Looking ahead to SEO in 2025

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who has covered all the facets of 2024 and knows how to look ahead to 2025, our one and only head of SEO communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

I am an expert on 2024. I have been here the whole time. I did every single day of 2024. Can confirm.

Mordy Oberstein:

I checked out on a few days, I'll be honest with you. There was a few days I missed.

Crystal Carter:

I was here the whole time. I saw all of it. I saw all of it. First eyewitness account, this is primary source.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was too much for my eyes. I had to like ...

Crystal Carter:

It was a lot. There was a lot. Every year I feel like we get to the end of the year and people were like, "Wow."

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no. This year was real wow. We'll get to it in a second. From an SEO point of view. I'm not talking about anything else. Purely from an SEO point of view.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, there's a lot to cover. There's been a lot of what-have-yous, a lot of ins and outs.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ins and outs, a lot of what-have-yous. Big Lebowski. Yeah, indeed.

The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. Look for it in your inboxes each and every month, where you can see and plan out your entire site with our new visual site map that not only helps you better see, and dare I say, visualize your client's entire site, but leverages AI to help you build custom wire frames. Links in the show notes. Do check it out, as today's all about having vision, as we look forward to 2025 and what it has in store for SEO.

Is it time to break free of the SERP silo? What content will work in 2025? And how does AI in the grand old LLM factor into the SEO equation now? We'll hear from not one, not two, not three, not four, not five ... I could go on, not six, but many SEOs, such as Mike King, the latest soloist, Ray Saddiq, Paul Andre de Vera, Victor Pan, and many more as they weigh in on what's in store for you in 2025. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness.

So while the snow's still soft on 2025, ratchet down those ankle straps and strap your feet in as we ollie and nollie our boards down the mountain that is SEO in 2025.

Crystal Carter:

You dropping skateboard references on the podcast?

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. Snowboard. I had to look them up. I have no clue.

Crystal Carter:

You snowboarding? Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's snowboarding.

Crystal Carter:

I'm aware that you can ollie on a skateboard. I guess you can ollie on a snowboard because your feet don't have to come off.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know.

Crystal Carter:

An ollie, I can never remember what that is. I know skateboarders, they talk in-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the opposite of an ollie, no?

Crystal Carter:

Possibly. It's like if you're going switch or doing tail taps and half cab disaster, there's lots of skateboard terminology that people say.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding. We're all about that stuff. I know nothing about it, which is funny-

Crystal Carter:

Everything's above board.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Crystal Carter:

Just play one on TV.

Mordy Oberstein:

I just play one on our SEO podcast. I literally Googled all that. I don't know what it even means.

Crystal Carter:

You know what the first time I went snowboarding, we actually Googled top 10 tips for snowboarding, printed it out-

Mordy Oberstein:

And you broke your leg?

Crystal Carter:

No, not the first time. No. We printed it out and then printed out the MapQuest and drove up a mountain in a Hyundai, and yeah, it was good times. Good times. That's the-

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what's funny? Probably that first result of the top 10 tips, probably very similar to the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh, eighth, ninth 10th offering the top 10 tips.

Crystal Carter:

Those are the good old days.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that was 2024 for you. So as we gently and non-controversially move into recapping 2024 just a bit, because SEO enters in a really weird place. I don't think it's ever been weirder. Isn't that weird? To quote Austin Powers, because it is weird.

Crystal Carter:

May you live in interesting times.

Mordy Oberstein:

I just want to recap some of the larger issues, stories, developments in SEO in 2024, such as now that the helpful content update is no more, it's baked into the core algorithm and sites that were hit by it back in September don't seemingly, at this point in time of the recording of this podcast, have been able to actually recover in a significant way. Seeing like 20% recoveries was the max. So that was a big deal. Reddit's here, Reddit's there, Reddit's everywhere, and there's not a drop of organic results to spare.

Crystal Carter:

I didn't know you had bars, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

I could snowboard and rhyme on the same podcast. Podcast is imagination land. So there's that. There were creator summits at Google Health where sites were told, "Nope, not going to happen for you."

Crystal Carter:

Good luck out there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Break a leg. I don't know. Yeah? That happened.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I guess they were just kind of told it depends. I don't know. Yeah, there was a lot going on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Interesting plan for a creator. So let's bring them all in and tell them we don't know. Sucks for you, I guess.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's just really tricky for people because Google shifts around, but this has been so much shifting. I've been saying to people, Google's in beta mode right now. And we've been in, as SEOs, there are people who've been doing SEO since 1999, and a lot of stuff hadn't changed that much over the course of that time, but in the last three, four years.

Mordy Oberstein:

In the last three days.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right, exactly. At time of recording, the head of Google recently said there's going to be monumental change coming in the next little while.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was a great ... We covered that on its new. If you missed that, you should watch that because there are some salty points that I will not say in this podcast about that interview. Just ask Congress. Okay. Stop, cannot go further. I will get too salty too quickly.

But yeah, and on the flip side of that, some of these sites have terrible ad experiences and Google traffic isn't guaranteed, which is another issue. Maybe we're too siloed and SEO should kind of get out of the bubble. Brand is now in focus in the SEO space Like never before. Everyone's talking about branding, and branding, and branding, but not exactly about how to do the branding, which is a different problem. But we're talking about branding. AIOs? I don't know how they got so far down on the list. That should have been more on the top of the list. This list. It's not a sequential order of SEO insanity, it's just a random list. So AI overviews kind of been hit or miss. Drink urine, eat glue, that was part of the equation in 2024.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Seemed to have improved over the course of it, I will say. I will say that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. They have improved. More links, more links,

Crystal Carter:

More links, more value, less just repeating the exact same featured snippet underneath of it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right.

Crystal Carter:

Little bit of that. So we'll see. We'll see.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. What's the CTR? All that one actually knows, so that's good. Also, manual actions on some pretty big websites for parasite SEO. Third-party content hosted on the website. It has nothing to do with whatever your website does. Penalized by Google. Moral of the story, write it yourself. Okay, that was again salty, because Google's like ... "Well, if you're writing it yourself, that seems to be fine," which was Greg Finn's point on Its New multiple times. So I'm just dealing Greg Salty Thunder on that one. But Forbes, a lot. Entrepreneur, all these big sites who were hosting third-party content on their website were dinged. Manual action dinged by Google on those folders. So that was a shot across the bow to publishers.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Forbes had quite the year this year. Everybody's been talking about Forbes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, really? Because it seems like they lost a lot of traffic. Oh, you meant it like, "Oh, it was complicated." Got it. Not like, "Wow, that was a great year."

Crystal Carter:

They've had quite a year. A lot going on. Everybody's talking about Forbes. People have a lot to say about Forbes. People have a lot of opinions about what's going on there, including Google, apparently.

Mordy Oberstein:

Apparently.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

But everybody acts like they're saints also, so whatever. Anywho. Wow, this is starting off great.

There's a ton that I probably missed. The net result of all of this is there's mass confusion, uncertainty, and change within the SEO space, and I'm not being hyperbolic.

Crystal Carter:

Not at all. Not at all. And I think that we're even starting to see this in how people are approaching talking to clients as well. So people are having to diversify their SEO offering, people are having to do things a little bit more different, a little bit more nuanced, a little ... And I haven't seen 360 marketing everywhere. I've seen 360 marketing quoted as a strategy more times than I've ever seen before. Everybody is going to 360, and I think that that's good. I think that's good, and I've spoken on this years ago that it's something that's high value. And Mordy, you've been talking about brand for years.

Mordy Oberstein:

For years. Years.

Crystal Carter:

Years. Years. And we don't want to be like the harbingers of, "I told you so," but also-

Mordy Oberstein:

No. I told you also.

Crystal Carter:

But we did tell you so. Just saying. Just saying. Just putting it out there. And so hopefully people are able to get involved and see what's going on there.

Mordy Oberstein:

So with that, we got a bunch of folks together and we asked them, okay, with all this craziness going on in the SEO space, what are your top tips for 2025? And they're like, "Punt." No, I'm just kidding. They had actual ... Punt is a football reference, whatever. It just means kick it down the field and see what happens. They have some actual really good advice for you. So let's get right to it. We're going to start off with Ray Saddiq, who is the global head of marketing at Rice at seven, who talks about working with other teams. Here's what Ray had to say.

Ray Saddiq:

So I think that search has changed massively, and it's time for you as an SEO to start working with the other teams in your department. So if you are in-house, go ahead and we'll start speaking to your social team, because social search is a thing at the moment, so it's time that you go and start speaking to them. But also speak to your PR team as well, because it's crazy how many links can be built. I've noticed over here on the US side, especially how many people aren't working directly with their PR team to build links into the right places on their website. So have a look at that, check that out. Look into digital PR as well if you haven't already. It's a huge thing. I know there's still a few people I spoke to today who aren't really looking into it at the moment, so now's the time.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks, Ray. That's a great point. Someone asked me, I don't remember who it was ... Humble brag, I get asked for so many of these round up tips for the end of the year, and one of my ... Somebody-

Ray Saddiq:

Everybody asks me so many things.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know. Look at me.

Ray Saddiq:

Totally asking me questions.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sound like such a creep. No, but I just have a bad memory. So I don't remember where it was, but I wrote ... I think it was for Aleyda's SEO FOMO thing. Sit with comms. My biggest tip for you is sit with comms, which is kind of what Ray is saying. So great minds think alike.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, totally. And I think that SEOs are growing up. We need to mature into the full marketers that we are, because we always have been a core part of the marketing team and we just need to mature into that. And I think that that's exactly what he's talking about from a PR point of view. One of the other things that's happened this year is that LLMs have also become destinations for search. So I've got an article that goes all into that, but one of the things that I talk about is that links are part of that. All of the things we've done for SEO contribute to that, including getting links in high value publications, which PR is the only way to do that. You're not going to get a link from time. You're not going to get a link in the Atlantic without doing some solid PR. So absolutely great advice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's really solid.

Speaking of which, and talking with other teams, Debbie Chew, who's the SEO manager over our Stripe, goes into that with a little bit more detail. So here's Debbie.

Debbie Chew:

One SEO tip for SEO 2025 would be to break out of your silos. So in SEO, we kind of live in a bubble sometimes. Maybe if we're lucky, we might be working with paid, but there are a bunch of other teams that really understand our customer and that we can tap into. So let's look at our sales team, our customer service team, what data can they share with us about our customers, and what data can the SEO team share back with them and use that within kind your SEO strategy and then have them use that as well. So make sure to break out of your silos and pull all that data together and create a great success for your business.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Debbie. Really appreciate that. That's really the point. I feel like the internet is in the age of resonance. There's so much digital noise, there's so much digital chatter that you really have to resonate with that audience, and the only way to really do that, and that part of your job as an SEO is to resonate, not just to get clicks and not just to get traffic, but to actually resonate, which is ... I don't know why I have to say that. And the only way to do that is to really, I think, is to understand the brand positioning of the company that you're working with or the client that you're working with, which means you need to talk to these other teams that break out of your silo, like Debbie just said.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, totally. And she also mentioned at the data point, the only way you're going to effectively connect with these folks is with some authenticity, and you can only get authenticity by knowing what you're talking about, and the only way what you're talking about is with data. So you need to get data from the teams that are working with them. And it might be that the data unlocks always, always data unlocks stuff that you didn't quite see. You're like, "Oh, turns out we're really big in Wisconsin." And you're like, "Oh, okay, maybe we should do some stuff in Wisconsin. I didn't realize that that was a thing. Or maybe you feel like you're big in Wisconsin and you can use the data to back that up so that you can get money to do something in Wisconsin, for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Or then they say, "Oh no, we're not really big in Wisconsin. We're actually big in Cleveland, so we have to do stuff in Cleveland." They're like, "Oh, Cleveland." Okay.

Speaking of breaking out of silos and working with other teams, maybe it's time to break out of search just a little bit, not put all of your eggs in one basket. So here's Celeste Gonzalez, director of RooLabs, over at Rickety Roo, on that point.

Celeste Gonzalez:

My one SEO tip for 2025 would be, towards local businesses, don't put all your eggs in one SEO basket. Diversify your channels. Be where your audience is.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Celeste. I could not agree more, not just for local businesses, but in general. I think one of the ideas that's coming out of SEO from 2024 is that search for many websites is a vehicle. And it's not the only vehicle, it's simply one vehicle to build up that brand presence, to build up the visibility that you want to have to build up, the engagement or the performance, whatever it is, it's one vehicle. And especially if you're not one of these giant websites like, I don't know, Wix ... Like Wix, it's going to be much harder for you to get onto that SERP and to use search as a vehicle the way that you might have done in the past. I think it's one of the main themes out of 2024. So definitely diversifying that portfolio a bit makes a lot of sense.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, totally. And I think it doesn't just apply to local businesses. I think it's absolutely important for local businesses, because you are going to be connecting with your customers in so many different ways. And Facebook is a channel that really, really works for local businesses, for instance. There's always a local schools group, people are using the marketplace to find things on Facebook. So I use Facebook more for local things than almost anything else, and I think that that's for instance, really useful. And making sure that your website connects with that, making sure that you've got listings, making sure you've got your Google business profile, absolutely helps your local business to perform online. So if you are working in the local space, if you are a local business owner or you're supporting a local business owner as a consultant, adding more channels to what you do will absolutely help you in 2024, 2025, 2026, going forward.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's just channel nine. Nothing ever good was ever on channel nine. Right?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know what you're talking about.

Mordy Oberstein:

Channel nine. That was UPN when I was a kid.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, I used to watch tons of UPN.

Mordy Oberstein:

There was reruns of Family Matters, I'll be honest.

Crystal Carter:

Tons.

Mordy Oberstein:

They had the most-

Crystal Carter:

I watched tons of UPN back in the day. Moesha was on UPN.

Mordy Oberstein:

The WB also. Also who bought ...

Crystal Carter:

They also had loads of stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

7th Heaven, Jessica Buell was on that. All right, whatever.

Anywho, one of the other big themes out of 2024 is obviously around content generation. We're talking about content generation, one of the things we're talking about is AI. So here's Mike King, founder of iPoll Rank, on how to generate content with AI.

Mike King:

Use retrieval augmented generation for creating content with generative AI. And when you do it, generate the content in components. Don't just say, "Give me a giant blog post." Give me the intro to the blog post, give me the main body area, give me the TLDR. Break it down into components in alignment with the design of the website and you're going to get much more usable content a lot faster.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks, Mike. And that's very similar, by the way, to what Mike talked about on our webinar with him and Ross Hudgens. If you give AI a walled garden to operate in, and boundaries to operate in, you usually get way, way better results.

Crystal Carter:

And in his webinar that we did with him and Ross Hudgens, which we reference a lot because it's got really, really good value in it, they point out that they've both been using AI for years. So they know what they're talking about. They didn't just jump on the bandwagon. They've been driving the bandwagon for years. And I think that it really, really does help if you break it down, if you give it good inputs, if you give it good prompts, if you're breaking it down that way.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. Now, to break down content itself a little bit for you in 2025 and what might work that you might not be focused on, here's Paul Andre de Vera, host of the SEO show on some fresh content ideas.

Paul Andre De Vera:

My one tip for SEO 2025 is live streaming. What's the freshest content out there? What's fresher than fresh? Live streaming? Live video. Last year I was talking about video's great. Get videos ranking on page one of Google button. If you look at right now, every time I schedule a live on my YouTube, they're ranking on page one almost instantly. So check it out. Live streaming is my number one tip for 2025.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Dre. That is really interesting to see that he's doing the live streams on LinkedIn and they're popping up on the SERP right away. That's interesting.

Crystal Carter:

That is really interesting. The live LinkedIn is a fascinating development. They've really been investing in video in the last little while since everybody's taken to LinkedIn as a refuge after all of the other social media platforms fell apart. So they've been putting a lot of video in there, and the live does seem to get a little bit of traction, so we'll see how that develops in the next little while.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, absolutely. So we don't only have those tips for you. We collected a whole bunch of tips from a whole bunch of different SEOs that'll be part of a roundup post, but I wanted to pull some of those into the podcast as well.

So Victor Pan, who is the SEO over a HubSpot, had a really interesting tip. He wrote, "Don't waste a crisis. When site traffic is down," because we're talking about, "Oh, it's a volatile world out there. Site traffic might be down," it's easy to patch these with the short-term solutions. For example, 2025 coming, or here, depending on how many content plus year keywords your site ranks for, you'll have a predictable traffic decline on pages ranking for 2024 keywords. The short term solution would be to scrape and update page content and titles manually. Gross. Don't waste this crisis, or forget the lesson from yesteryear. Quantify the loss from last year, document an editorial process to proactively avoid future traffic declines while elevating content quality. Record the win and wear it proudly with your colleagues. When you lose traffic, don't lose the lesson.

Crystal Carter:

Yo teachable moments.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Teachable moments. This is absolutely key. I think also sometimes people are like, "Oh, the traffic is down. Sometimes that means you got their attention." And if you're the person who's like, "I told you so. I told you we shouldn't have done this thing that we did anyway," then that's a great time to also give the teachable moment to the rest of your team and remind them why you are the SEO that you are.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

And just like, yeah, remember? Oh, now you're coming to me now. Oh, okay." So just have your answers ready to go. And yeah, as he says, don't let the teachable moment go past. Actually learn from it. Totally, totally great advice.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a great quote.

So switching over to eCom a little bit, Chris Long VP of marketing at Go Fish Digital wrote, "Retailers, Google is becoming your new category page. In effort to compete with Amazon they're turning the search results into a de facto category page experience. Fast and navigation pricing comparisons and more, all directly available in the search results. This means that you need to spend even more time on your products as opposed to your category pages," which is really interesting.

By the way, I think it's really interesting that Google's going so heavy on the homepage or the traditional SERP page with all of the products and not trying to push you into Google shopping more heavily so as to compete brand-wise with Amazon. I think it's a short-term win for Google. I'm not sure it's a long-term win for Google, but that's a different point aside.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, they are coming for Amazon hard. And I think also, I think for SEOs, this is going to be changing around the funnel. I think Chris is right. This is your product page, so you need to make sure that anything that's pulling through from your feed, going into Google, is optimized for that experience. And also making sure that your bottom of the funnel is locked tight and frictionless. And I think that people need to think about that going forward and optimize for all search interactions. So yeah, Chris has great, great insights on that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Chris always has great insights, has a great-

Crystal Carter:

He's good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, Chris is really good.

Okay. Naomi Francis Parker, who's the SEO manager over at Charlotte Tilbury Beauty said, "Pay attention to your brand identity. Make sure it's clear across all places of search. This includes social media, GPTs, and digital search engines like Google and Bing. If 2024 taught us anything it's that the way users are searching is changing at a much faster pace than anyone, platforms included, could have anticipated. Couple that with the constantly changing SERP and it's clear that ranking as a concept is becoming outdated. Entity SEO has always been around because it's how search engines understand brands, people, et cetera. But it's already more important now than ever before. It's no longer just about how you appear in Google. It's about how you appear online at all."

Yes, could not agree more. The way you appear, are mentioned, discuss related to as a brand across the entire digital landscape is how GPTs and how AI LLMs of the world are going to pick you up and understand you.

Crystal Carter:

Right. They need to understand your whole digital presence. And that's always been the case. And I think that as she's saying entities, you need to understand your entity. She's mentioning the LLM. I'm going to shout out my article that talks about that on the SEO hub, and it gets into that. One of the things that's important about LLMs is they're all trained on Wikipedia. 66 million pages of copyright-free, human-vetted information that's all coming from the knowledge graph, and pulling through all of those different entities and all those different elements. If your entity doesn't make sense online, then it's unlikely that your entity is going to make sense on an LLM. So you need to make sure that your entity, which pulls from lots of different data points, including what's on your website, but lots of other places, makes sense. And that's SEO these days.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And there's plenty of places where you can control if you don't have a Wiki Wikipedia page, you can crunch base if you're a business or a persona online. There's all LinkedIn. There's tons of places where-

Crystal Carter:

Your local business profile.

Mordy Oberstein:

Personality and persona are picked up. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Lots of stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Lots of places.

Crystal Carter:

Handle that. Handle it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. Last but not least, Aleyda Solis, SEO consultant, founder of Orainti, and of course, SEO FOMO, and learning SEO.io.

Crystal Carter:

And contributor/instructor for the WIC Studio SEO learning course, where you can learn SEO from Aleyda Solis. Mordy's waving because I'm waving my finger now.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, everyone. We're both waving fingers.

Crystal Carter:

Waving fingers because-

Mordy Oberstein:

Waving our finger at you. How silly it would be if you didn't take up that free SEO course from Aleyda.

Crystal Carter:

You totally should.

Mordy Oberstein:

Checkout the SEO Learning Hub, Studio SEO Learning Hub.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. Aleyda said, "It's clear that Google wants to feature real authoritative brands at the top of the SERPs, which is also clearly helpful to increase CTR and optimize conversions. Grow your brand authority by understanding your company brand positioning, and take into account in your SEO strategy. Target your brand to key queries, specify your brand details, structure data, optimize your knowledge panel details, etc."

So great minds think alike. I literally did a video on why brands, like if your sales team or marketing team, don't focus on the messaging. Focus on the positioning, because that tells you, A, who you are as a brand, and it helps you also understand who the client and the consumer is. It's like the perfect intersection. Focus on understanding positioning, which is I guess my tip of the year if we're talking about all this brand stuff. SEOs are talking and chirping a lot about it, and it's hard. It's long term, it's a different kind of mentality.

I will give you my one tip to fall back on it all. It all hinges on creating meaningful brand identity for yourself. And when I say meaningful, I've said this before, it means there are two levels, or multiple levels, of emotions that the human experience revolves around. What are surface level emotions and what are more deep, more integral things that you must have. I always say fun. In the vein of Barry Shores, I don't have to have fun. I don't have to have fun today. I don't have to have fun tomorrow. I can have fun on the weekend, or if I'm Barry, I will never have fun at all.

If your brand identity is focused on, "Let's have fun," that's a very fleeting experience. If your brand identities focus on more meaningful experiences that are integral to the human experience, like connection, overcoming struggle, things that are must haves for the human experience, that's much more meaningful, that's much more powerful, and it'll keep you much more centered. Focus on those more existential parts of your brand identity and less on the fleeting parts of your brand identity. And the rest of the brand will follow that. So if you're in SEO, you're looking at where do I start with brand? Start there.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's my tip for 2025.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay. I got it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Hey Crystal, what's your tip for 2025? Smooth transition.

Crystal Carter:

Sorry. Sorry. You were dropping the knowledge and I was just pondering it.

Mordy Oberstein:

You were caught in my aura.

Crystal Carter:

I was just pondering that. I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's really interesting." I forgot I was on a podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's it. Thank you?

Crystal Carter:

So my tip, and I've been saying this all over the place. I've said it in two different Brighton SEOs, have done a couple of podcasts, and I've written this article. Basically, you need to be treating LLMs as a channel, and we need to be treating them as a channel for traffic. We need to be tracking them. I have a deck that shares a regex that Jess Schultz shared where you can track the traffic from LLMs. You can see how many clicks you're getting. And guess what. You're getting clicks from LLMs. And while they are not currently overtaking Google in terms of search, we are looking at billions, billions of traffic that's going to LLMs every day. And people are looking to it for solutions because sometimes it has less friction than standard search, and we need to make sure that we can manage that. And I think that we have been approaching this as if it's completely different, or it's not relevant, or whatever, but it's not completely different.

All of these search enabled LLMs, of which there are many, are relying on results from search engines. Legacy results and previous results, previous crawls, things like that. And we can manage that, and I think that that's something that should be a new skill for SEOs. I think it's exciting. Gartner said that search could drop by as much as 25% or something in the next few years. But I think that we are SEOs, we can do anything. We ruin the internet. This ain't nothing. Are you kidding me? So I think that this is a brave new world, and I think that it's super exciting. So I'm excited to see how this goes forward.

Mordy Oberstein:

Your confidence is inspiring.

Crystal Carter:

I hope so. I hope so. I love a new thing. It's one of the reasons why I love working in marketing and SEO, because there's always a new thing to learn and try. You know in the Matrix where it says, "Can you fly a helicopter?" and he goes, "Yes, I can." That's how I feel sometimes.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know kung fu.

Crystal Carter:

Right? That's how I feel sometimes. And I feel like that's where we are right now. And I think that if you're in a place where you're like, "I want to do things the way I did before, I feel you. I see you, I understand you, but it's new. We got to do new stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

That brings to this week's follow of the week. This week's follow of the week are all the people we already mentioned. Is that lazy? I'm sorry. No, but there's so many people. There's Ray Saddiq, Debbie Chew, Celeste Gonzalez, Mike King, Paul Andre De Vera, Victor Pan, Chris Long, Aleyda Solis. My friend is Parker, Crystal, myself, a lot of people to follow.

Crystal Carter:

I think also you should follow George Wynn, our head of editorial-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh yes.

Crystal Carter:

At the Wix Studio Learning Hub, SEO Learning Hub, because George was the one who brought all these folks together. So George was able to interview some folks at Brighton SEO. He also put together a fantastic article with all of these tips, which you should absolutely check out. And yeah, he's got some great advice and he helps make sure that we sound like we know what we're talking about on the SEO Learning Hub.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wait, so George is the follow of the week?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, follow George.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that even lazier than saying, "Follow all the people in the episode"?

Crystal Carter:

If you follow George, you will also find all of these other folks because he put them in the article.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. Follow George, wherever he may go.

Crystal Carter:

I will follow him.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's just scary right now. I don't know.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. My kid's never seen Sister Act. I feel like I need to sort that out.

Mordy Oberstein:

My kids never saw that either. That's an old-school movie.

Crystal Carter:

I like it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, it's a great movie. It's just not one I see-

Crystal Carter:

I like Sister Act 2 better though.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't remember it as well.

Crystal Carter:

Sister Act 2 I was obsessed with because I had Lauryn Hill. I watched a movie a million times and had the soundtrack. Obsessed.

Mordy Oberstein:

I just don't remember it as well. I remember the first one really well.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, no. Obsessed. Absolutely obsessed.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, whatever. Whoopee.

And on that high note, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into email marketing and how it relates to search marketing in 2025. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars, and our free SEO course over on the Wix Studio Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.