Use roundups and comparison posts to win customers, build trust, and grow your audience by helping readers choose rather than chasing rankings.

This week’s Ask an SEO question is about comparison content, roundups, and listicles:

“The traffic from our roundups and versus comparison posts has collapsed. Should we abandon this format or can we change how we approach it?”

The short answer is yes. Comparison content, roundups, and listicles can still be useful for SEO, and large language models (AI) are not the only channels out there. Using them for SEO and AIO/GEO is never a good idea. Many people bought into this “silver bullet” strategy and are paying the price. The same goes for scaled content, and Google went after it multiple times with the spam updates, updating its best practices.

Lists and comparisons are not spammy if they are done for users vs. traffic. The quality guidelines and spam updates don’t need to stop anyone from creating them; you just need to work with this type of content in a smart way.

If you’re using any of these types of content to try and game an algorithm, you will get caught and lose your traffic and referrals and it is easy for the tech companies to detect trends and patterns and know who is on them. But, this has been covered in detail, so I’ll jump into some of the reasons to continue working with and creating this type of content, but in a strategic way.

If there are two, three, or five big brands in your space, and each has search volume, this is a golden opportunity for you as a smaller company or brand.

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