Follow traditional SEO best practices

Bill says: “My number one tip has really not changed for the past few years: follow classic, traditional SEO best practices for creating content and optimizing pages and websites.

With some search engines, you can get away with 150 words of content and potentially rank on a page, but when it comes to AI, it's more about structuring a page, using the right title tags, meta description tags, headings, H1/H2/H3 tags, bulleted lists, ordered lists, numbered lists, bold, italics, etc.

Focus on the traditional SEO tactics, which haven't changed in the 20 years that I've been doing this.”

What key aspects of SEO are still vitally important?

“Optimizing web pages: on-page SEO, optimizing a page, and structuring the content properly.

Even in the age of AI, I don't think you need to structure a web page differently. You want to have a good page structure: have an introductory paragraph of content that gives an overview of the page, then have your talking point and all the content, and then sum it up at the end, using things like headings, heading tags, bold, italics, etc., which make it easier for the visitor to read that page. We know that people scan pages, and headings help with that.

Also, you want to have enough content. Over the past 2-3 years, when I go much more in-depth with content, that tends to do well with AI. They tend to pick up and recommend you a lot more as a website or as a source when you have 3,500 words on that page about that subject, and your competitors have 500 words or less.”

Do you think that having more extensive articles and pages gives you an advantage for AI?

“I think it definitely does give you an advantage. One area that I focus on is entities. Looking at a page of content, you can even ask your favourite AI, ‘I'm writing a page about this topic. What are the entities – and the titles, headings, topics, and subtopics – that I need to mention on this page to make it a great piece of content?’

AI will actually come back and say, ‘You're talking about home inspections. You need to mention these topics: real estate, house, home, foundation, etc., in your content.’ It's not necessarily just saying that 500 words isn’t enough. Technically, you could probably mention everything you need to mention in 500 words or fewer, but if you are really going in-depth, appealing to an AI, and showing that you are the expert in that topic, then it's naturally going to come out as a page with more words.

You can certainly cover a topic in 500 words, but I've seen pages in certain industries that are 30-35,000 words on a single webpage. It's not about the length. It's about the content and what needs to be there in order to show that your page is superior and has more to offer than your competitors’.

It's all about whether or not it's relevant and appropriate, and the subject matter is related. One of the ways that you can determine that (which we've done for years) is, when you search a keyword on Google, you can look at what's currently showing up in the search results. Do your keyword competitors have 30,000 words on the page, or is it very short and sweet content?

If you then go into a little bit more detail and mention more of the appropriate topics, subtopics, and entities on that page, you're going to be right up there with the competitors that are currently ranking.”

Now that content can be produced so easily, how do you differentiate your content from other people out there?

“When you create a new page, do some really heavy analysis on what's ranking well right now in the top 10 results, and compare that. What topics are they mentioning on the page? What do you need to mention? Can you do that in more depth and have a better piece of content?

I've had success with that, and it can happen fast. I’ve created the page and submitted it to the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, and 45 minutes later, it’s crawled, indexed, and Google has it ranking in the top position.

The AIs (especially Google’s) are looking at content differently. You do need a lot of the basics. You need to get to a point where your website is trusted enough that your pages can get crawled and indexed and so forth, meaning you need links. In 2026 and beyond, you're still going to need some kind of trust signals, and those trust signals and authority come from other websites, so you do need some links somewhere.”

What’s best practice for both external links and internal links, and has the authority of certain links changed over the last few years?

“We're in a transition period. It used to be that there was a lot of trust in links, and we really needed to get them. If you didn't have links from other websites, you didn't have any chance of ranking – even if your content was great.

From the evidence that I’m seeing, we’re now in a place where brand mentions are also bringing that trust. Whether it's your personal name or it's a business, Google and AIs are not only looking at links, they're looking at brand mentions. I've seen new domains that don’t necessarily have links ranking, even on Google, because the content mentions certain brands on the topic.

For more competitive phrases, sure, you do need to get links, trust, authority, etc. That also tends to help with crawling and indexing. More authoritative websites are the ones that will have their pages crawled and indexed.

With internal links, you can include them as is appropriate. If you have two pages of content that are similar, you link those two pages with keywords in the anchor text and, ideally, in the middle of a paragraph, and make it contextually relevant.

Nowadays, it doesn't necessarily have to be the exact match phrase. It could be four or five words, as long as it's contextually relevant. Internal linking is definitely an important aspect here.”

How do you measure the value of an unlinked citation?

“As an industry, we have all of these tactics like link buying, guest posts, etc. My prediction is that, pretty soon, we're going to be looking at brand mentions instead: literally just getting your company name or personal name out there and having it mentioned.

We're seeing this in tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc., and even new businesses and SaaS products that are starting up, that measure how many times your brand is mentioned in AI. The next rank tracker is going to be the brand mention tracker.

I'm still just starting to understand it and how those are measured. I know others are really clued into how to measure brand mentions in AI and so forth. As a digital marketer in 2026, one area you really need to start focussing on is brand mentions.”

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

“Understand that we're in a transition period. As you create content, start to look at more in-depth content. Move on from the old mentality of blog posts on your site needing to be 750 words for every single blog post. I still hear that from clients, and that's not something you want to focus on.

You want to focus on the right amount of content to get the point across on that topic, not just in terms of how much you're writing, but what you're writing and what you're covering.

Also, you definitely need appropriate internal links from page to page, not just in navigation, and a good site structure. Still focus on getting some links and getting that trust and authority, but in the age of AI, we're at the point where we can get some of that trust and authority based on the content that we're producing, not just from links.”

Bill Hartzer is CEO at Hartzer Consulting. Find out more over at Hartzer.com.