Author: George Nguyen
This past year has been one of the most disruptive years in SEO history. Many of us are trying to figure out where generative AI best fits into our workflows, while others are still trying to recover from the aftermath of Google’s Helpful Content Update.
It’s easy to feel as though the ground beneath us has yet to settle. Nevertheless, 2025 is here and it brings with it a new set of challenges.
To help you overcome those challenges, I’ve asked 25 of the SEO industry’s top experts to tell you about the approaches and tactics that are top-of-mind as we start the year.
No matter where you are in your career, there’s something for everybody:
You can also register for our live webinar on January 28 at 1PM ET:
Note: The text beneath the expert’s names are direct quotes.
Generative AI
LLMs not only help you create content, they’re also answer engines that can drive visibility and traffic. Read tips on both these aspects of generative AI, from Crystal Carter, Bengü Sarıca Dinçer, and Mike King.
Within LLMs, monitor your brand entity, track traffic, and give feedback — Crystal Carter
Understand how different LLMs operate to maximize impact — Bengü Sarıca Dinçer
Generate content in components — Mike King
Within LLMs, monitor your brand entity, track traffic, and give feedback
Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications at Wix Studio
Take steps to influence and monitor your brand’s presence in LLM responses. This can include managing your entity, giving feedback on good and bad responses, tracking traffic from tools like ChatGPT, and more.
Transcript
Though tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot have yet to overtake Google's market share, they continue to gain ground, so taking steps to manage this process now will yield better results for the future.
Understand how different LLMs operate to maximize impact
Bengü Sarıca Dinçer, SEO Manager
If the audience you’re targeting is transitioning from traditional click-based behavior to conversational, task-oriented interactions, then you must update your SEO strategies accordingly.
It’s no longer about simply ranking for keywords but ensuring your website aligns with the query processing mechanisms of LLMs. These models prioritize freshness, relevance, depth, as well as well-cited and structured content in ways traditional search engines do not.
Moreover, in this brand new world, we need to adapt our strategies not only to meet dynamic user expectations, but also to make them compatible with the way these LLM models process, prioritize, and serve content.
Obviously, brand mentions have always been important for digital marketing, but with LLMs, getting your brand mentioned in content from others (news outlets, competitors, industry publications, review platforms, social, etc.) is actually more important the backlinks—keep this in mind for your digital PR and outreach campaigns.
And, as we enter 2025, it’ll be more important than ever to understand the distinctions between LLM platforms. For example, I was able to get freshly published content to show up in SearchGPT in 20-60 minutes, but I know not to expect that kind of performance on Gemini, for example. How these answer engines work depends on their training systems, which you need to keep in mind if you want to diversify your channels.
Generate content in components
Transcript
Content
Content remains the bread and butter of online visibility. Ashwin Balakrishnan has some north star guidance that will help you appeal to the most important stakeholder—your potential customers.
Skip the SEO conjecture and go straight to satisfying your audience
Ashwin Balakrishnan, Owner, The Copy Trail
In 2025, I’d be judicious with whose advice I take—technical site optimization (stuff like having canonicals in order and helpful 404 pages) rarely goes amiss, but a lot of what people say about ‘what Google rewards’ is conjecture.
You’ll rarely go wrong if you deliver a great experience for your target audience. That means content relevant to your domain/audience, a non-intrusive on-page experience, and authoritative links from others in your space (or similar ones).
Appease your audience and they will signal to Google that you deserve to be featured prominently.
eCommerce
Online stores need to understand how Google’s eCommerce SERP features and generative AI have shifted the landscape for customers. Get up to speed with these tips from Naomi Francis-Parker, Mark Williams-Cook, Paul Baterina, and Chris Long.
Reinforce your brand identity across all search and answer engines — Naomi Francis-Parker
Take a nuanced approach with discontinued products — Mark Williams-Cook
Use Google in tandem with enterprise tools to audit for issues — Paul Baterina
Google is replacing your category page, so focus on products instead — Chris Long
Reinforce your brand identity across all search and answer engines
Naomi Francis-Parker, SEO Manager, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty
Pay attention to your brand identity and make sure it’s clear across all places of search. This includes social media, GPTs, and traditional 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) anticipated. Couple that with the constantly changing SERP and it’s clear that ‘ranking’ as a concept is becoming outdated.
Entity SEO has been around for a long time because it’s how search engines understand brands, people, etc. But, it’s arguably more important now than ever before because search visibility is no longer just about how you appear in Google, it’s about how you appear online at all.
The landscape has completely opened up by bringing generative AI into the mix, so it’s more important now than ever before to make sure your brand’s entity is clear and, crucially, accurately reflects what your brand is. It’s the only way to really futureproof your brand’s online visibility and you will almost certainly fare better than brands that don’t do this when aspects of search change again (which they definitely will).
Top tips to get started:
Structured data is your best friend here. Make sure you have the basics in place, like Product, Offer, and Review, as a minimum.
If you get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, find out which platform provides the most traffic to your site and start there.
Don’t panic. Search is changing but SEO has always been about continuous improvement, so remind yourself that this is nothing new and just embrace the change.
Take a nuanced approach with discontinued products
Mark Williams-Cook, Director at Candour/AlsoAsked
It can be confusing to know what to do when a product is permanently discontinued on an eCommerce site. While some SEOs are keen to 301 redirect everything, that’s not always the best thing to do and can confuse your potential customers. My agency, Candour, has developed a generalized flowchart to help with decision making.
Direct replacements: If a product has a ‘direct replacement’ (for instance, a cooktop that’s just released a new version with some updated electronics, but it functions the same, fits the same, and serves the exact same purpose), then usually a redirect directly to the new product is acceptable. It can be a good idea (especially if there is search volume for the old model) to add a clear notice that this is the new version of the discontinued model to let searchers know they are in the right place. You can even be super smart and only show this if the user has followed the redirect from the old version of the product.
No direct replacements: If a product is discontinued and you only have similar products, it’s usually a good idea to leave the product page up and explain that it was discontinued. If you simply remove the page, a user may then return to search and try and find it somewhere else, perhaps losing you a sale and increasing their frustration. You can use this opportunity to link to similar products, categories, or even a guide to alternatives to catch new search terms as audiences become aware that this product is discontinued.
When to redirect/410: At this point, it is worth reviewing every few months to see how search traffic has evolved. If searches for that product persist, it is worth keeping the page live. In almost all instances, the traffic will gradually die off as demand reduces. At this point, investigate and decide whether the page has any valuable backlinks. If there are no good links, letting the page 4xx (410 Gone) is completely fine, as redirects do add overhead. If there are links you wish to keep, it’s usually best to redirect the page to the most similar asset for the user, whether it is a product, article, or category.
Update your site: Whenever you’re doing redirects, you want to make sure those pages are removed from your sitemap and you have updated all of your internal links as well.
Use Google in tandem with enterprise tools to audit for issues
Paul Baterina, SEO Manager at REVOLVE
I noticed that the biggest opportunities from a technical perspective aren’t necessarily found through enterprise tools. You can manually find some of these issues just by looking directly in the SERPS using search operators.
We found a significant issue that was impacting our organic traffic and rankings simply by putting “site:revolve.com” in Google. We saw that there were URLs (staging sites) that were outranking our main site on various keywords, inadvertently stealing traffic from our actual site.
The fix: We implemented canonical tags on all the staging sites, pointing them back to the main site. This change basically signals to search engines which version should be prioritized.
The result? We saw a strong correlation, with an average 72% traffic drop from the staging sites, while our main site saw an increase of 24%. Prior to the fix, the staging sites were gaining visibility month-over-month. After we added the canonical tags, we started seeing a decrease in the staging sites’ traffic over time (implemented in summer 2024).
The overall takeaway: Manually inspecting the SERPS can give you the answer/provide opportunities for your overall organic visibility and growth.
Google is replacing your category page, so focus on products instead
Chris Long, VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital
Retailers: Google is becoming your new category page. In an effort to compete with Amazon, Google is turning the search results into a de facto category page experience.
![The Google search results for [espresso machines] showing the popular products feature, which showcases 10 machines and looks like a category page.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a484d4_e91789ab0dd54b529a15747bc9cc6755~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_127,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/a484d4_e91789ab0dd54b529a15747bc9cc6755~mv2.jpg)
Faceted navigation, pricing, comparisons, product grids, and more are all directly available in the search results. This means that you need to spend even more time on your products as opposed to category pages.
Local SEO
Don’t treat local SEO like a monolith. Optimize with nuances in mind using these tips from Darren Shaw, Greg Sterling, and Celeste Gonzalez.
Highlight promotions and USPs in GBP with your Q&A — Darren Show
Recognize and account for varying consumer behavior across local verticals — Greg Sterling
Don’t put all your eggs in one SEO basket—be where your audience is — Celeste Gonzalez
Highlight promotions and USPs in GBP with your Q&A
Darren Shaw, Founder, Whitespark
Here’s a helpful Google Business Profile tip that very few people take advantage of:
The Q&A that has the most upvotes will be featured prominently on your Profile (as long as it has at least three or more upvotes).
This highlighted question is highly visible on both desktop and mobile, so it’s a valuable place to get extra messaging out to your potential customers.
You can use this space to:
Answer a super common question your customers have.
Highlight a special promotion you’re running.
Explain why you’re the best business in your category (this one is my fave).
Here’s what you need to do:
Create a super compelling question and response for your Q&A section. I like: “Why do people choose [business name]?”
Google will highlight the question with the MOST upvotes, so you will need to make your chosen question the most upvoted one. If none of your Q&As have upvotes, get at least three people to upvote your chosen question.
Additionally, you can update the featured question seasonally or whenever you want to highlight new info. Just have the people who upvoted the old question downvote it, then upvote the new one (our team regularly does this for our clients).
Recognize and account for varying consumer behavior across local verticals
Greg Sterling, Co-founder, Near Media
The traditional approach in local SEO is generally ‘horizontal’. But local consists of a hundred verticals that each see differences and nuances in consumer behavior. This is something we’ve learned at Near Media through direct observation and user research across multiple categories.
So while there are certain best practices (e.g., review management) that you should follow, local marketers need to deeply understand user behavior in their specific categories. What consumers care about or emphasize when making buying decisions will vary—sometimes significantly.
Considerations like proximity, reviews, directories, images, zero-click, LSAs, brand awareness, and other factors have different weight and impact. While this makes intuitive and logical sense, it often isn’t fully recognized by local marketers.
In some verticals (e.g., legal, restaurants) key directories rank prominently and can heavily influence buying decisions; in others they have almost no presence or influence (e.g., home remodeling). Similarly, local websites play a much larger role in some categories than others.
Searchers looking for restaurants and self-storage tend to be much more GBP-focused and use websites less often (zero-click) than those looking for lawyers or home contractors. And while reviews are usually one of the top two decision factors, they’re less influential, for example, in self-storage where price and proximity tend to have greater influence.
The influence of ads also varies. In some categories, searchers scrupulously avoid ads. In others, they’re less sensitive and more likely to click on them. In home remodeling and legal, for example, people were more likely to click on ads than in healthcare. And when Local Services Ads appeared in the SERP (which aren’t present in every local category), they often captured a surprisingly significant share of clicks.
While there are baseline practices that everyone should follow in local SEO, what consumers care about will differ by vertical and failure to recognize and address that behavior could cost clicks and revenue.
Don’t put all your eggs in one SEO basket—be where your audience is
Celeste Gonzalez, Director of RooLabs at RicketyRoo
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On-site optimization
Go beyond stale best practices by analyzing audience data, controlling crawlers, and testing ways to help customers convert with these tips from Gus Pelogia, Abby Gleason, and Jamie Indigo.
Speed up your data analysis with ChatGPT and Google Colab — Gus Pelogia
Get the most out of the traffic you still get by testing conversion rate optimizations — Abby Gleason
Build like your career depends on usefulness — Jamie Indigo
Speed up your data analysis with ChatGPT and Google Colab
Gus Pelogia, Senior SEO Product Manager at Indeed
Using LLMs to analyze data will become a standard. To get this right, it’s all about learning what you can ask and tweaking your questions until you find relevant answers.
Here are three common scenarios:
Identify the best and worst month a page had in terms of traffic over the last year.
Find the overlap between traffic and revenue so you know which pages are truly the most important to protect.
Call out traffic trends (e.g., which pages are trending up or down over the course of the last 12 months).
You can ask all of these questions to ChatGPT or other LLMs. If you don’t want LLMs to have access to your data, you could ask for a Python script that works on Google Colab (a Python notebook that runs on your browser without any installation).
You literally copy and paste the code from ChatGPT to Google Colab and upload your sheet. I don’t know how to code, but I’ve been doing small apps every other day.
Here's a prompt example:
“I need a Python script for Google Colab that can
- Calculate and display the cumulative percentages for both traffic and revenue, showing how many pages represent 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% of the total.
- Plot two graphs: one for cumulative traffic and one for cumulative revenue distribution across the pages. Find the URLs that represent 50% of the traffic and revenue.
- The input will be given by a CSV file I’ll upload. Combine the URLs into one file and automatically export this data to a new CSV file.”
This way, you can speed up manual analysis and spend time on your strategy instead of sorting data.
Get the most out of the traffic you still get by testing conversion rate optimizations
Abby Gleason, Senior Product Manager, SEO at Scribd
We are in an era of declining traffic and it seems like only major brands and forums like Reddit are winning in the SERPs. SEOs may feel (understandably) daunted when it comes time to report traffic and you’re down year-over-year despite doing all the right things.
Now’s an amazing time to pivot to CRO (conversion rate optimization). Optimizing your top-trafficked surfaces for conversions is a way to capitalize on the traffic you do get, and drive growth you can actually control.
Consider potential site conversions—do you want users to enter an email? Follow you on social? Sign up for a free trial? Visit a specific product or category page? Track these metrics (if you aren’t already) and run tests to encourage more people to take these actions.
My advice as a first step: Audit your key pages from a CRO point of view. What action do you want people to take? Is that clear? Is there friction? Note everything in a spreadsheet and begin brainstorming test ideas to tackle each point of friction.
Ensure this is baked into your 2025 SEO strategy, because you’re not just optimizing your site to drive traffic from search engines, you’re building a web experience that converts visitors into customers.
Build like your career depends on usefulness
Jamie Indigo, Director of Technical SEO at Cox Automotive
More content was created in 2023 than 2012–2018 combined. Bing discovers more than 70 billion new pages a day. Before the boom of genAI content, 60% of the internet was already duplicate content.
Google has no moat but braced for impact with the Helpful Content Update:
“Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search”
In the end, success here is about the ROI of your site. It costs Google 1.06¢ to execute a query for an ROI of 1.61¢. Helpful content is profitable content.
In the face of this content boom, Google wants to crawl less. Its new crawl priorities focus on saving money by reducing data consumption and relying on dynamic triggers to control crawl. Quality (or rather search demand) matters.
What does that mean for you? Here’s five tips to get you started on success in 2025:
Learn how to control the crawlers. There are more crawlers and more controls. While a noarchive directive is worthless to most crawlers, it’s how you keep Bing Chat. But if you want to keep content out of AI overviews, you need to use nosnippet. These controls are becoming more nuanced and critical. The Internet Engineering Task Force is actively looking for ways to improve AI crawler handling in the robots.txt protocol.
No one likes wasting time and resources—especially Google. Crawl budget refers to all the resources spent. Use as few resources as feasible to offer users a great experience. Disallow personalization resources. Use X-robots directives on endpoints. Curate the best of your content without the slog of your tech debt.
Regurgitated AI is the new extended car warranty. If your incredible content is made of the same stuff as every over commercially available genAI model, there's no boon in crawling or indexing you.
Great content wrapped in a bad experience is bad content. While search engines can’t get frustrated, users certainly can. That engagement (or lack thereof) is captured, calculated, and considered in how you appear in the SERP next time.
Make new allies. This industry is a rapidly changing landscape. You need relationships with developers, analytics, UX, and CRO to help adapt your strategies to upcoming changes.
Reporting and analytics
Without context, your reports may just be numbers and lines to the stakeholder. Influence their decisions with these tips from Maeva Cifuentes and Giulia Panozzo.
Contextualize your reporting for better client relations and retention — Maeva Cifuentes
Start looking outside the SERP and collaborate with your UX and CX teams — Giulia Panozzo
Contextualize your reporting for better client relations and retention
Maeva Cifuentes, Founder and CEO at Flying Cat
Don’t forget the simple things that are often overlooked when it comes to reporting progress to your clients.
Highlight where you want the eye to go to with a big red circle instead of just providing a screenshot of a bunch of data.
Always explain what the reader is looking at (e.g., What’s the time frame of this data? What’s the source? What are we actually looking at here?).
Explain what you actually worked on and DID—not only the results. Tie every insight to a ‘what are we going to do about this’ action or takeaway.
Make it easy to understand the report for someone with no context for what you’ve been working on.
Start looking outside the SERP and collaborate with your UX and CX teams
Giulia Panozzo, Founder at Neuroscientive
It’s nothing new—search has evolved and so has search behavior, and yet we keep measuring (and being measured) on last year’s metrics.
For SEOs, it’s an uncomfortable position to be in, but an exciting one too: with all these changes rolling out and the focus shifting to new aspects of the search journey, you have the power to really shape what your role is going to look like next year.
There are three things I would recommend to my fellow SEOs for 2025:
01. Educate your stakeholders/clients on the challenges your industry has faced — You shouldn’t use these as excuses for not reaching goals, but you should provide some context on why site performance cannot be benchmarked and compared to previous years.
AI overviews, organic product carousels, and new SERP filters (that provide the user with direct comparisons and information without leaving Google) have elongated the journey to a click on our websites. If you’ve noticed traffic drops, you can easily show the dates of these SERP feature launches overlaid on your performance.
By contextualizing your regular reporting, you have an opportunity to influence what the real goals of your channel should be—rather than relying on KPIs that are no longer representative of SEO success.
02. Start monitoring and measuring user behavior — The focus of SEO should have always been about reaching the user and meeting the intent behind their search, but even if you wanted to keep the conversation strictly search-engine oriented, there seems to be evidence that user behavior signals shape ranking and post-ranking algorithms.
There are several ways to go beyond surface-level data: Start looking at metrics within web analytics (such as a drop in engaged sessions or engagement time, higher internal searches that might indicate poor site architecture, low CTA clicks, scrolls and points of abandonment) and dig deeper with heatmaps and session recordings that might inform where the journey from query to action encounters roadblocks.
If you can rely on a dedicated team, leverage advanced techniques like eye-tracking or neuroforecasting to predict performance based on attention patterns. You can then use all of these behavioral insights to tailor content and design to your audience, ensuring your site not only attracts visitors but keeps them engaged until (and beyond) conversions.
03. Play the long game and collaborate with teams that enable you to make the journey from search to transaction flawless — Research by Baymard shows that a substantial portion of checkout abandonment is attributable to factors that are easily resolved by either SEO or UX teams (e.g., 404 pages or lack of proper information that affects trust in the website). So, collaborate with your UX, CX, and product teams. Leverage their insights for a common roadmap that prevents you from losing potential customers: customer service logs, reviews, and online forums can help you proactively identify and address some of the issues that might be cutting your customer journey short (even before they land on your website!). Keep in mind that a satisfied visitor is a potential converting (and returning) customer, so prioritize changes that improve the journey of the user as a whole.
Make 2025 the year you really put the user first. Understanding and addressing user intent, behavior, and needs are the real roadmap to SEO success in the future.
Career development
Whether you’re in-house, at an agency, or looking to start your own consultancy, these tips from Alec Cole, Victor Pan, and Vinnie Wong will help you think outside the box for career gains.
Start with personal relationships when launching your agency, consultancy, or freelancing — Alec Cole
Last year’s crises can be this year’s wins — Victor Pan
Find mentorship and network where you can — Vinnie Wong
Start with personal relationships when launching your agency, consultancy, or freelancing
Alec Cole, Founder at Salt Rock SEO
This one goes out to any fellow SEOs striking out on their own (or thinking about striking out on their own) and wondering how to build a client base.
As SEOs, there’s a temptation to look at organic channels as the cornerstones of a client acquisition strategy. They’ve got their place, but if you’re just starting out? Relationships are everything.
I invested a lot of time building out a rudimentary website, contracting out design and brand work, and piecing together a local SEO strategy. To date, leads from that site have resulted in less than 5% of my revenue. The income that actually makes Salt Rock sustainable (early days, knock on wood) has come either from people who worked with me previously and liked me, or from people who talked to the previous group and decided I was worth a call.
In an industry that's increasingly defined by AI-driven strategies, reputation and connection matter more than ever.
It comes down to people. If you think that freelancing or leading an agency is part of your future career path, evaluate your relationships. Ask yourself:
Would your current clients and colleagues leap at the chance to work with you again?
Would they act to support you if they knew you were taking a step into independent work?
The answers to those two questions might be the difference between you hitting the ground running or landing with a splat.
And if you’re just starting out? By all means lay the groundwork of an online business, but recognize that activating your personal and professional networks is probably going to be a much more critical step in getting your fledgling venture off the ground.
Last year’s crises can be this year’s wins
Victor Pan, SEO at HubSpot
Don’t waste a crisis. When site traffic is down, it's easy to patch this with short-term solutions.
For example, with 2025 here, depending on how many [content+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.
Find mentorship and network where you can
Vinnie Wong, Senior SEO & Content Specialist
I’m much newer to the SEO scene than my peers. At first, it was overwhelming trying to catch up. What I found most helpful was leaning on the wisdom of giants and my respective seniors.
Finding mentors helps a lot. I’ve spoken with a lot of wicked smart people in different specializations, and they’ve all helped me in different ways.
You should always be looking to learn from others in your industry. SEO is dynamic, and so you and your knowledge base should be, too. If you can’t learn from anyone within your company (e.g., you’re a one-person team), then reach out to others outside your company.
There are a lot of good people in our industry who will give you some of their precious time to help if they can. I’ve found the most success by just staying genuine and authentic as to why I’m reaching out to that person. I might leave a note with a LinkedIn connection request, something like “Hey X, I heard you talk about canonicalization in Lenny’s Podcast. Blew my mind away, never thought of it like that. Can I ask you a question related to my site?” Email works too, but be brief and to the point.
The last thing I’ll say about mentors is that not every mentorship works out, for various reasons. And that’s fine. There’ll be seasons you vibe and have a great relationship with someone, which might end after some time due to different priorities or time commitments. The key is that you keep learning from others and discover how to apply their hard-earned knowledge to your career.
Collaborating across teams
‘Breaking out of your silos’ doesn’t just mean a monthly meeting with your entire marketing organization—it means finding new ways to leverage data and piggyback off one another’s efforts for maximum ROI. Get into the right mindset with these tips from Debbie Chew and Ray Saddiq.
Work with other teams for better data and more levers
Debbie Chew, SEO Manager at Stripe.com
Transcript
Ray Saddiq, Global Head of Marketing at Rise at Seven
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Video SEO
Everywhere your customers go to learn about your brand and offerings, they’ll be able to do so with video. Learn how to get to page one with this tip from Paul Andre de Vera.
Livestream for boosted visibility
Paul Andre de Vera, Host and Producer at SEO Video Show
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Branding
When generic, AI-generated content floods the SERPs, your brand may be the only thing that distinguishes you from the competition. Highlight your identity with these tips from Mordy Oberstein and Aleyda Solis.
Prioritize topics that will resonate over chasing metrics — Mordy Oberstein
Grow brand authority via your knowledge panel, structured data, and branded queries — Aleyda Solis
Prioritize topics that will resonate over chasing metrics
Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix Studio
The web is very quickly moving to a paradigm where resonance (i.e., whether your target audience can connect or identify with your branding) is the determining factor. The value of resonating in the current digital ecosystem has skyrocketed and it’s only going to continue as the web gets flooded with more digital noise. Not only are you going to have to resonate more because of this exponential increase in noise, but because offline experiences are a driving force like never before.
SEOs would do well to remember that your brand is everything you do—it is everything you say.
Every piece of content you publish speaks volumes about who your brand is, what it does, and who it’s for. So the next time you want to ‘target a keyword’, ask yourself if the content will help the brand resonate with its audience the way it wants to. If not, I wouldn’t target it. Smart brands are going to target what resonates first and what drives performance KPIs second.
Grow brand authority via your knowledge panel, structured data, and branded queries
Aleyda Solis, SEO Consultant and Founder, Orainti & SEOFOMO
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 taking it into account in your SEO strategy:
Target your branded queries
Optimize your knowledge panel details
Specify your brand details with structured data, etc.
SEO on Wix
At Wix, we approach SEO with an eye for efficiency and scale. Check out these tips from Sean Del Galdo and myself (George Nguyen).
Save time by auditing and editing alt text in bulk — Sean Del Galdo
Manage your author pages and listings with the Wix Studio CMS — George Nguyen
Save time by auditing and editing alt text in bulk
Sean Del Galdo, SEO Product Advisor at Wix.com
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Manage your author pages and listings with the Wix Studio CMS
George Nguyen, Director of SEO Editorial at Wix Studio
If you’re in a competitive niche, you need the ability to scale if you want to gain any traction. The Wix Studio CMS helps me do that by enabling me to manage the SEO Learning Hub’s expert author profiles via a database collection that connects to dynamic pages.
Essentially, I’m able to upload author profiles in seconds and manage them in bulk—doing this manually would otherwise take hours.
For any brand with a blog, you can use this the same way I do (i.e., to highlight your author/blog’s E-E-A-T). Or, you could use them to publish and manage:
Podcast landing pages (this is how we manage our SERP’s Up podcast’s pages)
Job listings
Real estate listings
Etc.
Dig into our archive for 2024’s best takeaways
For even more guidance from the industry’s best—sourced from our own live events as well as the most prestigious SEO conferences worldwide—check out our past coverage:
George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event.