On October 31st, OpenAI announced that with ChatGPT Search, users can “get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for.”

Here are details about the launch:

• Search will now be available with ChatGPT paid accounts, and free accounts in the coming months

• This will allow users to get real-time information in response to their searches, something that wasn’t possible on ChatGPT before

• Users can ask a question in a natural, conversational way

• The interface will encourage follow up questions to refine searches 

• Answers will include links to sources, with a links panel available on desktop

• The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, and combines data from third-party search providers with content provided from OpenAI’s news industry partnerships — like Reuters and the FT.

So with ChatGPT Search’s availability will search behaviour change and how should marketers respond? SearchGPT is only available in the ChatGPT Plus, Enterprise and Education accounts right now – with availability rolling out across free accounts in “the coming months” so this limits the immediate impact for businesses.

The Neuron explained this new value proposition, “ChatGPT’s Achilles’ heel compared to Google has always been that you couldn’t search for live info (that Bing plugin was a flop...). Now you can… and it’s really good.”

I think that in the short-term ChatGPT users who have established new habits using the app to search for information online instead of using a traditional search engine like Google, it’s likely these users will expand their usage of ChatGPT to find information online.

I also expect that the integration of SearchGPT into ChatGPT will lead to a measurable increase in the amount of referral traffic that websites receive from OpenAI over the course of the next 6 to 12 months as more users adopt the app instead of Google.

The Verge makes a compelling argument that reinforces this hypothesis, “that’s one clear reason a user might choose ChatGPT over Google Search: there’s no clutter of advertising or promoted queries pinned to the top. While Google makes a lot of money off advertising in search results, Fry said there are currently “no plans” for advertising in ChatGPT. “

The ability to access real-time search directly from the app, will also mean searchers will be able to get what they need without navigating to Google for many use cases.

It’s likely that search traffic will decline from Google from specific user segments, especially business or technology related search journeys, as these users have shown themselves to be early adopters of AI search. 

Marketers can measure how much traffic they are generating from ChatGPT Search. As it’s possible to use platforms like Google Analytics and “apply filters for 'Session Default Channel Group' set to 'Referral' and 'Session Source' containing 'OpenAI.’” (Idea Grove)

I would recommend setting up a new monitoring work stream to measure how this changes over time, as stakeholders will have questions and you’ll need to show you understand how this is changing searcher behaviour.

You could also use new and emerging AI search analytics tools, such as HubSpot’s AI Search Grader and Profound to understand how often your brand is appearing in ChatGPT and the sentiment of those mentions.

In addition to quantitative measurements, I’d suggest defining a list of your most important search journey topics or specific keywords and searching those on a ChatGPT Plus account. Provide your business with regular updates on where and how your website is appearing. 

The AI search era continues to accelerate, and the integration of SearchGPT into ChatGPT is another major milestone that has the potential to change how marketers reach customers forever.

We’re living in strange times. The generative AI boom has had a seismic impact on the marketing landscape and startups need to rewrite their marketing playbooks for this new age of intelligence. 

Large-language model (LLM) technology has catapulted forward marketing automation capabilities, whilst at the same time creating a far more volatile channel landscape as companies like Google respond to the emerging threats and opportunities. 

Read on to understand how the landscape is changing, and my recommendations for how founders and marketers can succeed in growing their startup today.

The marketing landscape is changing, and marketers are struggling.

• 15% of marketers feel overwhelmed keeping up with trends, 14% are struggling to understand their customers’ needs and 16% can’t create content that receives high engagement. (HubSpot, State of Marketing, 2024)

• Google’s AI Overviews are now live across the US, UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil, with information search queries returning AIOs at around 20-25% of the time

• 58% of marketers are increasing their investment in AI and automation in 2024 due to pressures to deploy this new gen AI technology and “do more with less” in a challenging macroeconomic environment. 

Traffic is down across all industries. According to ContentSquare’s Digital Experience Report (2024) traffic has declined -3.6% across all industries, whilst some industries have observed acute drops of greater than -5%, including Services, Energy, Software, Manufacturing and Retail.

The traffic decline is being caused by a number of compounding factors:

• Google has heavily improved the ranking of community sites like Reddit which provide people-vetted content (e.g. upvotes)

• Google has rolled out AI Overviews, which increase the amount of ‘zero click’ searches which results in less traffic to publishers and websites 

• More searches are now being carried out on ‘walled garden’ channels, like social media sites including LinkedIn, X and Threads

• Users are turning to AI chatbots to get answers to their questions without having to click on a search result. 

Rewrite your marketing playbook for this new landscape. This playbook should still be based on the growth flywheel framework (HubSpot) across Attract, Engage and Delight phases, but the tactics used to create effective content loops that fuel the flywheel need to evolve.

Content loops act as the engine of your growth flywheel, specifically they:

• Emphasise the importance of ROI on content marketing

• Fuel, accelerate or restart your growth flywheel

• Focus on channels, strategies, tactics or campaigns.

The notion of a content loop emphasises the importance of being able to measure the performance of your media portfolio investments. 

To deploy content loops a startup needs to set up a marketing technology (MarTech) stack. To establish a basic MarTech stack, here’s my recommendation:

• Customer platform (CRM): HubSpot

• Website & product analytics: Google Analytics & Amplitude (if in SaaS)

• Channel analytics: ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, YouTube Studio and Audiense. 

These will allow you to measure the performance of your content loops. Each content loop is set up as a channel, campaign, strategy or tactic.

Put ‘The Human Element’ at the centre of your content loops in the age of intelligence. Generative AI technology means anyone can create mediocre, copycat content at scale. To make your startup stand out, you must optimise for ‘The Human Element’. 

In practice, this means using humans to create your content, and then use AI to ideate, research, repurpose and distribute your content.

I like to explain this concept by encouraging marketers to: Be the Shakespeare of your content loop, let AI be your printing press.

To grasp this concept, I’ll break down the components of ‘The Human Element’ and where AI comes in. To optimise for the ‘Human Element’, marketers need to focus on: 

• Audience intelligence: Use audience intelligence to understand the behaviours of your target audience(s). This includes keyword, social listening and qualitative (surveys, sales calls) data.

• Creators as your fuel: Emphasise the human element in your content loops by authoring content and media from creators or influencers. The channel landscape is evolving to prioritise this.

• Multimedia content: Where possible combine creators with multimedia (e.g. podcasts & YouTube) to build that human connection. Make this the centre of your content loop.

• Elicit an emotional response: Ask yourself, does my content elicit an emotional response? If so, which and why? Content rooted in human-led perspectives works well here.

AI should then be used to supercharge research and ideation, optimization and distribution. Marketers should invest in AI technology to assist with:

• AI research: AI insights from call transcripts, statistics research and customer success. AI can analyse keyword and social trends data.

• AI ideation: AI can help with content ideation, such as topic clusters for customer journey stages, blog post outlines or podcast topic ideas.

• Repurposing content: Use AI to edit and improve your content, as well as repurpose content across multiple formats and channels.

• Scale distribution and personalise: AI can be used to distribute content to prospects and customers at the right time, in the best format on a relevant channel with a personalised message.

Let’s take a look at how ‘The Human Element’ and AI could interact within a content loop that fuels, accelerates or restarts a specific phase of the growth flywheel (attract, engage, delight).

SEO is evolving as a content loop that fuels that attract phase of your growth flywheel. What worked in 2022 is no longer effective and you have to prioritise ‘The Human Element’:

• People-first Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (EEAT) content outperforms AI-led 94.12% of the time (Neil Patel)

• You must use qualitative research to inform your content strategy, not just quantitative keyword research

• Backlinks from high popularity pages beat low popularity pages, according to the Google API leak

• Reddit, and other community sites, have risen exponentially and to have visibility on search you need to be active on these forums. 

AI will play a role to support your SEO efforts:

• AI will assist with keyword research and analysis

• You can edit human-led content using AI 

• Analyse call data to identify customer problems

• Repurpose podcasts & videos into blog posts for search. 

If startup marketers only use AI to create their SEO content, and fail to incorporate ‘The Human Element’ bad things happen, as we saw with the infamous “SEO Heist”.

Email marketing as a content loop to engage and delight customers performs better with ‘The Human Element’. Marketers can improve the open rates, click rates and grow their startup’s email newsletter audiences by optimising for ‘The Human Element’:

• Author email newsletters from company leaders

• Human-led perspectives in newsletters

• Personal nurturing emails from employees.

Whilst AI can improve efficiency and effectiveness of your email marketing content loops:

• Use AI and your CRM to segment audiences based on their behaviour

• Scale AI email automation using your customer data

• AICRO to personalise your email messaging

• Promote multimedia by using AI to write emails from transcripts.

SparkToro is a fantastic example of how to put ‘The Human Element’ at the centre of an email marketing content loop, as Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad use email to build a human-to-human relationship. Rand is a true modern Shakespeare of content marketing.

Social media is excellent for establishing ‘The Human Element’ and can serve as an effective content loop across all stages of the growth flywheel. Social media is an effective way for startups to build a human-to-human relationship with their prospects and customers:

• Use it to emphasise your brand values and the people behind it

• Create multimedia content, such as podcasts & YouTube, to build human connection

• Prioritise human-led community management and 1-1 dialogs

• Host live stream events from social media for lead generation. 

AI can support ‘The Human Element’ of your social content loop:

• Use AI to analyse social listening data to uncover trends

• Repurpose multimedia into digestible formats (e.g. YouTube Shorts) 

• Ask AI to provide copy/creative feedback pre-trained from your customer data

• Use AI to create images for social posts.

I would recommend that every startup has a video podcast with human thought leaders covering relevant topics to their products, services and customers. Record this on a platform like Riverside and redistribute using AI across social media. 

Startups can grow by building a growth flywheel that uses content loops to fuel, accelerate or restart it. But the age of intelligence has completely changed the marketing landscape and marketers have to optimise for ‘The Human Element’. 

Be the Shakespeare of your content loops, let AI be your printing press.

HubSpot recently launched Breeze AI at INBOUND that includes a Social Media, Content, Prospecting and Customer Service Agents. 

Salesforce announced Agentforce, which has a Service, SDR, Sales Coach, Personal Shopper and Campaign Agents. 

The vision for how generative AI can truly empower professionals to be more efficient and effective in their day-to-day revolves around this idea of the AI-powered assistant.

AI agents are a step in that direction. 

AI agents may change marketing forever. These agents can help marketers by doing all sorts of day-to-day tasks across numerous marketing specialisms to give them time back to focus on strategy and human-to-human relationship building. 

Let’s take a look at some of those use cases for different marketing specialisms. 

Content marketers can use AI agents for:

• Content ideation and production 

• Brief creation

• Landing page creation 

• Editing and brand of voice alignment. 

Social media marketers are now able to use AI agents to:

• Plan their social media calendar planning

• Draft social posts

• Publish across channels.

Email marketers can ask their AI agents to:

• Draft email outreach and responses

• Personalise emails based on known contact information in their CRM

• Analyse a CRM database and start to prospect companies and decision makers who share similar characteristics. 

We’re entering the era where a lot of media creation and optimisation for campaigns will be handled by AI agents. This is a major step forward.

You could in fact do a lot of these tasks with AI chatbots and well engineered prompts, but where AI agents really step it up a gear is their ability to manage campaigns in full, not just produce the media to power campaigns. 

AI agents will be able to optimise marketing campaigns in real time. What makes AI agents stand out above AI chatbots is their ability to:

• Work towards a set goal

• Make decisions based on unexpected inputs 

• Autonomously undertake sequential actions to achieve that goal without prompts.

A marketer will be able to set up an AI agent to optimise a campaign based on a set goal, and the AI agent will autonomously make actions in relation to that goal, such as setup automation workflows, send emails and publish landing pages. 

You can see how Salesforce have positioned their Campaign Agent to reflect this value proposition, “because an Agent never sleeps, it will continually analyse performance against KPIs and proactively recommend improvements.”

AI agents lower the barrier to entry for generative AI usage. These changes open up access to a broader group of non-technically savvy marketers, who will be able to ask in human terms for an AI agent to prepare an entire marketing campaign for them.

All from a single message request, without any prompt engineering know-how. 

AI agent output quality can be shaken, not stirred. With all that said, the AI agent output quality can vary wildly depending on the data that the AI agent is able to pull from. 

So for marketers to get the maximum value from AI agents they will need to have their data ecosystem optimised for doing so. That starts with a CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce. 

It’s now crucial to establish a data ecosystem for generative AI usage, thus enabling AI agents for marketing activities.

There are still many unknowns, but it’s an exciting time for marketers who embrace AI agents and hand-off a lot of the busy work to focus on more meaningful work.

Some of the challenges Google faces as claimed by WSJ are:

1. The antitrust pressures placed on Google from the DoJ

2. The rise of TikTok

3. User behaviour shifting to usage of AI search engines, like Perplexity or ChatGPT.

A few recent updates could support this claim:

• Google has received what they call “radical and sweeping proposals” from the DOJ that “risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers.”

• TikTok recently introduced a feature that provides marketers with the ability to target ads based on users’ search queries. This is a similar model to Google’s AdWords, and something TikTok wasn’t offering until recently. 

• Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine that is set to introduce ads alongside AI-powered answers. Perplexity already monetises with a $20-a-month subscription but with the new ad-powered model, this could WSJ claim divert resources away from Google.

Let's reflect on each of those factors.

The antitrust pressures placed on Google from the DoJ

In October, we learned that the DoJ is ordering Google to:

• Break out Chrome and Android as separate businesses

• Share user search queries, clicks, and results with competitors

• Impose restrictions on Google’s use of data to build AI tools

• Make changes to it’s online advertising products 

• Limit distribution partnerships with Apple and others so users have more choice in which search engines they use. 

According to Google’s response, this would have a major impact on their business. The press release by Lee-Anne Mulholland on their blog, The Keyword, makes it clear this would pose a major threat to how much value they can provide as a business. 

So Google’s search ad market dominance may very well be under pressure from the DOJ trial. But they will battle this in court in 2025, so any immediate changes are unlikely for marketers to worry about.

The rise of TikTok

Another question you might ask is how are TikTok and Perplexity stealing that much search ad market share off from Google? 

TikTok has only recently launched a search query-based targeting functionally. So it’s unlikely that advertisers will have had time to experiment with shifting all their budgets here just yet.

We also shouldn’t forget that ByteDance - the Chinese company that owns TikTok - is being forced by the US government to sell TikTok to a US-based company by January 2025. This may result in hesitance from marketers in shifting their ad budgets across.

User behaviour shifting to usage of AI search engines, like Perplexity or ChatGPT

When we consider the rise of AI search and the claim that users will navigate to those tools over Google, I recently calculated that Perplexity has 0.1% of Google’s active users based on Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer’s interview with the Financial Times in August. 

Perplexity is an exciting tool, showing the potential of how generative AI can create a delightful search experience but it’s faced a number of legal challenges and still lacks the authority and trust that Google has built. Those are the main problems with AI search: accuracy, misinformation and therefore trust from users to use it as their main search engine. 

On top of that, Google is rolling out tons of AI search features as they attempt to disrupt their business from the inside, such as AI overviews and AI-organised search results. If users find AI search valuable, why not just keep using Google’s AI search features?

Google still has 88% of share of Clickstream data vs. competitors (SparkToro, Datos)

In response to WSJ’s claim that Google’s market dominance will decline below 50% in 2025, Rand Fishkin did a piece on SparkToro, “Is Google losing Market Share?” and he pulled ClickStream data showing Search Engine Share in US (September 2024):

• Google: 88.01%

• Bing: 7.01%

• Yahoo: 2.54%

• DuckDuckGo: 1.96%

• YANDEX: 0.21%

• AOL: 0.09%

Rand basically calls out the WSJ’s eMarketer source as making overblown claims of Google’s demise, but points out the growth across the likes of Instacart, Apple, Hulu and Spotify who are nipping at Google’s heels.

What do I think this means for marketers?

I think that there’s a lazy narrative that the Media have led with this year in response to the generative AI boom that goes something like: Google is declining and everyone is switching to use AI chatbots or native AI search engines to solve their problems. 

It gets clicks.

I do not think that the majority of people are using AI chatbots to search for things and replacing their old habits just yet, and when you compare the active users on AI search engines like Perplexity at 0.1% of Google, you really see how dominant Google is. 

So, you shouldn’t divert resources away from investing in Google right away. 

However, the ROI of your SEO efforts on Google may have declined in the last 24 months as Google has responded to the generative AI threat to the quality of their search results.

Paid search should still reach a huge TAM, and even with SEO’s ROI declining, it’s still a highly valuable channel to build on for long-term, sustainable content-led growth.

I do think that if you market a product or service that has a technically-savvy target audience, or more broadly in the tech industry, then you should be starting to seed investments in these new and emerging AI search channels like ChatGPT’s GPT Store, Perplexity and others. 

I also think the opportunity to reach audiences on TikTok via search query targeting is a good one for marketers who are already using TikTok to successfully reach their customers organically. I’m not a TikTok expert, but I think marketers should think carefully about the type of ad creative they would use on here, especially when paying for reach. 

Whilst any audience building may be in vain if TikTok ends up being banned in the US. 

I suggest marketers do keep a close eye on the DOJ trial, but it will be years before the outcome of that is felt and it’s unlikely going to change how users search immediately as they have long established habits of “Googling” something. 

Ultimately, Google’s search dominance doesn’t need to collapse - as the publications will write about to get clicks and impressions - for marketers to experiment investing in new and emerging channels across AI and social media. 

What do you think? Do you buy into the narrative Google is declining and about to face its bitter end? Do you think it’s all overblown by AI bros and click hungry publishers? Or do you think it’s somewhere in between.

Let me know in the comments!

Key takeaways:

• Users will see a full-page experience with relevant AI-organised results for their query that includes a greater diversity of search features and media formats – including articles, videos, forums and more

• This will offer more discoverability for your video content (e.g. YouTube Shorts) to be served in the main search results pages for relevant queries and topics

• Google has stated they will not be adding monitoring functionality to Google Search Console for AI-organised results – they will show up as regular Organic rankings, impressions and clicks

• It's unclear how this will impact third-party ranking tracking software. Reach out to your rep to get their perspective on how to track performance with an increasing amount of search experiences delivered in this way.

Strategies and tactics

Internal linking remains a vastly powerful, often underutilised tactic. Check out this helpful article by Mangools on how internal link building can be an effective way to improve rankings and traffic.

Key takeaways:

• Internal links are important for improving site structure, crawling, indexing, passing page authority, and providing a better user experience

• Your internal linking strategy should support your main pages (like the homepage, product pages and pricing page), as well as establish topic clusters and taxonomies within navigational and contextual links across your site

• You can improve internal linking by fixing broken links, avoiding orphan pages, fixing internal redirect chains, and optimising for the 3-click rule (from the homepage).

The article contains an overview of a couple of useful methodologies with Mangools, Google Search Console and ScreamingFrog.

Channel updates

YouTube Shorts are becoming YouTube Longs. That’s correct — like TikTok and other social platforms. YouTube is extending its ‘Shorts’ feature up to three minutes long.

It’ll give marketers new opportunities to create medium-length video content that has high discoverability on the YouTube Shorts interface.

With Google rolling out AI-organised search results, there's also greater opportunities for YouTube Shorts to be served in those more diverse search results.

MarTech news

Ads have arrived in Google's AI Overviews. As expected, Google has started to rollout ad experiences within their AIOs on mobile for users in the US.

Google claims that "people are finding ads directly within AI Overviews helpful because they can quickly connect with relevant businesses, products and services to take the next step."

Search and Shopping ads will appear directly within AI Overviews, with "Sponsored" labels.

TechCrunch reports that AI Overviews have led to an increase in Google Search engagement, particularly for the demographic of young people aged 18 to 24. This indicates there is an opportunity to reach and engage that demographic through this new ad experience.

Takeaways:

• I'll be keeping a close eye on the search queries that are most valuable to my marketing campaigns, doing spot checks to see where AIO ads are appearing

• Work with your paid marketers to try to get insights on how these campaigns are performing, and where the opportunities are

• Monitor your overall Organic performance in Google Search Console, as the rollout of AIO ads may start to cannibalise any Organic impressions and clicks you were getting before from AIOs.

Thank you for reading. If you found my roundup helpful, please do share this on to a friend or colleague!

Pizza and glue anyone? You’d be forgiven for thinking this is how you get cheese to stick to your pizza after Googling it thanks to Google’s new AI Overviews. 

This particular AI Overview surfaced from an old Reddit post from author ‘fucksmith’ according to 404 Media in Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue.

This is just one example of many errors in recent weeks since Google launched its AI Overview feature in the US on May 14th. It’s leading to the quality of Google’s search results to be questioned and a raft of bad press in mainstream media. 

The Verge, known for being hawkish on Google’s decline, covered this in Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in Search. 

“A company once known for being at the cutting edge and shipping high-quality stuff is now known for low-quality output that’s getting meme’d,” one AI founder, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Verge.

Search Engine Land focused on the fact that these AI Overview errors were appearing on YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) search queries that can lead to user harm in Google AI Overviews under fire for giving dangerous and wrong answers.

The negative sentiment towards Google’s AI Overviews only grew across social media platforms as memes were shared and former employees like Scott Jenson, a former Google employee of more than 15 years, spoke out openly criticising Google’s rushed AI Overviews rollout.

“The ‘AI Projects’ I was working on were poorly motivated and driven by this mindless panic that as long as it had ‘AI’ in it, it would be great. This myopia is NOT something driven by a user need. It is a stone cold panic that they are getting left behind.”

The fact that this led to mainstream media - those who don’t usually cover stories on the quality of Google’s search results - to shine a light on these issues must have seriously worried Google. The likes of the BBC and CNBC (to name a few) published stories like these:

• Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same (BBC, 2024)

• Google criticized as AI Overview makes obvious errors, such as saying former President Obama is Muslim (CNBC)

In response, Google published AI Overviews: About last week on May 30th where Liz Reid, VP, Head of Google Search addressed the errors stating that a large amount of novel searches and faked screenshots had been contributing to hallucinations.

“... there’s nothing quite like having millions of people using the feature with many novel searches. We’ve also seen nonsensical new searches, seemingly aimed at producing erroneous results.”

“Separately, there have been a large number of faked screenshots shared widely. Some of these faked results have been obvious and silly. Others have implied that we returned dangerous results for topics like leaving dogs in cars, smoking while pregnant, and depression.”

At the same time, Google acknowledged that a portion of those AI Overview hallucinations were in fact due to quality issues that the company is working on. 

“... some odd, inaccurate or unhelpful AI Overviews certainly did show up. And while these were generally for queries that people don’t commonly do, it highlighted some specific areas that we needed to improve.”

Google stated there will be some changes to AI Overviews as a result:

• Better detection mechanisms for nonsensical queries that shouldn’t show an AI Overview, and limited the inclusion of satire and humour content

• Updated systems to limit the use of user-generated content in responses that could offer misleading advice (e.g. Reddit)

• Triggering restrictions for queries where AI Overviews were not proving to be as helpful

• Additional triggering refinements for the YMYL topic of Health to enhance their quality protections.

Why does it matter for marketers? 

AI Overviews are here to stay. Sundar Pichai is adamant that AI Overviews will help the web, according to this interview with The Verge.

But it’s going to be a bumpy ride as Google Organic Search loses its predictability as a channel, and Google won’t commit to giving marketers data on AI Overviews (SEJ).

It’s clear we’re in uncharted waters as Google simultaneously tries to integrate AI into its search engine whilst radically tuning its Core algorithm to fight AI spam.

Amidst the uncertainty, marketers should refocus towards stability and defensibility of their existing demand with the following strategies: 

• Target MOFU & BOFU: Prioritise your content creation targeting middle and bottom of funnel queries, as AI Overviews are more likely to appear on top of funnel queries and there is likely to be significant unpredictability in the short-medium term.

• EEAT Historical Optimisation: Focus on historical optimisation of your content portfolio in line with Google’s guidelines and EEAT frameworks.

• AI CRO: AI Overviews are going to reduce traffic so prioritise CRO efforts on pages with existing traffic at the middle and bottom of the funnel. You can use AI here to personalise the web experience for users, using AI chatbot tools offered from the likes of HubSpot and others.

• Diversify TOFU: Diversify channels for top of funnel search by publishing multimedia content across platforms like YouTube, Spotify and TikTok. These channels and media formats are more defensible from AI. 

Overtime I expect SEO will stabilise as marketers get more time to research and understand how to succeed in AI Search. It’s also likely that the AI hype will deflate along the S-Curve, leading to less channel unpredictability from the likes of Google. 

Until then, focus on stability and defensibility across your acquisition strategy with the practical strategies above and communicate the short term risks to your stakeholders.

Alternatively, switch all your marketing efforts to Bing. As they’ll let you and your customers switch off AI answers (SER).

It will make you a better SEO, improving your ability to manage your core responsibilities:

• Create helpful, reliable content that ranks well

• Analyse the impact of algorithm updates

• Prioritise your SEO roadmap

• Manage your stakeholders.

I’ll run-through how Google uses automated ranking systems to achieve its mission, the purpose of the ranking systems, and why understanding them will help you to succeed with SEO.

Google’s achieves its mission by using automated ranking systems

Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful. 

In practice, Google aims to present the most relevant and useful search results to the user, and it does this using automated ranking systems that consider many factors and signals in relation to billions of web pages in its search index. 

Those automated ranking systems are regularly tested and evaluated (both by humans and AI), which leads to them being updated periodically.

Google’s ranking systems help it to achieve its mission.

Google provides information about their notable ranking systems - both their core ranking systems, and the underlying technologies that produce search results - on their Search Central blog. 

If you build familiarity with Google’s ranking systems, you’ll be able to make better SEO decisions, and communicate them more effectively to your stakeholders.

But where do you start? Which ranking systems are the most important to know? And how do you optimise for those ranking systems? 

Google’s ranking systems

Google references eighteen different ranking systems on the Search Central blog. That’s a lot of systems. If I group them for you based on how they contribute to Google’s mission, it will help you to understand their purpose.

To understand search query intent to serve relevant search results - Google uses ‘RankBrain’, ‘BERT’, ‘MUM’, ‘Neural matching’, ‘Passage ranking systems’, and ‘Local news system’. A brief summary of each ranking system:

• ‘RankBrain’ is an AI system helping Google to understand how words relate to concepts, and the relationship between concepts.

• ‘BERT’ is an AI system helping Google to understand how different combinations of words express different meanings and intent.

• ‘MUM’ is an AI system that is capable of understanding and generating language (it’s used to improve ‘Featured Snippet’ callouts, not general search rankings).

• ‘Neural matching’ is an AI system that Google uses to understand how concepts are represented in queries and pages to match them to one another. 

• ‘Local news systems’ identify local sources of news based on the searcher’s location. 

To ensure searchers see helpful, reliable, up-to-date content - Google uses the ‘Helpful content system’ (which has absorbed the ‘Page experience system’), ‘Link analysis systems and PageRank’, ‘Freshness systems’, ‘Original content systems’ and ‘Reviews system’. A brief summary of each ranking system:

• ‘Helpful content system’ ensures people see original, helpful content written for people, by people, in the search results. It also includes ‘Page experience’ signals that reward sites with good UX and page speed.

• ‘Link analysis systems and PageRank’ analyses how pages link to each other and uses this to better understand what a page is about, and if it’s helpful.

• ‘Freshness systems’ are designed to show fresher content for “query deserves freshness” searches.

• ‘Original content systems’ seek to reward content with original research, rather than those that regurgitate pre-existing research.

• ‘Reviews system’ aims to reward high quality reviews, content that provides insightful analysis and original research, and is written by an expert who knows the topic well. 

To detect Spam and SERP quality assurance - Google uses its ‘Spam detection systems’, ‘Deduplication systems’, ‘Exact match domain system’, ‘Removal-based demotion systems’ and ‘Site diversity system’. A brief summary of each ranking system:

• ‘Spam detection systems’ (including SpamBrain) are deployed by Google to deal with content and behaviours that violate their spam policies.

• ‘Deduplication systems’ works to only show the most relevant results to avoid unhelpful duplication, and runs to avoid ‘Feature Snippet’ and search result duplication in the same SERP.

• ‘Exact match domain system’ ensures that Google doesn’t give too much credit for content hosted on a domain that exactly matches a particular search query.

• ‘Removal-based demotion systems’ allow Google to remove certain types of content that relate to ‘Legal removals’ and ‘Personal information removals’. 

• ‘Site diversity system’ works to ensure Google doesn’t show two results from one site for a search query, unless its intent makes it helpful to do so. 

To help during times of crisis - Google uses the ‘Crisis information systems’ to “provide helpful and timely information during times of crisis” which covers ‘Personal crisis’ and ‘SOS alerts’ depending on the scenario. 

Now with a deeper understanding of Google’s search systems, we can explore how this can help you successfully manage some core SEO responsibilities, and act as a set of guiding principles for you when planning and executing an SEO strategy. 

I’d encourage you to dive deeper into Google’s documentation, independent research and industry expert point of views for each search system to build up your knowledge.

Create helpful, reliable content that ranks well

To create content that ranks well, you need to focus on creating content that meets the requirements of Google’s search systems that ensure searchers see helpful, reliable, up-to-date content. As we’ve covered, those search systems include:

• Helpful content system (which has absorbed the ‘Page experience system’)

• Link analysis systems and PageRank

• Freshness systems

• Original content systems

• Review system.

Helpful content system (including ‘Page experience’)

The ‘Helpful content system’ is arguably the most important search system to consider when creating helpful, reliable content that will rank well. 

You can read Google’s guidance in its guide ‘Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content’, where Google outlines how you can self-assess your content in relation to what the ‘Helpful content system’ seeks to reward, including:

• Content and quality questions

• Expertise questions

• Provide a great page experience

• Focus on people-first content

• Avoid creating search-engine first content

• Get to know E-E-A-T and the quality rater guidelines

• Ask “Who, How, and Why” about your content.

Google’s ‘Helpful content system’ analyses a mix of ranking signals to determine which content is the most helpful for the searcher by considering how it demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). That’s why in recent years, the interest in E-E-A-T and how to optimise for it has grown in the SEO community. 

E-E-A-T is the framework that Google references in its ‘Search Quality Rater Guidelines’ (SQRG). The SQRG is used by Google’s human search quality raters who are trained to evaluate the E-E-A-T of search results. The human search quality raters then give Google insights on if their algorithms are providing good results, and this ‘human in the loop’ feedback is used to train their automated ranking systems, like the ‘Helpful content system’.

You should read Google’s ‘Search Quality Rater Guidelines’ (SQRG) to understand how human search quality raters score search results based on ‘Needs Met’ and ‘Quality’ scores in relation to the search query, and how they consider E-E-A-T when doing this. Integrate the same auditing processes Google’s human quality raters do into your optimisation work streams. 

Google’s ‘Helpful content system’ absorbed its ‘Page experience system’ in 2023, meaning that as Google evaluates content quality in relation to the searchers query, it will consider your page’s Core Web Vitals scores, page speed and the overall user experience as indicators of helpful content.

Google has documentation on ‘Understanding page experience in Google search results’ for you to understand which questions you should ask when optimising your content for Page Experience. 

To succeed in creating helpful, reliable content that will rank well you should align your content planning, creation and optimisation work streams with the questions Google states that its ‘Helpful content system’ seeks to reward. 

This will give you a set of SEO principles to follow when creating or auditing content on your website. It will also encourage you to optimise your content for Core Web Vitals, page speed and UX, rather than focusing too heavily on basic ranking signals, such as keywords and backlinks.

A note on E-E-A-T: It’s not a Ranking Signal, as clearly stated by Google in their SEO Starter guide. However, it acts as a set of guiding principles helping you to create helpful, reliable content for people, by people, that the Helpful content system seeks to reward. 

Link analysis systems and PageRank

Google’s ‘Link analysis systems and PageRank’ are some of its oldest search systems, although they have been updated many times. PageRank is a core ranking system that was around when Google first launched. 

Backlinks continue to be an important ingredient in the recipe for SEO success. They tell Google what a page is about, how that page relates to a topic or concept, and its relationship to other pages in Google’s search index. 

They act as ranking signals, and are still worth optimising for. You should consider both how you can create content that naturally acquires backlinks from the open web, content you can promote to generate backlinks from external websites and also how you internally link between your content to build topic clusters. 

If your content is acquiring fresh, high quality, relevant backlinks it’s a signal to Google that your content is authoritative, which is a key part of the E-E-A-T optimisation framework. Invest time into optimising for ‘Link analysis systems and PageRank’ for improved rankings. 

Freshness systems

Google states in their ‘Freshness systems’ documentation that some search queries are ‘Query deserves freshness’ and this means that if you’re trying to rank for queries where the user intent implies it’s ‘Query deserves freshness’ then you’ll need to create relevant, timely content that’s related to the keyword, topic or concept. 

It’s also important to remember that Google also rewards content freshness for all search queries. 

Knowing this, it’s beneficial for you to allocate a significant proportion of your content resources towards historical optimisation of existing content to optimise for the ‘Freshness systems’. If you don’t, your competitors will. It’s also worth pointing out that more up-to-date content is more helpful for the searcher, which aligns with what the ‘Helpful content system’ seeks to reward. 

Original content systems

Google has systems that ensure original content is shown prominently in the search results, known as the ‘Original content systems’. 

I would recommend expanding your content creation capabilities to be able to produce primary research if possible. You could do this by sending surveys to your customers, or using an agency to run polls. You can tailor your survey to add original angles to your content, differentiating it from the competition. 

Google is then likely to reward that content with better rankings. 

There is a technical SEO component to this too and that is making sure you correctly use canonical tags to tell Google which URL is the original if there is any duplication on your website. Duplicate content can lead to cannibalisation and a number of other issues relating to crawling and indexation. 

Reviews system

The Reviews system takes into account various factors to ensure that users receive the most helpful and trustworthy information when making decisions about businesses.

Key components of the Reviews Ranking System include:

• Review content: Google assesses the content of reviews, looking for relevance, depth, and usefulness. Reviews that provide detailed insights into the customer experience are typically ranked higher

• Reviewer credibility: The credibility of the reviewer is taken into consideration, including factors such as their review history, activity level, and whether they are verified customers

• Sentiment analysis: Google employs sentiment analysis techniques to understand the tone and sentiment of reviews, distinguishing between positive and negative feedback

• Recency: Freshness of reviews is also a factor, with more recent reviews often carrying more weight in the ranking.

Analyse the impact of algorithm updates 

To successfully analyse the impact of an algorithm update to the point where you have confidence in your hypotheses as to why your website has experienced positive or negative ranking changes, you should consider Google’s search systems and their official announcements of what each algorithm update focused on. 

Some examples of Google algorithm updates, and the search systems they focused on, include:

• Core updates (a broad update that considers all search systems)

• Helpful content updates (an update relating to the “Helpful content search system”)

• Reviews updates (an update relating to the “Reviews search system”)

• Link spam updates (an update relating to the “Link spam search system”)

You should analyse your historical Organic Search performance data in a platform like Google Analytics, and cross-reference that data with a historical timeline of confirmed (and unconfirmed) algorithm updates from Google. 

Refer to Google’s announcements on which search systems an algorithm update focused on, and check whether your website benefited or fell in line with the update roll-out timeline. This will give you insights that help you to build your hypotheses, and focus your analysis on a specific set of ranking signals, or SEO principles, for your website and competitors for those search query SERPs exhibiting ranking shifts.

By diagnosing which search systems and their relevant signals are impacting your website’s performance, you’ll be able to prioritise your SEO roadmap to optimise for a search system, or group of search systems, that you’re confident will deliver results. 

Prioritise your SEO roadmap

The reality of SEO is that there is always more you can do to improve the performance of your website to generate more traffic and conversations. 

However, you will always be limited by the budget and resources you have available. 

It’s imperative that you have a logical system for building and validating how you’re prioritising your SEO roadmap. You can use your understanding of Google’s search systems to your advantage here. 

We’ve covered how you can diagnose issues on your website by cross-referencing algorithm updates, the search systems they focus on, and your Organic Search performance data to spot areas for optimisation. 

You should also consider the signals that each Google search system seeks to reward or demote, and align your SEO roadmap towards optimising for those signals.

An example would be how in 2023, there were a number of Google update announcements and industry chatter that stressed the increasing importance of the role of the ‘Helpful content search system’ in ranking results, and the E-E-A-T framework for marketers to consider. 

In this situation, you would benefit from revising what Google seeks to reward through their ‘Helpful content search system’ to tailor your SEO roadmap to cater for these new signals. For instance, by increasing your investment in original research, hiring subject matter experts, or refreshing your content with up-to-date statistics and references. 

Another example would be from March 2023’s core algorithm update, where Google integrated the ‘Page Experience search system’ into their ‘Helpful Content search system’ and industry chatter suggested the update focused on rewarding websites and pages with good Core Web Vitals and page speed scores. In this instance, you would consider how much investment and buy-in you had planned for improving Core Web Vitals and reprioritise as needed to move the needle. 

Manage your stakeholders

SEO is a complicated field of marketing, and one of the toughest challenges is communicating clearly to your stakeholders why you have prioritised the SEO roadmap the way that you have, and then using that to generate buy-in in line with those priorities. 

I highly recommend referencing Google’s official documentation and nomenclature around its search systems when communicating with your stakeholders. 

From my experience, you’ll often be collaborating with stakeholders that take these broad positions on SEO:

• I do understand SEO, and I’m willing to collaborate (a.k.a provide resources, budget and support)

• I do understand SEO, and I’m going to challenge you to provide clear reasoning to explain why it’s a priority vs. other investments

• I don’t understand SEO, and I’m willing to collaborate (a.k.a provide resources, budget and support)

• I don’t understand SEO, and I’m going to confront you on why it’s a priority vs. other investments.

If you’re working with stakeholders who will either challenge you to provide clear reasoning, or confront you, on why it’s a priority versus other work streams or investments then you should refer to specific search systems, and lean on Google’s official documentation to generate buy-in. 

Google maintains a resource that lists all of the algorithm updates and the roll-out dates. You can refer to this when communicating to stakeholders to explain your reasoning, citing the relevant search systems and mapping them to the ranking signals your SEO roadmap is optimising for.  

Understanding Google’s search systems makes you a better SEO

As you’ll have seen from what we’ve covered, a deep understanding of Google’s search systems makes you a better SEO. 

Your knowledge of the search systems will help you build your SEO principles for creating helpful, reliable content, analysing algorithm updates with confidence and clarity, prioritising your SEO roadmap based on the signals the search systems seek to reward or demote, and communicating the ‘why’ to stakeholders to generate buy-in. 

Finally, I recommend that you refer back to Google’s search systems documentation regularly, as it changes and you’ll want to stay up-to-date.

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Let’s take a look at Google’s announcement, and what marketers need to know about Gemini.

Why's it important? Gemini will be powering Google Bard, and its upcoming launch of Search Generative Experience, known as ‘SGE’. 

SGE will change the search landscape and marketers need to start building an understanding of which SEO strategies will work in the near future. 

I’ve curated takeaways from articles on Google’s Gemini, how it powers Bard, accelerates Search Generative Experience, and how you can evolve your SEO strategy.

Read on for takeaways from:

• What is Google’s Gemini 1.0?

• Gemini Pro powers Bard and accelerates SGE

• How SEO will evolve for SGE.

What is Google’s Gemini 1.0?

“I believe the transition we are seeing right now with AI will be the most profound in our lifetimes, far bigger than the shift to mobile or to the web before it.” (Sundar Pichai, Google CEO). 

Google’s CEO believes AI will be transformational and significantly improve our daily lives. The company launched Gemini 1.0 in December 2023. Gemini is built for multimodality, meaning that it works across text, images, audio and code. 

In Google's announcement, it compared Gemini's new AI model capabilities to humans, demonstrating that it surpassed MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) of human experts, as well as outperforming GPT-4 on almost every capability. 

There are three versions of Google Gemini upon launch: 

• Gemini Ultra is the most capable and largest model for highly-complex tasks

• Gemini Pro is their best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks

• Gemini Nano is their most efficient model for on-device tasks. 

Gemini Pro powers Bard and accelerates SGE

Gemini Pro is being used to power Google Bard and accelerate Search Generative Experience (SGE).

Google states that this represents the biggest upgrade to Bard since it launched because of Gemini Pro’s multimodal capabilities. 

According to CEO & Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, the upgrade, “means it (Bard) can generalise, understand, operate across and combine different types of information text, code, audio, image and video.”

Gemini Pro is also being used in Search to accelerate Search Generative Experience for users by reducing latency by 40%, according to Sissie Hsiao (VP & GM, Google Assistant & Bard). 

I believe the introduction of Gemini Pro is a major milestone in the path towards Google’s launch of Search Generative Experience (SGE) for a number of reasons:

• Gemini Pro is accelerating the speed of SGE’s AI-powered answers. This was a major blocker for Google, as users complained SGE was too slow. Gemini is changing that

• Google wants users to search seamlessly with images, video and code to get AI-powered answers. Gemini enables that

• Google did not want to launch a more inferior AI-search experience than Bing’s Chat search (powered by GPT-4). Gemini now surpasses GPT-4

• Gemini Pro can provide a more personalised experience that better understands user intent by understanding their goals, reasoning with relevant information, and generating a bespoke interface based on their needs

• Gemini Pro improves the accuracy of SGE’s results, reducing the risk of hallucinations (although they still occur, see below for multimodal example on Bard).

How SEO will evolve for SGE

As Google gets closer to launching Search Generative Experience, powered by Gemini Pro, marketers are going to need to evolve their SEO strategies. 

What should you do? 💡 I’ve curated some of the best articles for you to read about how SEO strategies could evolve for SGE: 

Impact of Google SGE (Search Generative Experience) on SEO (Fernando Macia, Human Level). Key takeaways:

• • Click through rates (CTRs) will decrease for organic results, but increase for the Google SGE panel

  • The impact on CTRs will vary depending on the type of search. For example, CTRs are likely to decrease more for informational searches than for transactional searches.

How Google SGE will impact your traffic – and 3 SGE recovery case studies (Gilad David Maayan, SEJ). Key takeaways:

• • In a study of 23 websites, the aggregate organic traffic drop as a result of SGE was 18-64%

  • It’s possible to optimise pages to appear in SGE snapshot carousels

  • You can model SGE impact models and optimise now, with a framework provided by Gilad.

How Search Generative Experience works and why retrieval-augmented generation is our future (Michael King, SEJ). Key takeaways:

• • Retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) is the mechanism by which LLMs (Bard, SGE) gather relevant documents and data points to fine-tune it’s response

  • SEOs should consider their ‘RAG pipeline’ and how to optimise for knowledge graphs due to the symbiotic relationship between knowledge graphs and LLMs (as part of RAG)

  • Search queries will get longer, as users realise Google can handle natural language. Head terms will shrink and middle to long-tail queries will grow

  • Rank tracking is about to become more complex

  • Informational keywords made up 51.08% of SGE AI snapshots.

GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik R Narasimhan, Ameet Deshpande, Cornell University). Key takeaways:

• Marketers should consider the concept of “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)” based on this research, with nine optimisation tactics referenced (many of these align with EEAT frameworks):

  • Authoritative content: Optimise content to be more persuasive and adding authoritative claims

  • Keyword Inclusion: Adding more keywords to match the query

  • Statistic: Add quantitative statistics, instead of qualitative discussion

  • Cite Sources: Add relevant citations

  • Quotations: Add quotations from credible sources

  • Easy-to-Understand: Simplify the language

  • Fluency Optimization: Improve the fluency

  • Unique Words: Adding unique words to content

  • Technical Terms: Add technical terms content wherever possible.

• The efficacy of these strategies varies across domains (topics), underscoring the need for domain-specific methods

• Adding relevant statistics, quotations and citations can boost content visibility in generative engines by up to 40% in AI snapshots.

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Why's it important? Whenever a Core algorithm update rolls out it is important to retrospectively analyse how the SERP landscape has changed, and how that has impacted the rankings of your website and competitors to plan your SEO roadmap.

Read on for my tips on how you could approach this analysis. 

What else is happening?

• Google has added new Organization Structured Data 

• ChatGPT celebrates its first birthday, and it changed the MarTech landscape in 22-23

• YouTube has added a new Product Drops feature.

Google’s November 2023 Core Algorithm Update has finished, what next?

Google’s November 2023 Core Algorithm Update has finished, what next?: Google’s November 2023 Core Algorithm Update ran over 26 days, starting on November 2nd and completing on November 28th.

Google has guidelines on why you may be seeing performance drops and what you should do after a Core Algorithm Update. Here are some key takeaways:

• There is nothing wrong with pages that may not be performing as well as before (e.g. they haven’t violated spam policies)

• Core algorithm updates do not target specific pages or sites

• It instead focuses on improving how Google’s search systems assess content overall

• This leads to pages that were previously under-rewarded performing better in the search results.

What you should do💡: You should run an analysis of how your site’s rankings changed before and after the update. However, the November 2023 algorithm update could be a challenge for many to analyse and draw meaningful conclusions from due to the number of consecutive algorithm updates recently. It was also running at the same time as the November 2023 Reviews Update. 

Here are some tips on how to approach the analysis:

• Wait two weeks until after the algorithm finishes rolling out to get enough performance data. You may start your analysis around December 14th.

• Analyse two sets of data. The pre-Update date range of October 19th - November 2nd and the post-Update date range of November 28th - December 13th. 

• October 19th is the day the October 2023 Core Algorithm Update ended, so you should just about have two weeks of data.

• Use Google Search Console to export Clicks, Impressions and CTR data for Pages and Search Queries for both date ranges. Deseasonalise the data to better understand the trends. 

• Use a keyword ranking tracking software, like ahrefs or Semrush, to export keyword ranking data. Compare the date range of November 2nd to December 13th for rankings. 

• In your spreadsheet, create four sheets: 1) Pages Increasing; 2) Pages Decreasing; 3) Keywords Increasing; 3) Keywords Decreasing. Filter the data and categorise it accordingly. 

• Now, investigate the Pages Decreasing. I recommend you incorporate additional data variables, such as Last Updated, Topic Cluster and Core Web Vitals by URL.

• Try to identify patterns, ask questions such as: “Has my site performed well or badly for specific topic clusters?”, “Are the pages that have decreased in performance outdated?”, “Are the Core Web Vitals reports in GSC showing these pages decreasing have ‘Needs Improvement’ or ‘Failed’ scores?”

• Analyse the pages that have improved in rankings for the keywords that you have lost positions for. Assess how they are now better satisfying the user intent by answering Google’s suggested questions in their Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content guide.

• You can also do this process for ‘Pages Increasing’, how do they differ from ‘Pages Decreasing’?

This should get you into a position where you have a better understanding of what has changed pre and post the November 2023 Core Algorithm Update. It’s very likely that your roadmap will then focus on improving the Content Quality and “Helpfulness” of those Pages that have decreased in rankings. 

Refer to Google’s guidelines on what to do if you’ve seen drops after a Core Algorithm Update, and consider how you can improve the Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (EEAT) of your content.

You may also have to refresh your technical SEO roadmap to address things like Core Web Vitals, broken links etc.

Google has added new Organization Structured Data 

Google has added new Organization Structured Data. In this most recent addition, they’ve added new Organization Structured Data that merges the old logo and URL structured data whilst adding “name, address, contact information, and various business identifiers”. 

Recently Google has been launching a number of new structured data options for SEOs to consider, including Author Profile Page and Discussion Forum structured data. My personal take is that this new structured data is going to help Google to understand EEAT in its fight against generative AI spam.

What you should do💡: I suggest you review if your site currently uses the pre-existing Organization Logo and URL markup. Work with your developers to add those if not, as well as the new fields. Google uses structured data to create its knowledge panels, and that’s an important aspect of your company’s brand SEO strategy. 

If a user enters your brand name into search, you want Google to be able to display as much relevant information in the best visual way possible.

You can use the Rich Results tool to test that your new Organization structured data has been set up correctly. 

ChatGPT celebrates its first birthday, and it changed the MarTech landscape in 22-23

ChatGPT celebrates its first birthday, and it changed the MarTech landscape in 22-23. The ChatGPT team at OpenAI posted an update on X (formerly Twitter) celebrating the birthday.

What a rollercoaster of a year. ChatGPT, and the boom in generative AI, has changed the MarTech landscape forever. What’s changed, and where are things going?

• A year in ChatGPT has over 180 million users, it took just 5 days to reach 1 million users

• OpenAI launched its GPT marketplace, with users being able to build Custom Agents for specific use cases. Industry commentators think this could be as groundbreaking as Apple’s App Store launch in 2008

• A recent survey suggested that 48% of marketers are now using AI to assist with generating content, with 10% planning to use it in future (Smart Insights)

• MarTech SaaS companies have been moving quickly to launch new generative AI products, such as Salesforce’s Einstein and HubSpot’s ChatSpot

• Google has announced that Search Generative Experience is coming in 2024, and has launched it in beta on Search Labs. It will likely change the search landscape forever, and it’s AI-powered answer boxes could have a catastrophic impact on informational click-through-rates for many companies.

YouTube has added a new Product Drops feature

YouTube has added a new Product Drops feature:  If you create content for YouTube you will now have more options for selling products via product drops. Creators could previously do product drops and price drops via pre-planned events, but now there will be the option to do product drops on live streams via the YouTube Live Control Room.

• Here is a video outlining how you can do this over on ‘This Week at Youtube: Product Drops, Updated Post Creation Flow & Updates on Revenue Analytics Tabs’.

What you should do💡: To be eligible for product drops on YouTube, make sure you either connect your YouTube account to a first party store, such as the Google Merchant Center or Shopify. You can also sign up to be part of the YouTube Affiliate program to do this. 

Once you’re set up, you can create and manage activities for tagged products to drive more engagement when doing a price drop or product drop announcement on your YouTube channel.

You’ll be able to use the Live control room to do product drops in live streams.

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Entity SEO helps search engines to understand the entities within your content.

This will then work to ensure your content is included in Google's search results when processing of a user's search query related to that entity (e.g. a topic like 'cryptocurrency').

By organising information into entities, Google is becoming more proficient in providing relevance and quality in its search results, especially for ambiguous queries.

Context and relevance are such important factors for succeeding with SEO. Optimising your content with entity SEO can help to improve your content's relevance to what you want to rank for.

So let's explore the tactics for optimising through entity SEO.

How do I optimise for entity SEO?

1. Research the keywords relevant to your audience(s) using a tool like Semrush, ahrefs or Google Ads keyword planner.

2. Use tools like InLinks to identify how a search engine (e.g. Google) classifies entities, and their relationships. Use this and your keyword research to inform your SEO content strategy.

3. Plan an SEO content strategy that adopts the hub and spoke model, where the hub page covers everything related to an entity, and the spoke pages address the long-tail related topics for that entity.

4. Internally link between the pages that are relevant to a specific entity, or entity group.

5. Use structured data to inform a search engine about what your content is relevant to. You can even reference specific entities here.

What is the difference between a keyword and an entity?

An entity is "A thing or concept that is singular, unique and well-defined and distinguishable." This can include physical objectives, concepts and more.

A keyword can represent an entity, or it can be a search query that relates to a component of a wider entity network.

Essentially, you can search with keywords to access information related to an entity. A search engine will consider that entity, and it's related entities to provide relevant information in a format that best suits the searcher.

Common misconceptions about entity SEO

Entity SEO is not the modern day keyword stuffing. You cannot just simply add references to related topics of your primary topic and expect to rank.

It's also not just about adding internal links between your blog content that shares a similar theme.

Why is Wikipedia a useful source for understanding entity SEO?

Wikipedia is a useful entity database source to understand how a search engine may determine entities and understand their relationships.

You can analyse Wikipedia's related topics to understand how a human would categorise information and then use that to inform your SEO work around entities.

Are topics actually entities?

Topics are entities because they are a 'concept', the key is to optimise your content so that a search engine can clearly understand the well-defined and distinguishable entity or entity cluster that it is relevant and authoritative for.

Internal linking can be a highly effective tactic for informing search engines of the entities your website is authoritative and relevant to. This is where the topic cluster or hub and spoke model has been found to be effective by many SEOs in recent years.

How do links connect entities for search engines?

Links are signals to search engines that content A is relevant to content B.

Links convey a significant amount of messages to a search engine about the quality, relevance and freshness of web content. As a result, links connect entities on the web and this is one of the key techniques that Google uses to understand the relationship between entities.

RankBrain determines which entity metrics and relationships are most important

RankBrain is AI that can determine which entity metrics and relationships are the most important to deliver quality, authoritative and relevant content to users.

4 factors Google analyses to influence the ranking of entities

There are four factors that Google analyses to influence the ranking of entities for queries input by users.

1. Relatedness

2. Notability

3. Contribution

4. Prizes

Why are entity databases important for SEO?

Google purchased Metaweb, an entity database, to improve its understanding of entities, their relationships and using that to prioritise certain entities over others when users input ambiguous queries.

Entity databases help Google to be more efficient when processing search results whenever a user enters a query. An entity database stores entities and their connections, these connections can be understood via backlinks and using entity databases.

Entities are ranked using a quality score. This quality score is determined by freshness, incoming links, outgoing links and a users selection history.

Google can infer context for multiple entities with the same name by analysing auxiliary keywords such as "where is", "how to" and "when did". This technique enables Google to determine entities and their relationships when processing unstructured data (information that is not organised in a pre-defined manner or data model).

By understanding the relationships between entities, determined by analysing entity databases and backlinks, Google can prioritise certain entities over others.

Which tools can you use to optimise for entity SEO?

There is an ever increasing array of tools that SEOs can use to identify entities, and their relationships between each other. Here are some to check out:

• InLinks

• MarketMuse

• Frase

• KeywordInsights.ai

Access the presentation to learn how to create your SEO Personas

SEO Personas Improve SEO Content Strategy With Social Data INBOUND 22 V2 HubSpot Version 1

SEO Personas_ Improve SEO Content Strategy With Social Data - INBOUND 22 - V2 - HubSpot Version (1).pdf

3 MB

Photos from my seminar at INBOUND22

Download the workbook to create your SEO Personas

If you'd like to access the workbook from the seminar to work through the tasks, you can follow the instructions below.

Please use the below URL to create your own version of the SEO Personas: How To Improve SEO Content Strategy Using Social Data WORKBOOK.

Long URL to access the Workbook

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gDZycbyw03YeGqAZyz1RKmxg7BJT6KUsUirDy80C6xM/copy

Short URL to access the Workbook

https://qrco.de/bdJJvt

QR Code to access the Workbook

roryhope.com/seo-personas

In the WORKBOOK, you will find the following:

• Introduction & Let’s connect!

• List 1-3 keyword topics relevant to your company.

• List 5+ websites that are 'SEO Competitors' in the search results for one of your keyword topics.

• Find and list the Twitter handles of the 'SEO Competitors'.

• Upload your 'SEO Competitors' into an audience intelligence tool (e.g. Audiense).

• List 1-5 SEO Personas from your keyword topic audience intelligence report.

• List 1-5 Influencer Entities per SEO Persona from your keyword topic.

• Setup Twitter Lists for your keyword topic and SEO Personas' Influencer Entities.

• Review Tweets and list 1-3 SEO content or digital PR ideas for your keyword topic.

• Appendix & let's connect!

Access the "CRM" Keyword Topic SEO Personas audience intelligence report

https://shared.audiense.com/app/insights/627bab53328b2fdfb7d954e3

By perfecting your skills and experience across these three pillars, you can develop into a highly effective SEO and growth marketing leader.

The first two pillars of content and data analytics will mould you into a sought after 'Individual Contributor' (IC), whilst mastery of leadership will elevate you into a 'People Manager' or departmental leader.

Have a read of the three key pillars, and the supporting sub-topics.

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SEO success can be boiled down to three key pillars: content, data analytics and leadership.

Content

Content is the first pillar of success in SEO. Content is the fuel that drives SEO performance. Without resources available to produce high quality content, SEO strategies remain just that, a strategy. If you focus on perfecting your skills and learning about the sub-topics within this pillar, you'll be able to deliver organic growth and immense long-term value for any company.

Content production and creative writing

Content can really be broken down into either content production as an overarching discipline, which may include content calendar management, briefing content freelancers, producing specifications and coordinating with internal stakeholders; or alternatively it can be actually writing content and publishing, which leans more into the discipline of creative writing.

Content production managers are in high demand these days, as brands understand how challenging it can be to manage a number of content publishing streams that each serve different objectives, team stakeholders and KPIs. The core skills required to deliver here are exceptional time and project management, a strategic understanding of the inbound marketing funnel, collaboration, SEO best practice and editing.

As an SEO, you should focus some of your development time practicing writing and one way of doing so is to hone your skills on a creative writing course. Even if you work in let's say a more 'mundane' industry, creative writing can help you to bring your SEO content assets alive. It's also important to note, that you are always writing for an audience, or a number of audiences, with any piece of content.

Here are some writing courses that you could check out to level up your content production and creative writing skills:

• Udemy Content Writing Courses

• Content is King: Writing Killer Content for Web & Marketing

• Writing Tool Hacks

• Masterclass

Digital PR & storytelling

To be successful in SEO, you need to find a way of acquiring high quality, relevant backlinks on an ongoing basis. The best way to do this is to deploy digital PR campaigns that focus on revealing engaging stories that are newsworthy, often driven by data and relevant to your target audiences, so that they get seeded in high authority, relevant publications earning backlinks.

A digital PR campaign needs to have at it's core a creative concept, which then in turn needs to be communicated in an engaging way through copywriting, imagery, graphs, tables and videos. Creative thinking is therefore an important step in the digital PR process, which provides content ideas that will have a greater chance of being seeded and earning backlinks to your website in priority press, relevant publications and blogs.

I have previously presented a number of conference talks on what I call 'Audience-first SEO', which is a system for using social data to enhance your digital PR campaign ideation and storytelling as a brand. You can check out my Semrush webinar on the topic, or alternatively download the slides I presented at BrightonSEO here (with over 3800 views and counting!).

Finally, here as some examples of successful digital PR campaigns to inspire you.

Email outreach

It's just as important to focus on content distribution as it is content production. In fact, many marketers believe you should focus on the 80-20 rule leaning into more time spent on distributing content. One of the key tactics is email outreach.

Outreach emails need to be tailored for the recipient, unique and engaging. It's not enough to simply use an email template. You will get disappointing results.

Instead, practice writing personalised emails which share your content and encourage others to share your content with their audience, which may result in a backlink for your website. Backlinks are seen in a search engine's eyes as a vote of confidence, and can often improve your SEO performance.

Technical SEO

You might see this Technical SEO section and think hang on a second, we're talking about the first pillar of SEO being 'Content', not 'Technical'.

But I think as SEOs we often over complicate things and technical SEO generally focuses on the technical health of your website's content: how quickly the page loads, how the content is linked to, whether or not the content can be found by a search engine crawler.

The area where technical SEO may overlap with data analytics would be when analysing crawl data from tools such as DeepCrawl, ScreamingFrog or ContentKing. However, I think that most of the time it's more important to have a solid understanding of technical SEO best practices rather than be a pro at big data analysis here.

When thinking about the three pillars of SEO, consider technical SEO as a supporting specialism within the 'Content' pillar. I think for those of you who are fearful of technical SEO because of the reputation it gets for being complicated, or cliquey, this will help to bring down those mental barriers and you can get stuck in!

Here are some great resources for learning technical SEO:

• Technical SEO course with Bastian Grimm

• LearningSEO.io Learn Technical SEO

• Deepcrawl's Technical SEO Library

Video and imagery

Did someone mention video in a meeting again? Pfft... dreamer. No! In fact video is a key priority for marketers with usage and spend both, overall, increasing, and plans to increase again in the next 12 months, according to HubSpot (2021).  

What does this mean?

You don't want to get left behind as an SEO, especially when video SEO can yield significant returns within Google's search results, or via YouTube, Vimeo etc.

It's worth considering video as a key content format, and you study how brands in your category, or more video-savvy categories are using video. I'd suggest educational formats, and aligning video assets produced with your keyword intelligence, social listening data and audience or user surveys.

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Embed evergreen, education video content to evergreen priority SEO landing pages. You will improve UX signals such as time on site, which Google values.

Remember, with the rise of TikTok and the ever decreasing attention span of most people, focus on short form 'snackable' video. You can then lead users into a longer video or asset once you've captured their interest.

There are some useful resources on video SEO found on Wistia.

Imagery has been a crucial part of a content strategy for a long time. Whilst image SEO is often overlooked, and it's worth revisiting all of your blog assets to identify opportunities to work with your design team, or a freelancer designers to create unique images (did someone say NFT?) per priority SEO landing page. Make sure you add an alt tag to each image with the relevant keywords.  

Here are 12 important image SEO tips from Search Engine Journal. It's time to get creative people!

HTML, CSS and Javascript

Now we arrive at a topic that has been debated within the SEO community for a long, long time. Should SEOs learn to code? My answer, no - it's not necessary.

However, you do need to be adept at understanding of HTML as a minimum. This is absolutely crucial for a number of reasons, including optimising content for SEO, analysing internal links and communicating with developers.

CSS and Javascript languages are hugely beneficial to learn if you want to level up your SEO skillset, mainly because you can take on more advanced technical SEO problems such as UX optimisation, Javascript SEO, JSON, web speed optimisation (e.g. core web vitals) and improve your project management of developer resources.

Seeing as HTML, CSS and Javascript are all front-end languages which focus on the structure, design and behaviour of web content, it's useful to see proficiency as in these languages as another string to your bow within the 'Content' pillar of SEO success.

Do you have an interest in levelling up your front-end development skills? Here are some great online courses:

• Code Academy

• Treehouse

• Freecodecamp

Data analytics

Data analytics is the second pillar of SEO success. To formulate an SEO strategy, you have to do keyword research, competitor and market analysis. Whilst to make decisions on how to optimise your SEO strategy, you must measure KPIs using analytics platforms such as GA and GSC.

We have already covered content as the first pillar, and the interplay between content and data is the basis of a successful SEO strategy. Focusing your development around these core two pillars of content and data analytics will help you to become a valuable individual contributor (IC) for your company.

Keyword research

Keywords remain the most important data for marketers when developing an SEO strategy, they are foundational and will likely remain so for as long as search marketing exists. I'd suggest you spend a lot of time here, reading as many resources as you can, using the wide range of keyword research tools available and establishing your own methods.

The most powerful tools for keyword research are Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. The former for processing large keyword data sets, and the latter for managing keyword targeting strategies, page optimisations and integrating those into content calendars. You can export data from various keyword research tools into spreadsheets for manipulation.

Focus on becoming familiar with important excel formulas for managing keyword data sets, such as VLOOKUPs, CONCATENATIONS, find and replace and de-duplicate. These will help you to stay on top of your keyword data and feel in control of your keyword strategy.

To be honest, no matter how long you've been in the SEO industry, it can always help to revisit some of the best keyword research guides to brush up on the latest techniques or re-familiarise yourself with best practice.

Below are some of the most informative keyword research resources online:

• How to do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner's Guide by HubSpot

• A Beginner's Guide to SEO (Moz)

• How to Do Keyword Research for SEO (ahrefs)

• How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: The Ultimate Guide (SEJ)

Here are some of my favourite tools for keyword research:

• Google Ads Keyword Planner

• ahrefs

• Semrush

• AnswerThePublic

Competitor insights

Competitor intelligence is really important for SEO, as it helps you to identify keywords to target, content assets to produce and backlink strategies to deploy. You can use a range of competitive intelligence tools, including:

• Semrush

• Ahrefs

• Similarweb

I'd suggest learning how to best use these competitor intelligence tools to not only analyse your direct competition, but also other websites that offer products which address pain points or talk about topics relevant to your target audience.

It's best practice to update competitive intelligence reports on a quarterly basis, but if you can develop automated dashboards to send alerts and insights to your SEO team when a competitor outranks you, that can help you to be more reactive and grow better.

Content, social and backlinks analysis

An SEO strategy must put high quality content at it's core. To make high quality content you need to understand what interests your target audiences and various stages of the funnel or flywheel.

I recommend familiarising yourself with content analytics tools, such as BuzzSumo, audience intelligence tools, such as Audiense or SparkToro, social listening tools, such as Pulsar or Meltwater and finally backlink analysis tools, such as ahrefs.

Setup a system whereby you are feeding data from these platforms into a weekly dashboard for identifying trending topics, audience behaviours, link opportunities and content ideation. These insights should be reviewed as an SEO, or by an SEO team, or a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Focus on analysing data based on keywords and audiences that align with the your SEO and content strategy.

SEO reporting & forecasting

SEO reporting is a very important skill to continuously improve, especially as it can be a challenging part of the job for those who are content SEOs, rather than SEO analysts.

The main analytics platforms to focus on for SEO reporting include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Data Studio and BigQuery.

There are many courses that you can take to improve your data analytics skills for SEO reporting, including:

• Google Analytics Academy

• Coursera Web Analytics

• Digital Skills: Web Analytics on Future Learn

As you progress in your career, and get more responsibilities, you will likely be requested to provide SEO forecasts which can be daunting. We all know that SEO performance is subject to regular fluctuations as algorithm updates roll-out.

Here are some very helpful resources and templates for SEO forecasting:

• SEO Forecasting in Google Sheets by Tom Capper at Moz

• Kevin Indig's SEO Forecasting Template

Python

Python is a programming language that is incredibly powerful for SEOs. It enables automation by leveraging APIs and machine learning algorithms. However, it can be an intimidating thought for many SEOs to learn Python.

You can use Python across a wide range of SEO workflows, including automation, technical SEO, reporting, split testing and more.

Undoubtably, Python's greatest strength for SEOs is in automation, and here are some of the tasks you can automate with Python:

• Keyword research

• Identifying user intent

• Scraping websites

• Internal link analysis

• Merging data sets

• Gathering GSC data

• Performing competitor analysis

• Image optimisation.

Here are some useful resources for getting started with Python:

• How to Use Python to Analyze SEO Data: A Reference Guide

• An Introduction To Python & Machine Learning For Technical SEO

An SEO who pioneered in this space was Hamlet Batista, and here is a roundup of his contributions to the SEO community, teaching us how to use Python.

Digital PR data analytics and visualisation

Digital PR campaigns often rely on data to produce engaging stories that are shared on websites in exchange for backlinks.

To do this, often large data sets need to be analysed, using tools such as Tableau and others. Once analysed it's important to visualise data in a way that is engaging for your target audiences, as well as easy for websites or publishers to share.

Brushing up how to use data analysis and visualisation tools will really help to make your digital PR campaigns generate extra buzz and backlinks!

User research surveys and customer interviews

This is a workflow of increasing importance for SEO, and some people in the industry are coining this 'Product-led SEO'. Conducting user research surveys and customer interviews as a means of getting insights into what content you should publish to address pain points is the premise.

Most SEOs stick to keyword data, content analytics and some will look at social media data, but few feel comfortable conducting user research.

You could undertake quantitative user research to gauge opinion or interest on topics that have been uncovered during qualitative interviews.

This can help steer resource allocation and discover new content topics that will deliver high quality SEO traffic, otherwise undiscovered by keyword research tools.

Leadership

Leadership is the third key pillar of SEO success.

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Leadership is defined as, "the action of leading a group of people or an organisation" in the Oxford Dictionary. 

Based on my experience, to be an effective SEO either in-house or agency side, you must be able to lead your team, client or multiple teams and stakeholders to follow an SEO roadmap to achieve goals. This requires strong communication skills, a strategic understanding of other business functions, persistence and vision.

Of course, there are also the leadership traits required to be a people manager, which include team building, empathy, adaptability, transparency, project management and personnel development.

Strategic governance

An SEO strategy requires constant strategic governance because its success is conditional to the resources allocated from various teams across an organisation or its agencies.

Whilst SEO also comes with an element of risk, be that technical SEO, link building, poor quality or duplicate content. Often these risks are unknown to non-SEO professionals, who don't realise the issue of their work flow.

For example, imagine that you have a product marketing team in a SaaS company, who would like to launch a range of features pages that are close to or identical to existing SEO-informed hybrid informational and transactional pages. It's the responsibility of you, the SEO, to ensure these new pages are either differentiated enough or technically setup as to not cause duplicate content issues or cannibalisation.

To excel in SEO, you'll need to have enough authority in your company, or with your client, to influence the strategic decision making.

Project management

Project management is a crucial skill to keep SEO roadmaps moving.

Documentation and prioritisation are key to ensuring that all teams have the information they need to work on SEO projects. Ensure that all of your projects are thoroughly documented, with clear objectives, KPIs, resource requirements, roadmaps and definitely link them into your overall SEO strategy, which also needs to be documented! Prioritisation can really help your stakeholders (e.g. developers) to focus on the most important actions during sprints.

Repeat after me, I will use the project management software that my company or client uses. Please, make sure you learn how to use the project management software adopted by your company, or client, and remember to use it!

I cannot stress enough the importance of delivering, managing and chasing the SEO roadmap within the project management tool used by your stakeholders; if you leave roadmaps and action plans in Google Sheets when your company uses Asana - they will be forgotten!

Communication

SEOs need to have their tentacles in all areas of a company to ensure strategic governance of the SEO strategy, and this makes communication a key skill! As an SEO, you need to focus on constant transparency, to ensure that all teams understand your SEO goals and how they are going to be achieved.

Another aspect of communication that is worth noting is diplomacy. If another team has goals or project objectives that don't fully align with an SEO project then you need to work closely with them, collaborate and figure out a way to get SEO priorities considered in their projects or work flows. Similarly, your SEO team must be on-hand to offer resources to support projects led by other teams.

Stakeholder management

Stakeholder management is the process of ensuring that you retain positive and productive relationships with all of those people who have the greatest impact on your work flows and projects.

Within the leadership pillar of success for SEO, stakeholder management plays a key role in determining how you will get things done and achieve your goals.

It's key then to identify the stakeholders of your work flows and projects, and you should study those stakeholders to understand their motivations and pain points. You should prioritise them, and ensure that you regularly stay in contact with each key stakeholder. This will mean your projects run smoother, and you'll face less blockages.

People management

People management is a vast and nuanced discipline that has been debated and studied for many years by academics and practitioners. If you are managing a team of SEO individual contributors, then high quality people management is a must.

You must realise that your mission is to dedicate support to your team to help them develop with positive and constructive feedback. Ensure you create clear roles and responsibilities, and provide ownership to your team members.

Consider key roles within your SEO team to include:

• Technical SEO specialist

• SEO manager or strategist

• Digital PR & content distribution manager

• SEO content writers or editor.

Here are some useful resources for learning about people management:

• Essential People Skills for Line Managers (CIPD)

• Managing Remote Teams (CIPD)

• The Manager's Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Managing People at Work (Coursera)

Values, cause and mission

Aligning your team to a clear cause and mission that is rooted in shared values will help to drive cooperation, improve performance and loyalty within your SEO team.

Simon Sinek's famous business book, 'Start With Why' discusses the importance of ensuring a leader or company has a clear vision on 'Why' they are working in a team or at a company, which defines the 'How' and the 'What' they are working on.

I'd suggest as an SEO leader, you clearly define what your team's cause and mission is and how that impacts the values you encourage within your team. Often, this is set from your company culture, but you can still instil a sense of purpose within your team and focus on inspirational leadership.