← Simple SEO and Marketing, Business Growth, Organic Marketing, Copywriting, Online Business, Blogging, Content Creation
Simple SEO and Marketing, Business Growth, Organic Marketing, Copywriting, Online Business, Blogging, Content Creation
Ep 258 // 2026 Content Marketing Trends to Stand Out (Don't Sleep on These)
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All right, friends, so today we are digging into 2026 and beyond, what is actually going to work in content marketing. And I'm actually really excited about where content marketing is headed in 2026. And I'm going to give you seven tips to market smarter, not just harder, in 2026. And I truly believe that these tips, these strategies are going to carry you through 2026 and beyond. So bust out your notes, app, pen and paper, write it on your arm, and Sharpie. I don't really care. Just make sure that you've got a way to keep track of these tips so that you can go and apply them to your content marketing. Are you ready? Let's go. Hey there fellow entrepreneur. Welcome to simple SEO and marketing. Do you want to grow your business with sustainable traffic sources? How to have you heard about the power of search engine optimization? And you want to take advantage of it to get more traffic, more eyeballs on your business. But when it comes down to it, does SEO feel complicated and hard to implement? Are you tired of wondering what in the heck to do with your website to get more traffic and more leads knocking on your door? What if I could tell you that there was a simple, proven system for using SEO, blogging and copywriting to get leads from your website and not just any leads. How to hi. Converting Lead Hey, I'm Faith Hannon, wife, mama, copywriter, SEO strategist and barrel racer. And for the last eight years I've been figuring out what works and what doesn't work in the world of online marketing to get organic traffic. And now I'm here to share all the things I'm learning in the trenches of SEO, copywriting and content marketing. How does 300%, 500% or even 12,000% more traffic in a year sound? What could your business do with that kind of traffic increase? How many more people could you help? So listen in and prepare to take notes. I'm about to drop simple, actionable SEO, marketing and copywriting tips all with a heavy dose of Jesus loving encouragement. Let's get you more traffic and more leads so you can help more people with your God given gifts. So I'll be honest, I try actually really hard to not be on social media a ton. And I'm actually not on there a ton. I fasted occasionally don't use it a ton at the moment for my business, but I do find it a super useful tool to kind of keep keep your pulse, you know, keep keep the pulse of what's going on in the marketing world. And that paired with talking to lots of students and clients and not so much clients talking to lots of students and potential students about, you know, where they're at in their marketing. And then all of the emails that I get from other marketers, like there is a lot of out there around marketing in 2026 and beyond. I hear questions about is SEO dead? Is blogging still worth it? Is AI going to replace content marketing? Like, I hear all of these things, I hear what people are saying and maybe you are saying or thinking, and I'm here to help you with that, okay? And the fact of the matter is marketing changes, right? If we look back to what worked in marketing in 1950 or 1910, right, it has changed drastically since then. But I think with the advances of AI and you know, everything just moves so much faster with the Internet and YouTube and in social media. Like the changes are so much more rapid now than, you know, maybe they were 50 years ago or even 10 years ago or five years ago. The changes are so much faster now than they were, you know, back then that I think it's really easy to get kind of scared, right? But hey, guess what? I'm not here to fill you full of fear. God hasn't given us a spirit of fear, right? So let's move forward with boldness, right? Knowing that we have businesses to market, people to reach, and let's do it in a way that's fun, okay? So number one for 20, 26 and beyond for our marketing is SEO still works, but lazy SEO does not. Truly, as long as people are searching for answers that you provide solutions for, you can use SEO and you can use it in a way that's sustainable. Just like two weeks ago I had a student on our, in our simple SEO framework and group coaching call to add a student that she says, she told me she had 110% traffic increase in the last couple months. Like boom. Like this is, this still works, SEO still works, but lazy SEO doesn't work. And what I mean by that is I feel like people in general overcomplicate SEO and then they feel like they have to have all kinds of hacks to use SEO. What I mean by that are all of these like AI tools and bots and all these crazy things that you can quote unquote use to use SEO when in reality they just most of them don't work. And I say that saying knowing that I get emails in my inbox with new tools literally every day. You could drive yourself crazy trying all of these SEO trends and fads. And stuff, right? Or we can just do what works and not be lazy, okay? And when Chat GPT launched, we just saw so many changes. We saw so many changes because people were like, ooh, I can just tell AI to write a blog for me. And boom. And they started churning out tons and tons and tons and tons of blogs, right? And I think the Internet just, like, exploded. Its brain fell out. And it was like, oh, my gosh, these people who are posting 800 blogs a day, they must be doing something right. And finally, the pendulum swung the other way with the, quote, helpful content update. And for a lot of people, specifically bloggers who were just blogging to blog, that pendulum swing really hurt them, okay? But what I have seen with my students and clients, I got the Google Analytics receipts to prove it. What I have seen over the course of years, y', all, is when you use SEO the right way, not the lazy way to market your business. There's no massive changes, there's no massive swings because your content was written to be helpful to begin with. You just used SEO to get it out there in front of the right people, okay? So don't worry, don't freak out. SEO still works, but lazy SEO doesn't. Okay? Number two, the Google helpful content updates, they didn't kill content. They just enforced helpfulness. Okay? Now, when you have the right heart behind creating your content, that you want this content to be helpful, not just a check mark or not just putting it out there to make the SEO gnomes happy, when you have the right heart to create helpful content, it's always going to work as long as you do it the SEO way, right? The way I teach you, in fact. So one of my students, she's a current student, but before she signed up for simple SEO framework and group coaching, she. She emailed me back and forth. She had lots of questions, and I was happy to help her. One of her questions was she had popped into a blogging group, and she asked in this blogging group, like, you know, have you guys seen any results with SEO? And somebody in the group, well, meaning, I'm sure was like, SEO doesn't work anymore since the helpful content update. And so she emailed me about that, and we just chatted back and forth, and I was like, well, actually, what I teach still works. When I just sent her screenshots, I was like, here's this, here's this, here's this, here's this. Because the truth of the matter is when you're not trying to scam people or scam machines, the helpful content still helps, right? So content that was written specifically and only for algorithms. That's what got exposed, so to speak, and kind of knocked down the rankings with the helpful content updates. But content that was genuinely written for people and by people still wins. Okay. Okay. And this is probably number three is probably the biggest complaint or worry that I'm hearing out there in the chatter right now. And that is that AI overviews are stealing people's content. And I have to, I have to tell you that this is actually true to an extent. Okay? Because AI, if you just pay attention to your own searches and how you are using Google or DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever your search engine of choice is, if you pay attention to your own searches, you'll see that AI gives you overviews on surface level level topics. Think definitions, think like simple topics, like how to hard boil an egg. Not that I've googled that slash. I really have. AI is AI is giving answers to simple questions. Okay? But AI is not giving help or answers to like deep level personal recommendation type question. So think about it like this. The AI overviews, they're handling surface level answers, which may honestly mean that depending on the content that you had out there already, depending on what your past content strategy was or even your current content strategy, you might genuinely be seeing less clicks. But that's actually okay. In most cases it's actually okay because those fewer clicks have a higher intent of purchasing. Let me explain like this. So if you were, if your past content strategy included a lot of very simple, like, what is type content? Then people are coming to your website, they're getting information and then they're leaving. They're not coming to your website, engaging, reading, more subscribing, and really buying into your brand. Okay? They're just coming like, what is this word on my finger? Okay, great. And then they're moving on. Okay? Versus, if you're losing that, like the traffic to that surface level content, and you're still getting traffic to the deeper level content, the people that are coming are more likely to engage and buy. The right people still click and read quality, helpful, easy to read content. I gotta throw that out there because I'm looking at you bloggers who have 800 ads covering the content that I actually want to read. People are still searching for information. They still want recommendations, they still want to learn. Okay, People still want to learn, but they want to learn in a little bit different ways. Right? Like we want definitions. Great, moving on. But when we're looking for deeper things, deeper Questions, more complex questions and more complex answers. They're, they're more willing to engage. So think of it like this. Maybe your clicks were kind, your, your click numbers, your analytics were kind of inflated in the past, and maybe now it's more realistic for genuine leads. Right? Maybe before you had 10,000 people coming, but they were just clicking on, you know, 50% surface level content. So now you've dropped to, let's say, 5,000 clicks. But those people that are clicking articles and blogs, they're clicking on deeper level content and they are more likely to engage and buy. Okay? So truly, AI didn't kill your traffic, the traffic that means anything, it just filtered out tire kickers. So moving forward, I want you to think about your content on a deeper level. I don't want you to be thinking what is, who is type content? I want you to be thinking deeper level content. Which brings me to number four, which is this content is no longer a quantity only game. And can we just all pause and say praise the Lord, hallelujah. Because that 2023, 2024 AI content flood that just created so much low quality content out there on the Internet. That's, that's done. I mean, people may still be doing it, but it's not winning anymore, okay? Because people were just going on to Google typing, write me, or going on to chat GPT and typing, write me a blog on repeat. Okay? The pendulum is swinging back the other way. Okay, this is actually really good because you get to go deeper with your content. So what does this mean for your content marketing strategy? Well, you don't need to be churning out eight blogs a week, or four blogs a week, or even two blogs a week. Truth be told, I would love to see you churning out one blog a week in 2026. But honest to goodness, if all, if all you can do is one high quality blog every other week, you're still going to be ahead at the end of the year because you get to go deeper. So with each blog that you create, you need to be asking yourself, am I, am I thoroughly answering the question? And am I doing it in a way that only I can do? Because if you're doing it in a way that only AI could do, slash, anybody could do, then you're not going to rise to the top. Which actually brings me to a cool free gift that I have for y'. All. A cool resource. It's called the AI Input Advantage. So it's going to help you take your AI from an annoying intern to your most trusted assistant. And what this is, is, it's, it's just a guardrail system that you pop in as a chat or as a prompt in whatever AI you're using. You pop it in and it gives your AI guardrails that are going to show you, that are going to show AI what to do so that you get, you get outputs that are actually helpful and are not wasting all of your time. Okay, so grab that. The link is in the show. Not, it's called the AI input advantage. It's just AI guardrails to help your AI be more helpful and go from an annoying intern to your most trusted assistant. Okay? The number five change that I see coming in 2026 and beyond is that who you outsource to will matter even more in 2026 and beyond. So I feel like sometimes outsourcing gets a bad rap amongst small business owners because we, we feel like we should be able to do it all, especially create our own content. And I get that, right? There are certain things that only you can do, okay? And outsourcing the wrong things at the wrong time can be detrimental. However, however, outsourcing can be and is a fantastic tool for growth. And if we ever want to grow our businesses beyond us and we're, if we don't want to work 24 hours a day, then we have to learn to outsource correctly. Okay? When this comes to your content marketing, outsourcing isn't wrong, okay? We actually, my, my team and I, we actually love taking content marketing off of small business owners plates. However, outsourcing your content marketing is one of those areas where you really, really do not want to just hand off tasks willy nilly. And I say that with like the biggest hug in the world. Like, because I know that not everybody can outsource to my team. Like we can't handle 800,000 new clients, right? But trust me when I say that outsourcing your content marketing without being really strategic with it will bite you in the butt. We've had some clients that they outsourced to other people previously and oh my gosh, I spent so much time cleaning up the mess that those other people made and it was just, it just hurt my heart because these companies that were clients for me, like, they were wonderful companies, loved them so much. They, I love the people, but it was like I, they had to spend so much, you know, they had to spend money cleaning up the mess that they had paid somebody else to make essentially. Right? And so when you're outsourcing your content marketing, please, please, please, please don't be willy nilly about it, okay? And outsourcing in general isn't bad. But outsourcing with any. Without any strategy can. Can kill your business. It can kill your business. Okay, so let me explain the difference between outsourcing wrong and outsourcing the right way. Okay? So outsourcing wrong. There are so many randos on the Internet, okay? Random people on the Internet, maybe people you know, maybe people you don't know, maybe people overseas, maybe bots. So many randos on the Internet who say that they will do content marketing, who say that they will create SEO content for you, who say that they will take over your marketing for you. I get pitches in my inbox, okay? There are so many people out there who say that they will take over your content marketing for you, and the prices range all over the board, okay? But outsourcing wrong. Oh my gosh. Looks like you're outsourcing to somebody. This is the wrong way to outsource outsourcing to somebody who doesn't know or care about your business. And there, there are people out there, okay, Number two way to outsource wrong Is to outsource to people who don't have. They don't understand your overall marketing strategy, okay? They just, they don't have any thoughts of your. Your overall marketing strategy. They don't have the picture of your overall marketing strategy. And so they don't know or understand where their pieces to that puzzle fit in. All right? And then outsourcing wrong looks like outsourcing to people who aren't actually thinking like a business owner with your best interest at heart. Okay? Or you can outsourcing wrong could look like using writers who may care, right? They may be really good writers, they may care a lot, or some combination of both, but they, they're just trying to hit a word count, okay? Or create a set number of blogs per client without fully answering the questions. Okay? So how do you outsource. Right. How do you outsource your content marketing the right way? Well, there's really two different ways to do this, okay? So outsourcing right? Can look like if you are the, if you have the knowledge and the SEO content marketing understanding to give good directives and manage the process, then you can create the strategy and hire the worker bees to do the work, okay? And you honestly could probably get some cheaper writers to do this and still get some great SEO friendly content, okay? If you are in the position to create the strategy, okay? And, and give the directives and then manage the doing, okay? But if you're like, heck no, faith. I don't know what all that needs, what needs to happen for all that. I don't know what, how to get, you know, eyeballs and sales for my content. Then I would love for you to reach out to me, shoot an, shoot an email over@infoaith hannon.com or click the link in the show notes to book a call, a discovery call and we'll chat because we have space for two more content marketing clients. And the way that the my team and I do content marketing, we do it with your overall business in mind, with your strategy, with your keywords that you need to rank for. We'll do the research for all of that and then tell you these are the keywords that you need to rank for that you can realistically rank for. And then we create a strategy to rank to help you rank for those keywords and get the traffic and the eyeballs, the right eyeballs and to truly grow, to grow the traffic, the eyeballs to your website in a way that's going to benefit you long term. And I love helping small business owners with this. And my team and I have got a well oiled machine to do this. I have a marketing assistant who is chef's kiss with social media so that we've got a low lift social media strategy going for you. Pointing back to your website, it's just so fun. It's so fun. So reach out if you have even an inkling of. I think I could, I think I need this, I think I need help with this. Okay. Because I know that not everybody can do all of their content marketing themselves. That's okay. All right. Outsourcing is not bad, but you have to outsource correctly and even more strategically I think in 2026 and beyond. So you're not, you're not wasting your money or your emotions. Okay, so here's number six. The number six, 2026 and beyond content marketing tip for you is that traffic alone cannot be your only indicator of success. So I say this and it almost feels like I'm contradicting a lot of things that I've said in the past, but I'm not. Okay. For a lot of businesses, depending on your content marketing strategy, depending on, you know, your position in the market and where you were landing in Google and the type of blogging strategy that you had, traffic very well could have been a vanity metric for you because if you're getting clicks, if you were getting clicks to pages but no conversion, then those clicks weren't really doing you any good? So moving forward. Yes. Traffic still matters because we need to get eyeballs, right? We have to get our offers in front of people. Traffic numbers still matter, but I want you to focus more on the conversion for each page, the buyer journey. They click on this page and then this page and then this page and this page, like that type of stuff. And. And your user. Your user, user experience and your copy. Okay? I need you to pay more attention to conversion, copy and user experience and the buyer journey on the page, because that is ultimately what's going to lead to more sales. And if you can identify the holes there, then you can fix those holes and not be leaking your leads like a sieve. They get to your website. Okay, Fewer clicks can actually still mean better buyers when you have the right content marketing strategy, when you have the right website traffic. Okay? So traffic alone cannot be your only indicator of success. You have to focus on conversion, your copy, your user experience, and how buyers are navigating through your website. Okay? Take heart. You can still have really great sales even if your traffic numbers look air quotes less than they were a year ago. All right, and number seven, this is last one. And this is probably the biggest, most exciting change I see in 2026 and going forward in your content marketing. And it is this experience wins the day. It does. It just does. I think with all of the AI content, with all of the Fakey McFake stuff that we have seen and we've been, you know, inundated with in. In our social media and YouTube and. And blogs and all that stuff, with all of the fake crap out there that we've seen in 2026 and beyond, I think the content marketing that rises to the top will be that which is written from experience. So what does that mean for content marketing? Right? Just because somebody can write or talk about a subject does not mean that they should. Now, I could go and I could write a blog on how to ride, how to ride an elephant, how to make an elephant turn, how to make an elephant lay down. Well, I've never. I've never ridden an elephant, y'. All. I've never ridden an elephant, but I could probably make some crap up. Okay, but somebody who has trained elephants, they would be able to tell that I was just full of it. Okay, so before you go write or talk on a subject, have a couple wins under your belt before you go teach. Now, as consumers, our baloney meters are on high alert, and consumer trust is just plummeting when you haven't actually lived. The thing that you're talking about the people go know. They gonna know. They're gonna know, okay? But that's great news for us as small business owners because we're doing the thing. We're making the thing. We're providing the service that we're talking about in our marketing, right? So you have stories to pull from. You have experience to pull from. So use it. Use it. And it may feel less polished than what we've seen before on the Internet. And that's okay, because I think that experience is still gonna win the day. And think about it from the perspective of who you choose to take advice from, right? Who are you gonna go ask, you know, and get help from in just your everyday life, right? Like, I had a friend come over the other day, and I was helping her with her sourdough. I've had success with sourdough, okay? So I'm able to help her with her sourdough, right? The people that I. The ladies that I go to to help with barrel racing and riding my barrel horse better, she's had a ton of success versus maybe somebody on Rando on the Internet that I'm like, no, thanks. She doesn't really know what she's talking about, right? So let your experience work for you when it comes to creating your content. It is okay to speak from a place of authority if you've done the thing and won the thing and got the T shirt to prove it. Okay? Now, I say this, and a lot of y' all are gonna be like, oh, my gosh, but I'm not the best ever at this. At this XYZ skill. That's okay. You're still further ahead than somebody who is looking for what you can do, right? Like, my friend that came over and I helped her with her sourdough the other day. Am I the world's best sourdough baker? No, I'm not. I've had success with it. I've figured out a system that works for me. It's great to be able to feed, you know, my family, sourdough bread, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there are definitely people out there who are more experienced than I am. Okay? And where would my sweet little friend be if I was like, no, I'm not the best ever. I can't help you at all, right? She just made her first loaves and had great success with it because I offered what I knew and what had worked for me in my experience. So use your experience. Use the wins, use the lessons, even use the hurts. You know, what hasn't worked. Use the failures to help somebody out to help somebody to help your ideal client to move them further down the buyer journey. Okay? All right, y'. All. Content marketing in 2026 and beyond. AI is here to stay. SEO is still foundational. Content marketing is just maturing, so to speak. It's not dying at all. Okay? SEO still works. Google is still your friend. It doesn't hate your guts and livers. Okay? Don't worry about losing to AI Overviews for surface level content. Number four, your content is quality, focus, not a quantity only game. Number five, who you outsource to matters even more in 2026. Who you outsource content marketing to matters even more in 2026. Make sure that you reach out to my team and I if you're just even the slightest bit interested because we have openings for two more content marketing clients. Number six, traffic alone cannot be your only indicator of success. You need to look at conversion as well. And number seven, experience wins a day. Experience wins the day for your content marketing. So AI is here to stay, y'. All. So make sure that you grab that AI input advantage the AI guardrails for using AI in your business. These, these guardrails are going to help you stop babysitting AI, get answers that you don't have to fix 900,000 times. And it's going to help. They're going to help turn AI to help instead of just more homework for you. So what this is going to do is you use these prompts before you do any work with whatever your AI tool of choice is. And what it's going to do is going to put constraints guardrails on your AI so that you get more usable answers, so that it's actually a help, not a hindrance and can help you in your content marketing as well because you're going to be giving the parameters and not just turning it over to a bot who doesn't care. So excited to bring this episode to y'. All. Share it with a friend or five if they're struggling with their content marketing. And we'll be back with you next week. Bye. Thank you so much for listening in today. Hopefully this episode gave you some really tangible tips for better SEO and marketing to get more leads and more sales from your website. If it did, can I ask you a quick favor? Would you please share this episode with a friend and then just take 10 seconds and go leave a written review on Apple Podcasts. That is the very best way to help more Jesus loving entrepreneurs scale their businesses so that they can help more people with their gifts and make an even bigger impact for the Kingdom of God. And guess what? We now have a Facebook community where we can learn, hang out and laugh. Go join the Facebook group now. It's linked in the show notes and all the other things, courses, coaching and copywriting can be found at my website, faith hannon.com until next time. God bless and I'll talk to you soon.