brand tone of voice, or anything else. Some light prompt engineering will yield better results.
4. Now get the output. If you’re not happy with the result, edit your prompt or input a follow-up prompt asking AI to give you more versions, plus the do’s and don’ts you’d like to see in the next versions.
5. Finally, edit your final version. Place the summary it in the first 150-200 words on the page for maximum visibility on search and AI.
6. Then monitor your rankings and see if there was an effect!
Technical Issues Creep In
Broken links, crawl errors, slowdowns — these pile up. Make sure you’re solving usability issues and UXC issues as they come up when they are critical – for example, 404 errors.
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