For fifteen years, an average company's content plan was written more or less like this. You open Ahrefs (or SEMrush, or Ubersuggest). You search for keywords with good volume and low difficulty. You write a list of "SEO opportunities". You assign them to freelance copywriters or to the agency. You publish.
It worked. More or less. For the right sectors, even well.
In 2026 this approach is dead, and almost no one has announced it.
The problem isn't that keywords don't exist anymore. It's that their volume no longer corresponds to the traffic you get by ranking on them. Between zero-click searches (today over 60% of the total), generative AI answers, expanded snippets, sponsored cards, and local maps, the first organic result of a query with "monthly volume 5,000" today brings — at best — a few hundred visits.
Result: content plans written on Ahrefs continue to look valid. They produce well-ranked articles. And they don't bring traffic.
This piece is a reconstruction methodology. No theory. Five practical steps to redesign your content plan for the next quarter on a different criterion: intent and opportunity cost, no longer volume.
Step 1: clean up the metrics of old content
Before planning what to write, understand what you've already written and how it really performs.
Open Search Console. Filter the articles from your blog from the last 24 months. Export the dataset. For each article, calculate:
- Real clicks (not impressions, real clicks)
- CTR (clicks / impressions)
- Average position
- Article age
Sort by descending clicks. You'll probably notice two things: 20% of articles bring 80% of traffic (it's almost always like this), and among that 20% many are old (3-5 years).
That pattern is precious information. It means:
- The content of yours that works is little
- It's almost always the deep content (long-form, evergreen, well-cared-for over time)
- The "shallow" content written for a keyword opportunity is producing little or nothing
From this alone, a decision can be made immediately: stop writing "shallow" articles (800 words, generic listicle, written for a keyword). Invest that time in two things: updating those that work, and writing few new ones but very deeply.
Step 2: identify intents, not keywords
Keyword research in 2026 works like this. Instead of starting from a keyword and asking how many search for it, start from a customer intent and ask how do they search for it.
Examples. If you sell industrial machines, your customer's intent isn't "search for the keyword machine X". It is:
- "Understand whether to buy machine X or rent it"
- "Evaluate if machine X fits their production"
- "Compare machine X with model Y"
- "Find a machine X installer in Italy"
- "Solve a specific problem with machine X"
Five distinct intents. Each corresponds to many possible queries — some with high volume, some with low volume, some that don't even appear in standard tools. But all five correspond to a decision moment of the customer.
The right question is no longer "how much traffic does keyword X bring me?". It's "if my customer lives this intent, do I intercept it?".
For each intent, write one and only one really good article. Five intents = five articles. Five well-written articles per year beat fifty articles written for keywords.
Step 3: build the "opportunity cost" of each topic
Here comes the counterintuitive part.
For each candidate topic, calculate two things most traditional SEOs ignore:
A — Real writing difficulty. How much does it cost to write it well? A banal article gets written by the agency in three hours. A truly deep article on a topic you know deeply takes a day of thinking + half a day of writing. If you don't have that time, it doesn't pay you to write it.
B — Distance from your core value. Is the topic central to your brand, or peripheral? A well-written peripheral article brings traffic but doesn't position you. A well-written central article brings less traffic but positions you — and in the next years, in a SEO + AEO + GEO world (see the June 29 piece), positioning matters more than traffic.
Opportunity cost = (potential volume) × (closeness to core) ÷ (writing difficulty).
It's an approximate formula, but it changes priorities. Often you'll notice that topics with higher volumes have low opportunity costs (because they're peripheral and difficult). And topics with mediocre volume have high opportunity costs (because they're central and relatively simple to write well).
Plan on the second category. Not the first.
Step 4: stop measuring only traffic
KPI change. For each new article, define the expected result in three dimensions, not one:
- Clicks (the traditional metric).
- Citation in AI chatbots (does the article get included when an LLM answers questions on the topic? Verifiable manually with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude.)
- Qualified conversion (those who read the article sign up, subscribe, request a demo, at what percentage?).
The "ideal" article of 2026 is the one that wins on at least two out of three axes. Articles that win only on clicks but not on citation and not on conversion are vanity content — they look effective but don't move the business.
Initially it's laborious. Three months later, you have a dashboard telling you which content is really building positioning for you.
Step 5: use AI as editor, not as author
A final operational note. In 2026 vibe writing — using AI to write blog articles — is everywhere. Everyone does it. Result: the public web is invaded by AI-written articles, and Google's algorithms + LLMs' citation models are learning to recognize and devalue them.
The operational rule we apply internally and recommend:
- AI is excellent for structuring an article (outline, angle definition, point map).
- AI is excellent for reviewing an already-written article (flow check, redundancies, cut suggestions).
- AI is excellent for expanding research (finding sources, lining up data, generating examples).
- AI doesn't replace the author's voice. Voice — point of view, opinion, "why I say it" — must be human.
An article where 100% of text is AI-generated is visible three steps away today. An article where AI did 30-50% of the support work (research, outline, review) and the human put voice, opinion, and angle is the winning formula of 2026-2027.
The final truth
Companies seriously doing SEO in 2026 changed the starting point of the content plan. No longer "what do our customers search for?". But rather: "what do we have to say that no one else knows how to say as we do?".
It sounds silly. It is instead the difference between chasing Google's 2015 algorithm (which rewards those who answer generic questions) and speaking to the 2026 reader-customer (who wants informed opinions, data, direct experience).
Italian SMEs have a huge advantage on this axis: they have real experiences that "optimized" articles never have. Putting those experiences on the page is the best SEO you can do today.
Monday, August 3 we enter real August with the first of the pre-Q4 pieces: The September pitch: 3 things to fix in August if you have a round in sight. Deck, narrative, numbers — what will change in the next six months among Italian investors.
Have an editorial plan that produces articles but not results? Under growth hacking and sustainable organic growth we rebuild content strategies based on intents, not keywords. Let's talk — September is the right month to restart.