What is Modern SEO?

What is Modern SEO?

In short, it’s important to stop thinking about SEO as a separate marketing function within your business.

Modern SEO is just a term I use to encompass the approach we should be taking to SEO that ensures businesses see the practice with a wider strategic lens.

Good SEOs Go Beyond Keywords

The approach isn’t revolutionary, and in fact many great SEOs I know are already on the same page, particularly those who have been in the industry for a long time. But this isn’t an article for SEOs, it’s for business owners.

It’s important for businesses that I work with to understand this approach from the start, as it sets expectations on both sides and produces more consistent and strategic work that avoids the pitfalls of chasing individual keywords and short term results.

Yes, it's still important to measure keywords, visibility, traffic etc from organic.

We of course have to use KPIs that monitor progress.

But one thing I still find takes clients by surprise is how much I will be digging in to their businesses overall, including areas such as paid marketing channels, operations, product offering and customer service.

Modern SEOs know the importance of doing the thing you do as well as possible.

You could throw as much money as you like at SEO, but if you’re not fundamentally great at what you offer, it’s eventually going to become a frustrating process.

Being Even More Human in an Age of AI

AI is clearly already becoming a huge shift in how we interact with computing platforms, and a key recommendation is that in the age of easily generated AI content we should be even more willing to create something original.

Sometimes creating something original can even utilise AI in smart ways. But ultimately we come back to Google’s ever persistent mission to show users the best results for their queries.

For growing businesses, this is a case of asking a simple question: why should customers trust you?

How are you demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about? Are you showing your team of experts? Are you showing why you care? Why are your products or services better than the competition? Visually this can be done with content, opinions, and clever design. As a business, this comes from awesome products and services that have unique offerings.

For larger, more established businesses, this is a case of focusing on reputation, resources and reviews.

If you’re a larger business, what efforts are you making to keep customer service at its finest so you achieve positive reviews and returning customers? How are you demonstrating your expertise as a brand through extensive resource content that helps users navigate a complex buying decision?

Your Brand is Everything

SEO and brand go together for many reasons, and good SEOs know this - and even push it. Google has always treated established brands differently - aim to become one if you’re not already, and stay one if you are.

Recognition

Being recognised is usually a goal most businesses would want to achieve. But with search marketing, we often forget the influence it can have on someone clicking through to your landing page. Your marketing spend outside of SEO is about creating a recognisable visual mark that consumers can easily identify.

Recall

Similar to recognition, how are you clearly, consistently and concisely communicating your solutions? For SEO this means again standing out in a sea of search results for a problem a potential customer has, and if done correctly can mean them searching for your brand directly.

Reputation

Once someone has discovered you through SEO and converted, what mechanisms do you have in place to help them recommend you? How are you providing additional useful and valuable information to them?

Perhaps it’s content related to a purchase, a follow up call, a way for them to get discount if they refer a friend or perhaps it’s a way to help them create user generated content. Outside of search results, reputation can be the most powerful form of marketing.

Reach

Sometimes reach isn’t about constant growth. Sometimes for a larger brand it’s about understanding when you’ve peaked in a specific market, and focusing on carrying on doing that to perfection before you expand into something else.

For a smaller brand with less budget (money and or time) it’s about understanding how to communicate extremely well to your smallest viable audience and doing that consistently before expanding to other channels or messaging.

With search marketing, your reach can literally be understood by metrics such as search volume and % impression share of a set of keywords. Use this to your advantage and plan marketing activity accordingly.

So what do SEOs do?

Ultimately when setting an SEO strategy we still have to do SEO stuff. Sounds obvious, but the core components are still there:

1. Planning and creating epic content
2. Ensuring minimal technical issues
3. Getting other sites to link to you

The difference now is that businesses should be willing to let SEOs weigh in on many other areas as described in this article. When working with truly great SEOs, don’t be surprised if they want to be involved in stuff that “isn’t SEO”.

9 Key Thoughts on SEO & AI

There’s a ton of AI hype at the moment and Google’s recent I/O conference saw the company demonstrating many new upcoming features within search.

These are still experimental features for now but are likely to be rolled out soon as Google and other search engines fight for AI dominance. What's the big deal?

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is trained on an already existing data set, rather than searching the web live, so Google is attempting to get one up on ChatGPT here. Yes, we have web search extensions for ChatGPT, but Google is doing that work for the users as a core part of their experience, and let’s face it most businesses will be more concerned with Google search for the near future, as it's such a huge part of customer's lives already.

Google’s Answer

You may have heard of Bard, essentially Google’s version of ChatGPT. The new announcements from I/O is basically to combine Bard with the search engine, known as Search Generative Experience.

It provides a new way of displaying information to searchers, providing more context and related information in a conversational style. You’ll also be able to follow up with more questions or prompts, much like a conversation.

The most clear benefit to the searcher, and clear concern to website owners; is that a lot of useful information is presented without the need to visit a site. Google has also said they are connecting their "shopping graph" to the system, meaning a huge amount of product data will be surfaced in the results too.

My thoughts and opinions:

1. Google has been using AI for a very long time, so a lot of the use of the phrase is hyped up quite a bit. Keep calm (for now).
2. It’s helpful for now to see AI as a new way of interacting with computers, rather than a monstrous machine that is going to end the world by building too many paperclip factories. That’s not to say ethics aren’t a concern, but most news sources focus on the Terminator angles rather than the good stuff, because that sort of thing gets more clicks. I could do a whole separate article on the subject but that’s for another time.
3. We already see a lot of information in search results that will discourage clicks. This has been around for 5+ years at least, and SEOs have dealt with it. We will continue to deal with it.
4. Where this may get interesting is in trying to measure these results. This is already messy; how do we know if our information is being read? Will we see SGE impressions in Google Analytics 4? Unclear currently.
5. On the last three points, the main difference with Generative AI is that it often doesn't give a source for the information. This is the biggest worry for content creation right now - how do we control how our content is cited? Possibly more lost clicks here.
6. The regular non-AI results aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and businesses need to think about several factors that might give an indication of how they will be impacted, including:
   • B2B vs B2C - B2C probably more likely to be impacted first
   • Keyword intent and the length of the buying/purchase consideration cycle - longer buying journey impacted more
   • Long tail vs short tail keywords - short tail & high intent transactional keywords are potentially likely to show more of the regular non-AI results because the journey is so much more simple
   • How factual and impactful your information needs to be, particularly for your-money-your-life (YMYL) industries like health and finance
7. Similarly, most people will take quite some time to start searching in a way that will better utilise the AI features.
8. Google’s functionality is trained on results from the web. These will still need to come from some form of indexed content. Therefore content will still be very important, particularly unique, expert, authoritative and non-machine written content. Keep being better - provide realiable expertise in your industry.
9. Google is bringing what they call “perspectives” into search, including an algorithm update designed directly to better understand this. Basically this is surfacing opinions from real people from blogs, forums, social media and YouTube etc. It could become a lot more important for all types of businesses to use these channels as part of their digital strategies.

Ultimately it’s still early stages for these announcements, but I have a feeling Google are slightly rushing things following a dissapointing response to their initial Bard reveal. It could mean that SEO and Google Ads is impacted a lot sooner than we think, and in a potentially messy way. But rest assured, SEOs are responding quickly.

Nothing To Hide? Privacy Basics.

Privacy has come to everyone’s attention recently due to WhatsApp making some changes to their terms.

I’m constantly presented with the argument “I’ve got nothing to hide”. Or “if you’re doing something wrong you shouldn’t have privacy anyway”.

It’s an odd and frankly pretty dumb argument.

• Firstly, if you have nothing to hide are you living at all? I bet every one of us could think of something off the top of our heads we'd not want people knowing, seeing or having the right to share with others. This isn’t necessarily something you’re doing that’s wrong; you just don’t want the invasion of privacy.
• Secondly and more importantly, the confusion is often in the tradeoff between privacy and security. The main issue here is that we have to argue in privacy’s defence - not the other way round. Why should we have to argue “please don’t take my privacy away”, instead of “why do you want to take my privacy away”? Governments have failed time and again to demonstrate that they have a proper understanding of technologies they are trying to interfere with - yet they make the decisions first then we have to debate later. Not how proper discourse should work.
• Thirdly, privacy is a basic human right. 1998 Human Rights Act. Simples.
• Forth and less obviously, most data privacy issues aren’t that dramatic. The likelihood of the government looking at your nudie photos is slim. However, it is important to remember: the collection of individual’s information, and potential invasion of privacy, changes the relationship you have with that institution. And if that institution then decides to implement new laws and policies that mean the things you “don’t have to hide” become things you have to hide; well then we’re all fucked.
• Lastly, anyone who works with data knows that a single data point by itself is pretty damn useless. It’s inference of context through multiple data points combined that we gleam meaning and make decisions. So, if you think that WhatsApp (or many other platforms) looking at your location data is fine, it probably is. But then combine that location data with where the message is received and what media it was etc, and pictures can be painted that are more easily actionable from that company.

Avoiding privacy issues with private companies is simple, supposedly. Don’t like what WhatsApp is doing? Use Signal.

But we should be aware the impact these technologies can have on our lives and the decisions our leaders make - something 2020 has shown us we should absolutely 100% all give a shit about.

Am I going to stop using WhatsApp? No, probably not as I have many business uses for it. But I’d rather use iMessage, Signal or any other platform that doesn’t take those details. Why not?

What is a Brand?

What is a brand?

A logo? An idea?

People often associate brands with cost; i.e. am I going to spend more for a brand just because it's a brand. Sometimes yes. Brands are often something referred to when discussing luxury goods, but not everyone buys brands just to look good for buying the brand. Ultimately many brands rely heavily on the simple fact that their product or service is very good.

Coca-cola has many loyal followers, and as it happens their drink is rather delicious and uniquely theirs. Many people of course buy Apple phones because they want to be seen as cool, but it just so happens that they also have the fastest mobile processors by a mile, and focus on the user's experience over on-paper specs like how much ram there is.

A brand is an anchor; a way of tethering a person's association with you to a solution. You don't go to Nando's for the fine dining experience, you go because it's damn good chicken pretty much every single time.

Recall & recognition should be in focus for any brand trying to grow.

Brand recognition is "I have heard of that brand". How many logos could you recognise? Brand recall is "this brand has the solution to my current problem". Problem, need, want.

Brand and strategy go hand in hand. Businesses focus on the money, tactics. Building a brand is taking the time to strategise and create lasting value.

Test & Learn

Do it, do it small, learn, do it again.

If you never take action on your ideas they will remain just that. Even if you test something to see if it works and you fail, you've still taken a step further than anyone at ideas stage.

With Odhealth we started with Personal Training, and learnt that actually we could add more value to people's lives through offering Nutritionists. We're nearly ready to bring that to people.

Stay strategic. So even if you test and it doesn't work, you've still tested against your original mission. Odhealth started with a mission to "empower everyone to live happier, healthier lives by connecting them with experts". We're still doing that now, we've just learnt a hell of a lot in the process.

Stoicism

Stoicism is something I've been trying to action for a long time now, and it's a huge subject. A few key things I've found have improved my life are gratitude journaling, goal setting and of course physical fitness (which in turn keeps the mind healthy). If you've never practiced stoic thought at all, a few Immediate things to jump in are;

1. Gratitude journaling - journaling sounds a bit fancy, and actually all I do is list 3 things using my phone each morning that I'm grateful for. These could be simple things like having enough time to have a good breakfast, but are often people who regularly make me feel good also. Gratitude journaling teaches you to acknowledge what you are lucky to have and will leave you with a more positive mindset for the day.
2. Make goal setting with reasoning a priority. You'd be surprised how many people never set clear goals. Reasoning means justifying why you want something. We can always have more, but it won't always give us a positive feeling unless we know why we're attaining it. Reasoning also feeds into a sense of gratitude once the goal is hit. 6 years ago I set myself a goal of being able to wear gym kit whenever I want (in the office etc) so that it's easier for me to integrate fitness into my lifestyle. I'm very grateful to be able to do that now.
3. Spend an afternoon sat in a pub or the park with a notebook and try to understand what you really want and why. Many goals people set are based upon other's expectations. Set your own. Then review them every 3 - 6 months.

Creating the MVP the Right Way

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a concept taken from The Lean Startup, a book that is often seen as a sort of bible for tech startups in early stages.

Defined by Eric Ries on his blog an MVP:

“Is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort”.

Seems simple enough.

But here’s the problem: a lot of teams, agencies, founders etc. often approach an MVP with the mindset of which features can we remove so that we are in budget rather than which features are absolutely not needed for us to get the maximum amount of validated learning.

This is important and is summarised in the same blog post linked above by:

“The definition’s use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense”.

Cost is of course important for many reasons. But try not to approach an MVP in the way that many do; consulting with a developer on a feature list and having them strip it down based on reducing costs. You’ll often end up with something that people just don’t want to use.

As an example, if a goal of your MVP is to answer the question ‘is there a demand for this service’ so that you can prove to investors there’s a market, that can seem simple enough. But features are an important part of creating an experience that customers will enjoy and therefore actually use. A push notification strategy might not seem totally essential right now for the MVP, but what is the cost to your user experience of removing it? It could be the difference between someone returning to your app twice, or never.

Perhaps a potential solution for the ‘requires judgement’ problem is to look at the features removed or added as removing or adding user motivation; therefore usage, and in turn removing or adding that data point/learning. As usual focusing on the user is a good thing.

It’s a minimum product, but you want maximum learnings, or essentially ‘proof’. Too often in MVP’s these are both minimum.