How IBM Took Over “AI” Keywords on Google (And What You Can Steal)

This might be the most successful B2B SEO content program at the moment, ranking number one for AI agent, number one for what is AI, and four for the absolute monster of a term, just AI. Rankings have exploded in the last year. They're kicking the poop out of everyone in the most frenzied, hype-driven category that I have ever seen in my career. So, who is it? Mother effing IBM. This is a post from Lars Lofgren. I'll finish reading the post in a moment. Gagan Gochra sent it to me. Thank you, Gagan. Thank you, Lars. And then we are going to take a look at what IBM is doing really well with their content that is allowing them to rank number four for just AI, number one for AI agent, number one for what is AI. We're going to look at that. Take a look at some things that they could be doing better that they're probably getting away with because of their very high domain authority. But overall, yeah, tactics that we can steal from IBM's very successful, as Lars Lofgren wrote, B2B SEO content program. Lars continues, "Whoever's running their Think blog absolutely knows what they are doing. Full props. Things I love about this blog, the structure and overall architecture is spot-on. No notes. The content is exactly what Google prefers at the moment. Note, I don't think it's good, it's what Google wants. It's perfectly chunked and there is a good mix of images and videos. The Google loves videos. Now for what I hate, eff me, is the content bland. The kind of generic best practices that make my skin crawl. That said, they shouldn't change what they have. The site is getting spread thin across all of B2B. I'd be careful here. It's working for now, but if the team gets greedy, they could hit a tipping point and the whole thing might collapse. Got to shift into retrenchment and consolidation and dial back the expansion. Most teams eff up at this stage. This is what happened to HubSpot. HubSpot got greedy, it was ranking for of terms outside their core business offerings, really spreading themselves thin, as Lars writes. And they got hit. They hit a tipping point. In February 2023, HubSpot was getting 24 million clicks a month from Google. Now they are only getting 4 million clicks a month. But Lars finishes, "If you're wondering what the perfectly optimized B2B blog looks like for Google right now, this is it. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, eh?" Now we have "No one at Google ever got fired for ranking IBM." And the top comment for this is "The guy who runs IBM's content operation spoke at Tech SEO Connect and it was super impressive. The scale in battling corporate inertia is no joke. So, they know what they're doing." Oh, I like this comment. "This is a great example of what a legacy company can do when they want to. There's probably literally like three companies in the space that have the kind of brand and authority that IBM does, who existed decades before almost everyone else in the space did. So, if they choose to deploy that wisely, now we see what happens." And it's true, you see a lot of companies that have legit authority not wielding it properly for SEO. All right, so this is the page that is ranking number four for AI. It's IBM's What Is Artificial Intelligence AI page. The page title is the same as the H1. The URL slug is think/topics/artificialintelligence. Here are some of the things I really like about this page. Right away when you start reading, you get your answer. It says "What is AI?" and then "Artificial intelligence AI is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem-solving, decision-making, creativity, and autonomy." It's in a bigger font than the rest of the paragraph text. Below this, they have a smooth call to action to join their newsletter, join over 100,000 subscribers who read the latest news in tech. That's not helping them with SEO, but it's just a it's a good way to incorporate a call to action in extremely top-of-funnel content like this. With my site, the call to action to join my newsletter is with a pop-up that triggers with exit intent, so like you're planning on leaving the page, or if you scroll to the middle of the page. But I like that it's just embedded like this, a little bit down the page. And I'm actually thinking about incorporating this exact thing into my top-of-funnel articles cuz this is just so smooth. Like Lars said, this is really well structured. There's this part, "Deep learning also enables semi-supervised learning, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, transfer learning." And then each of these links to separate pages, separate pages that can rank for their terms. So, by having this page rank well for such a highly clicked and searched keyword, this page is passing a ton of authority to these subpages that it is linking to. And the internal linking on this page is very thought out, very extensive. I like that there's this timeline about how AI has developed. When I look at this page, personally, I feel like the authors gave it more thought into what a searcher will be looking for. I think a lot of people who are searching AI are probably looking for AI news, but then there's going to be a lot of people who just search AI who want to start learning, just like this. And this is extremely top-of-funnel content that will help people learn. There are videos in here, the images explain things well. One of my favorite things about this page is there are no clear signs of AI writing. There's no em dashes, there's no bullets where the first word of each bullet is bolded with a colon after it. It's not extremely redundant. AI might have assisted in writing this piece, but the clear signs of AI writing were removed. Now, what's interesting is if you go to a page like their semi-supervised learning page, all the AI writing signs were left in this. There are tons of em dashes. The paragraphs are longer. There's not as much media. It's possible that because the term AI is so much more competitive, once this page started to rank for AI, they went in and removed the AI writing giveaways. They said, "Okay, let's just double down our effort on this page and improve it because this is such a highly searched term." Or they just didn't have them from the start. And their subpages link back to this page. So, those subpages rank and then pass authority back to this page as well. For people who don't know, just by ranking and getting clicks, the good type of clicks where people are not pogo sticking, you are getting authority that you can pass to more of your pages. Looking at the page they have that ranks one for AI agent, they're doing many of the same best practices that I just described in this page. They explain, cuz this is extremely top-of-funnel. So, they explain it right away at the top of the page with just a short sentence. It's such a good best practice. It's given above the fold here. "An artificial intelligence AI agent is a system that autonomously performs tasks by designing workflows with available tools." There you go. A problem with this page, something that I don't like, which I believe they're getting away with because they have so much authority, is that there is a tremendous amount of keyword stuffing in this page. AI agents is used so much in this page and it is really bad. That is a bad problem. It's it's used to an unnatural degree, I would say. But again, they have so much authority, it doesn't even matter. For a startup that doesn't have a lot of authority, the startup might not get away with it. AI agents are in the H1, the first H2, the beginning of the second sentence, the beginning of the third sentence. They're in the second H2, at the beginning of the fourth sentence. There's just a lot of there's a lot of uh mentioning. If I search this page actually for just AI agents, I see that it appears 51 times. That's a lot. But aside from that, again, it's doing a lot of the things that the AI page was doing well. And the internal linking, as I said, is super thoughtful. So, this is cool. It's just cool to see what a big legacy company like this that does have a lot of authority can do with very valuable terms when it takes its SEO seriously. And I really respect this. I think it's awesome. And I hope to see more people doing great SEO. Thank you, Lars Lofgren, for writing this post and thank you, Gagan Gochra, for sending it to me. If you want to see how I do search engine optimization, I specifically go after bottom-of-funnel terms, high purchase intent terms. And then once you're dominating the high purchase intent terms, then you start to go after some top-of-funnel terms as well. But you start with those super high purchase intent terms because, a lot of people don't know this, those are the easiest to rank for. The search volumes are less, and because the search volumes are less, less SEOs are going after them. SEOs are going after the most highly trafficked keywords often times. And so, these purchase intent keywords are just left completely under-targeted. And you come in, you find the keywords, you target them properly, you make conversion-based landing pages that are literally about saying why your brand is doing what people are already looking for. And people are so hot with desire that they convert right there. And so, if you want to learn that method, that is at compactkeywords.com. It's the thing on my shirt, Compact Keywords. And this is episode 1012 of my daily search engine optimization podcast, The Edward Show. 1012 days in a row without missing a single day. Let's go. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.