Make your content into assets by creating for the user

Ashley says: “Stop building content for ranking purposes and start thinking about content as assets for every stage of the user journey.

By doing that, you’re going to build trust, address their questions, supply helpful information, and bring the user through the entire journey, to eventually convert them.”

Can you build content for both the purpose of being an asset and for rankings purposes, or are rankings so unpredictable that you have to focus on assets?

“It's a combination of both.

Generally, when we've developed content strategies in the past, one of our big objectives was ranking. We would create content topics based on keywords and create content outlines based on how best to optimize. Now, we have LLMs in the mix, throwing us back to old school SEO.

So many content marketers are used to prioritising: ‘We need to create content that's going to rank and we need to create content for search engines.’ Then, Helpful Content happened, and it was like, ‘Okay, we'll create content for search engines and maybe for users too.’

I'm saying to throw that out the window. Let's just create content for users. By doing so, you are going to complement everything that we are facing these days, including all of the new wonderful things that 2026 is going to throw at us.”

You say that you should draw a clear line between disposable content and strategic assets. Does that mean creating separate content for humans and for LLMs?

“No, I think that should be one thing.

If we become really good content marketers and SEOs, we're going to naturally complete both of those objectives. From what we know thus far, when we're trying to optimize for LLMs, it's about the style and the format of the content, and it's about the authority that you're putting into the content.

Your users also want that format. They want that bulleted information. They want the short paragraphs and the short sentences. They want the cut-and-dry, exact facts. They're also looking for that credibility, where you say, ‘We’re a five-time awarded agency, and we have a bunch of thought leaders, so we can carry out an SEO study.’

By focussing on what users are going to be able to believe and trust within your content, and how they’re going to be able to trust the author, you’re also satisfying the LLMs and optimizing that content, without even trying.

From what we’ve been able to see so far regarding how to write content for ChatGPT and appear in AI overviews, if you're writing content in that format for users – putting trust and credibility in there, incorporating your own credibility through linking, and including internal link structures – you're satisfying both parties.”

Is it more important to be succinct and to the point now?

“Yes. I appreciate the history of lasagna, but at 7 p.m., when I'm cooking one and I only have half an hour to get it in the oven, I just want to know what temperature it needs to be and how long to cook it for. If I go to ChatGPT and ask how long to cook lasagna for and at what temperature (the same way I would ask Alexa in my kitchen), there are very specific pieces of information that I want to know.

However, you also need to be able to provide the additional context. Maybe they want all the steps. Maybe they want the side dishes to serve with that. Give them the option without forcing it.

In the past, we would force it by giving them the entire history of lasagna. Then we would bury the oven temperature and cooking time, hoping they would stick around. That's not the case.”

Is there any specific structure that makes content more likely to be picked up by an LLM?

“Having a summary beforehand is a safe bet, and something that SEOs and content marketers have been doing for a while now. Even before Helpful Content, people were starting to put summaries at the top, and then they were starting to do bulleted takeaways at the top, a table of contents, and ‘Jump To’ buttons. That was to support this whole idea of making your content helpful.

We should absolutely continue to do that, and it helps LLMs. However, I don't think that there is a secret format yet. LLMs are also still figuring out what pieces they should pull, as they're crawling pages and getting content.

There are a lot of great experts doing studies on this right now, and by mid-2026, we'll have a bit more information on what a good format looks like. However, that is also going to be different from brand to brand. Our demographics are different. The kinds of questions that they ask and the depth of information that they need are very unique.”

You also advise writing content that earns links by itself, so is it not necessary to proactively try to build links, if your content is good enough to earn them?

“Of course, you should always try and get links. However, if you get to a point where you're writing content that is strong, really covers a topic in depth, and is truly helpful, then you're going to naturally build links.

When I talk about links now, in terms of content, I'm going back to traditional PR. Let’s start working with PR agencies again and get placements in great places, instead of working with backlink companies or doing entire backlink strategies the old-fashioned way.

Let’s focus a little more on traditional PR. Have quotes in places. Do press releases. Actually create great content.

At SearchLab, we're working on a bunch of different studies, and we have different departments within the company that are working within AI and LLMs, within different SEO behaviours, within the auto industry, the cannabis industry, the law industry, etc.

We're doing these studies so that we can bring all this information together and show the patterns that we're seeing. Maybe an auto dealership can learn from this and update their GBP with it.

We’re creating content that is going to make noise and break through, and people are naturally going to want to link to it. That’s traditional PR, and it’s where a lot of content marketing is going.”

SEOs tend to focus on content that drives long-term value, but where can you gain more immediate initial visibility?

“Of course, it depends on your market, your target audience, and where they are.

For my target audience, what’s hot right now is LinkedIn. It's publishing LinkedIn articles and being active on LinkedIn, even by commenting on other people's posts. Comments are getting more impressions than your own organic posts.

For marketers who are targeting marketers, LinkedIn's a really hot place to go right now to create and publish content. In other industries, that's going to look completely different, and that's changing on a very regular basis.

By the time we get halfway through 2026, Reddit could be back up again. It all depends on where your demographic is. You want to make a lot of noise in those channels.”

Do you think SEOs should be aware of organic performance in discovery platforms as well as search engines?

“Certainly. At the end of the day, as marketers, one of our biggest goals is to track where all of these people are coming from. How did they get to your website? Then, what did they do once they landed on your website? Did they eventually convert? How long did that take?

We're constantly trying to tell a story with all of the content that we're producing, and hopefully be able to identify that first touchpoint. Was it an article that you contributed to on Forbes or a comment that one of the employees posted on LinkedIn?

If you have enough tracking in place, you'll be able to tell this story, but it is one of the hardest things to do. Whether you're an SEO, a content marketer, or a social media advertiser, data attribution is something that we're still struggling with.”

How do you ensure that your brand’s message and story are incorporated within your content without being overly salesy, and in a way that resonates with the user?

“That's the ToFu, MoFu and BoFu model (Top-of-Funnel, Middle-of-Funnel, and Bottom-of-Funnel), where content topics are created for very specific user stages. It's not just about their entire journey; it's where they are at now.

Sometimes, we're creating content just to be educational. We do not care if they ever press ‘Get a Demo’ or sign up for a service. We're literally just providing education in the hopes that they're going to understand that SearchLab is an educational hub, and they can trust that they can come to us when they have questions. If they want to know what's going on – the latest in SEO, or the latest in PPC – they can come to us. It's a long-term play.

Then we'll have different pieces of content where we'll send email newsletters to people who have signed up to our webinars, and that will start to drip a little bit more aggressively, and then a little bit more aggressively again.

It's a much more long-term play when you start with an educational angle, but you build so much trust by doing that first.

Focus on creating content that hits ToFu, MoFu and BoFu, and connects with a user where they are, right then and there – instead of always worrying about that sale or that instant new customer, because content is very far away from instant satisfaction.”

What metrics do you look at to determine when to update or improve a piece of content, and how do you know what to change?

“This is going to vary based on how much traffic you're getting and how much data you have.

If you have a decent-sized website, you're going to be able to get data within a quarter of a piece of content being published. For others, waiting six months to a year is going to be a little bit safer.

Once you have the data that lets you understand how it performed on social, how it's doing on the site, what a user went to afterwards, and what that story is with that specific piece of content. That's when you can judge what you need to update or how you need to pivot. Maybe you’re getting so much engagement on one piece that you should write five other blog posts complementing that topic.

The first thing to do is give it time, which will vary based on how much traffic and data you have. The second thing to do is look at what the data is telling you. If it worked really well, you can go all in and create more topics that are very similar to complement that. If it didn't work at all, you can go to Google, type in that keyword, and see what's populating the SERP right now.

What's the heading structure? What's the information that they're saying? How is that different from what you said? Are you so far off that you can't just update it, so it needs a full rewrite? Maybe your paragraphs are super long compared to everyone else, or you wrote 2,500 words when the average word count was 900.

That's how you use the data to tell you exactly what you need to do and how to fix your content.”

What metrics do you look at to determine whether your content has been consumed and had an impact on a user's behaviour, and how do you tie that to business goals?

“That's a loaded question because it's going to be so varied based on the company and what they're trying to accomplish. Right now, I'm working on about six different pieces of content, all with their own unique channels.

For webinars, I'm measuring success by how many people registered, how many people attended, and how long those who attended stuck around. The biggest metric is how many of the people who registered then filled out a ‘Get a Demo’ form after the webinar.

That form comes from a QR code at the end of the webinar, which has UTM tracking, so we're able to correlate it specifically back to that webinar.

The most important goal is how many people signed up for a demo (that's what I'm ultimately trying to get), but I'm using the registrations and the attendee info to also tell me the story of which topics are working really well and which ones aren't.

If we have a bunch of registrations on a webinar, that’s telling me that people want to know more about that topic. We're not changing the guest. We're not changing the date and time. We're only changing the topic, so it’s easy to understand where we need to improve and pivot.

It depends on the content type. If it's a blog, it's a completely different set of metrics. A podcast is a completely different set of metrics. It really varies.”

Ashley, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Keep creating content for your users. Don't get overwhelmed by the idea that you need to optimize for search engines, and you need to optimize for LLMs, and you need to think about the users, too.

If you start with a brand-new piece of content, think about what your user wants to know and how you can get that information out to them in a simple way. By doing that, you will help satisfy both optimizing for search engines and LLMs at the same time.”

Ashley Segura is Director of Marketing at SearchLab Digital. Find out more over at SearchLabDigital.com.