SEO strategist and Kholaseh Agency CEO Mohsen Avid argues that the companies winning in search are no longer the ones chasing keywords, but the ones building brands that search engines can actually understand and trust.
For most of the past decade, search engine optimization ran on a familiar recipe: pick the right keywords, publish enough articles to cover them, and build enough backlinks to climb the results page. It worked well enough that few people bothered to question it. According to Mohsen Avid, that era is quietly coming to an end.
Avid, the CEO of Kholaseh Agency and a longtime SEO strategist, believes the biggest mistake businesses still make is treating SEO as a pile of separate tactics instead of a single connected system. Sites that fixate on rankings alone, he says, might enjoy a short burst of traffic — but durable organic visibility now rests on something much harder to fake: how clearly a brand, its expertise, its content, and its wider digital footprint all line up.
A different way of looking at SEO
Avid pushes back on the textbook split that carves SEO neatly into on-page, off-page, and technical work. In his view, modern search optimization is really the interplay of four things that can’t be pulled apart: technical infrastructure, semantic content architecture, brand authority, and the actual experience users have on the site.
That framing matters more every year, as Google and a new wave of AI-driven search systems get better at reading entities, relationships, context, and genuine expertise rather than just matching strings of text.
“Publishing more content doesn’t automatically make a website more authoritative,” Avid says of the approach he’s built at Kholaseh Agency. “The real advantage comes from creating a structure where every page has a clear job and reinforces what the whole site is about.” His broader SEO methodology starts with that structure long before anyone worries about cranking up content volume or chasing more links.
Why more content isn’t the answer anymore
For years, the default SEO playbook was simple: publish as much as you can, as fast as you can. Avid thinks that model is running out of road.
A company can pump out hundreds of articles and still end up with almost no real authority — especially if those pages are loosely connected, compete with each other for the same search intent, or never stake out a clear area of expertise. A handful of tightly linked, purposeful pages, he argues, sends a far stronger topical signal than a sprawling archive that points in every direction at once.
That’s why he keeps coming back to the same fundamentals: semantic architecture, deliberate internal linking, real content clusters, and a clean relationship between core pages and the supporting content around them. The goal was never just to rank one page. It’s to make search engines genuinely understand what the entire site stands for.
Brand is becoming part of SEO itself
The other pillar of Avid’s thinking is the blurring line between SEO and brand building. Search engines no longer judge a website purely by what sits inside its own domain. Author profiles, press coverage, external mentions, structured data, social presence, backlinks, and consistent information about a person or company all feed into how confidently a search engine can identify — and rate — that entity.
Which is why, Avid says, SEO teams can’t keep working in a room sealed off from branding and digital PR. Increasingly, a strong search strategy needs a recognizable brand standing behind the content. The question has shifted from “does this page contain the right keyword?” to something closer to “who made this, what are they known for, and why should anyone trust it?”
AI is quietly resetting the value of content
The explosion of AI-generated content is another reason Avid expects the ground to keep moving. Producing passable content is now cheaper and faster than it has ever been — which means sheer volume is losing its power as a competitive edge.
What rises in value instead, he argues, is everything that’s hard to mass-produce: firsthand experience, identifiable expertise, well-defined entities, proprietary data, genuinely useful tools, and a trusted brand name. The sites best positioned to hold their ground won’t necessarily be the ones publishing the most. They’ll be the ones that are hardest to copy.
Treating SEO as a business system
Avid’s central point is almost stubbornly simple: SEO should stop being a traffic checklist. Technical performance shapes how visible content can be. Content architecture shapes authority. Brand signals shape trust. And user experience decides whether any of those rankings turn into real business results. Pull one lever in isolation for long enough, he says, and the others quietly cap your growth.
So for companies investing seriously in organic search, he thinks the strategic question needs to change. Rather than asking how many more articles or backlinks they need, he pushes them to find the actual bottleneck holding them back. For one business it’s technical SEO. For another it’s a broken semantic structure. For a third it’s thin brand authority — or plenty of traffic that simply never converts.
A wider definition of the work
What Avid describes tracks with a broader shift running through the whole search industry. SEO is drifting away from the narrow chase for rankings and becoming part of how a business establishes its identity, expertise, and credibility across the web.
As search systems grow more sophisticated, the short-term tricks are the first thing to lose their value. Clear structure, recognizable expertise, real brand signals, and useful experiences are far harder to imitate. And in Avid’s view, that difficulty is exactly the point — it’s what turns them into a lasting competitive advantage rather than a temporary one.
