What sort of content is right for my website?

We work with lots of different clients, and this question often comes up: “What should I post on my website?”

Key takeaway: The simple answer is that the sort of content you put on your website depends on the sort of search terms you want to rank for in organic search and the sort of questions you want to get cited for by AI tools. If you post content that isn’t laser-focused, it can hurt your rankings and AI mentions.

This may seem really simple, but many people don’t realise that publishing the wrong types of content on your website can damage your rankings.

Now that we are contending with both organic search and AI search, the content game has changed somewhat, and you’ve got to be even more careful about what you publish on your website.

The key differences in new search tools

Traditionally, organic search results and placements. You were positioned 1 through 10 on the homepage, and if you were outside those rankings, you didn’t exist.

Organic search results were largely deterministic, meaning different people searching for the same thing would see similar results. There would be variations based on location and search history, but in general, position 1 was position 1.

Sites that ranked in these positions generally stayed there for as long as they provided the best answer or solution to the Google search query.

There would be some variation in position based on search history and location, but broadly, the deterministic nature of search meant that if you were in the top 10 for a particular keyword, you generally stayed there, irrespective of who was searching (assuming they were all in the same country).

AI tools do not work this way

AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude are non-deterministic, which effectively means five different people can ask exactly the same question and get five different sets of results.

This matters even more when users are logged in to their AI accounts, because these tools take into account search history and memory far more than traditional search does.

You can test it yourself. Get three or four people in your office to search or ask for the same recommendation in GPT, and you’ll notice just how wildly different the results are.

What this means for your website content

There’s a very good chance your website has a blog. You may call it insights, articles, or just a straightforward blog, but it’s generally the place where you publish content about the products or services that you provide and demonstrate your experience and thought leadership around the service that your business provides.

This is fine, it’s exactly what you should be doing. Your blog informs the search engines and AI tools about your area of expertise.

If you keep this to laser-focused articles about the services that your business provides, the solutions you’ve delivered for clients, and interesting ideas about your sector, then you’re generally in good standing to rank well in both organic and AI searches.

However, if you use your blog as some form of news repository for articles about everything from people’s birthdays to team-building exercises and other non-business-focused content, you are going to confuse both the search engines and AI tools – you are simply diluting topical authority with content that shouldn’t be on your website.

Your blog articles must be laser-focused

For this example, let’s imagine we’re talking about a business that sells website design and build services, a lot of which we do here at Toast.

The articles on our blog are all specifically focused on WordPress, website issues, content marketing, hosting, website optimisation, and a whole host of other topics directly related to the services we offer.

The reason for this is that we don’t want to muddy the waters; we want tools like GPT and Google search bots to read our content and understand that we are all about the services we provide and that we also have broad-ranging expertise, experience, and authority in these subjects.

Where things can go wrong

We do quite a lot of stuff outside of work at Toast. Many of the designers have side projects, we’ve got a 30-year anniversary coming up soon, someone might have just had a baby, and so on. But we don’t let this stuff anywhere near our blog,

That’s not because we don’t care about it, obviously, our culture is really important, but the effect of placing such information on our blog can have a detrimental impact

The simplest way to think about it is this: imagine a photo of 100 footballs. Every single one is exactly the same. Now imagine the same photo where you’ve got 100 identical footballs, but one of them is square and bright pink, it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb

The first image, where all the footballs are exactly the same, is targeted and precise; the second image, where we start introducing the square pink footballs, doesn’t look quite right, and it only gets worse as we introduce more square pink footballs.

This is somewhat of an oversimplification of the process, but you get the idea. The minute you start introducing content in your blog that isn’t about your core services, you start to confuse crawlers about what your website is actually about.

You have to bear in mind that web crawlers are not short of websites to crawl. If you give them any ambiguity or insinuation that maybe you also do other things apart from your core services, then they are simply going to rank someone who’s more laser-focused higher than you.

This is even more true when people are using AI tools like ChatGPT to ask for recommendations. AI does not want to get things wrong; this has been shown in many recent news articles about AI models cheating to get the correct answer. Part of it is down to their programming, where they are told specifically not to hallucinate and not give people answers that are ambiguous or could be interpreted incorrectly.

Apply this level of thinking to your website, if you’ve got 100 blog posts on your site about the services and solutions that you offer, and you’ve got another 100 about a recent football match that you played in, a charity event that you attended, or the fact that Bob in Accounts’ wife has just had a baby, you’re going to start confusing the search engines and AI crawlers.

There are other places to post content that is soft, cultural, or not directly focused on your key services

That place is social media. Instagram, LinkedIn, X, or whatever it is you use. This is the place to post non-core service-related content that you can then share with people who are genuinely interested in reading about that type of content.

I’m not for one minute saying that you should share only non-work-related stuff on these platforms, of course. It should be a mix of content,  but the simple advice is: do not cross the streams.

Do not publish content on your website that is not specifically focused on your services; the simple advice is: do not cross the streams – if it’s a social event, a social update, or staff-related news that is not business-focused but is more cultural for your business, share it on social media platforms.

That’s what these platforms have been built for: sharing content about your business. Many businesses use platforms such as Instagram and LinkedIn to attract followers rather than people who are specifically interested in buying a product or service today.

A simple guide to what to publish

You don’t have to be boring, but you just need to choose your platform wisely: