Before/After Thought - Onpage SEO Advice for Publisher (large site)

Sharing some information based upon my recent discussions with publishers.

Earlier today I shared a comparison with a client team explaining what should be "before thought" and what "after thought" for on page SEO.

Talking about a publisher here and they were doing SEO mess of all the inputs coming from their ground reporters while raw/real ground info is something that people prefer to read. In that case sticking to raw reporting of here's
- What happened
- Here are some points
- If there is history to it explain that
And then only think of SEO on page elements.

The goal should be reporting the information and that’s important over doing some SEO on page optimisation or tweakings.

But once that’s done then can explore opportunities to make on page SEO changes but specifically in case of publishers I think because sometimes its better without being optimised?

Given the site wide singals boost from Google for such large publisher sites that’s why I think SEO operations shouldn't be wasting too much of daily time thinking it at the level of which keyword to include in which heading ..... YES its somewhat ok to do so but even without that its going to be fine because of site wide signals.

I think the bigger the publisher site - lesser amount of daily SEO resources should be spent on making sure minor things like keywords in headings rather focus on more broad issues is the key like training the SEO and Editorial team to write content in better way or probably optimise the content to be shown in Google Discover, which can drive a lot of traffic to the site.

Same advice of before vs after thought also applies to use of AI generated content, I think. My recommendation to publishers is to start with writing whatever you want to write or decided based upon user research then use LLMs as "after thought" to look for opportunities to improve that content rather than it being something "before thought" and starting with AI generated content then editing it.

This approach ensures that your team is focused on creating net new information on the web which of course might be better than what a LLM can generate.