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A different way to think about SEO

Traditional SEO works by compiling a list of keywords that you’d like to rank on, and then building content that can rank on those terms. Let’s explore a more systematic approach that maximizes the efficiency of AI content creation.

For example, if you’re running SEO for a food & nutrition brand, you might want to rank on keywords like:

best diet to lose weight how many calories in rice

There are two things to note about these keywords:

  • They have topical similarity; they are both relevant to nutrition.
  • They don’t share a syntax; their structural format is quite different.

In this way, we can say that these keywords, and traditional SEO, is 0-dimensional. There is no common syntax we can provide which can generate both of these keywords.

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1-dimensional SEO

To understand 0-dimensional SEO better, let’s contrast it with 1-dimensional SEO. A 1-dimensional syntax looks something like:

how many calories in

This isn’t a keyword in itself, but rather a syntax from which we can generate keywords. It’s 1-dimensional because there’s one variable ({food}) in the syntax, which we can iterate through to generate multiple keywords.

To generate these keywords, we provide a list of items. For {food} this could be rice, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, and so on. As we pass each item into our syntax, we get keywords like “how many calories in rice,” “how many calories in lettuce,” and so on.

You can do this efficiently in Excel or Google Sheets. Put “how many calories in” in one column, and a list of foods in another. With a simple formula, you can generate a keyword for each food item.

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Why use this approach?

There are several compelling reasons to use 1-dimensional strategies for keyword research:

  1. Speed and efficiency - It’s easier to build up a list of foods than to mine individual keywords
  2. Topical authority - Producing content on these terms helps build topical authority on your site
  3. Organized site structure - You can easily partition the content onto a subsection of your site without cluttering your blog (e.g., https://example.com/how-many-calories/{food})

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2-dimensional SEO

We can extend this concept further to 2 (or more) dimensions. A 2-dimensional example could be:

how many in

Here,{nutrients}represents terms like calories, grams of fat, carbs, etc.

The crucial thing to understand is that the number of keywords generated equals the number of values for {nutrients} multiplied by the number of values for {food}. With 10 different nutrients and 100 different foods, you’d generate 1,000 unique keywords.

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The power of 2-dimensional SEO

When employing 2-dimensional SEO, you typically end up targeting many keywords that are underserved by traditional SEO approaches. These keywords are less competitive and easier to rank for precisely because:

  1. They’re often long-tail terms with lower search volume
  2. The economics of human writing has made them unattractive targets
  3. Few companies have the infrastructure to create content at this scale

2-dimensional SEO is particularly effective with AI content systems like Byword. Since human writer-reliant brands rarely commission 1,000+ articles (due to cost constraints), there’s a significant opportunity to use Byword to rank on these terms.

In my consulting experience, 2-dimensional projects often outperform 1-dimensional ones. While they target lower-volume search terms, the lack of competition typically makes it much easier to get traction and secure high positions in search results.

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Getting started with dimensional SEO

To implement this approach:

  1. Identify core patterns in your industry’s search queries
  2. Create structured templates with 1 or 2 variables
  3. Build comprehensive lists of values for each variable
  4. Generate your keyword combinations
  5. Use Byword to efficiently create content for all variations

This scalable approach is one of the most powerful ways to leverage AI content generation tools like Byword for maximum SEO impact.