Grab my new ebook – Strategic SEO 2025 – a PDF which is available to download for free here.
Many people claim that SEO is dead (as they have since 2004!), and for many, it almost is.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not dead; instead, it has evolved. We now have Search Everywhere Optimisation (SEO)! – I will cite who came up with that on a later day.
The truth is, YOU are about to get 50%-95% less traffic from SEO over the next year or two as AI mode is incorporated further into Google Search. This might have already happened to you. The other truth is you will need to invest as much, if not more, in SEO to get that percentage of traffic in the first place, and replace lost traffic with traffic from AI chatbots.
Now I can tell you, nobody’s really got the cash for SEO the way they used to, say a decade ago, when the results were more certain (well, rankings were 100% certain if you hired me – and SEOs like me – up until when Google penalised me lol then the odds went up a bit).
But these costs, and loss of earnings from the current paradigm of organic SEO, should be balanced out by the AMOUNT of work that AI can do for you.
Site Quality
If you don’t have a trusted site (what my EEAT Tool is designed to help you address), you will be effectively demoted or worse, taken out by Google’s spam algorithms. https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/eeat-tool/
The fact is, you still need to appear and rank in the top ten of Google and Bing results to ensure you are mentioned in AI chatbot results (including ChatGPT) – so NO CHANGE from old school seo.
SEO Reporting and analysis
NOW, though, if your pages are low-quality, they will be deindexed from Google (meaning no traffic at all), which my SEO Dashboard deals with identifying.
Also, my Dashboard is robotic, eg, no more need for SEO reporting costs, because again, who wants to pay for those in this cost of living crisis. https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-dashboard-in-google-sheets/
Optimising for AI
To feature in AI overviews in Google, you need to appear on list pages on other domains where other competitors are already mentioned.
That’s…. just old school SEO and link building (doesn’t even have to be a link now, a mention of your brand name on the target page will suffice!). Although backlinks still matter if you want to rank in Google and Bing.
There are some specific AI optimisation techniques I am testing out – see here for the strategy. https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/optimising-website-content-for-the-synthetic-content-data-layer/
And forget keyword stuffing, I tried to stuff a universe created by AI into Google! And it worked! https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/the-autonomy-gauntlet/ EDIT – It took a while after I posted this, but it was successfully indexed by Google.
The Hobo site has deeper – and serious – issues (I spent a year or two developing my SEO analysis software the Hobo SEO Dashboard (V4 out shortly!) and ripped my entire site apart so I could test my tools picking up on every kind of error I could come up with to do to my site – I even let the domain expire briefly a couple of months ago (for HCU analysis purposes) for about a minute to see what effect that has). The site blocked Chrome users for six months as a test. I removed all my internal links as a test. I changed the theme. I (meaning to) botched the migration. I let https expire. I removed all my title tags. You get the picture. The Hobo site has a relatively high DA (!) because of the organic backlinks it has generated over 15 years, and frankly, no site with that DA would let me test in this fashion. All that on top of watching Google EEAT AWAY at traffic levels since 2018 (again, that was for a test, but I ended up taking 5 years out to watch my kid – as I was fairly depressed at what I was looking at in Google SEO leading up to 2018 – see the correction hypothesis – essentially that is what I saw years ago). THAT is when a certain kind of SEO… died – well, for this SEO anyway.
You see? SEO is always “dying”.
As you can expect, the current changes in organic search – well, SEOs like me have seen this all before, and many still have GPTSD from unnatural links with Penguin in 2012 (I was nuked from orbit on about 20 high-paying projects at the time). Most other projects, like PANDA, etc, were good for me. It was relatively A cinch to fix. In fact, they all were a cinch to fix – if the clients had the cards, so to speak – up until the last couple of years.
Not having the cards was usually a good way of not recovering from previous updates, FYI, and that is still the case today (hence the EEAT tool).
Social Sharing
You also need to publish your content on Social networks (what my Hobo Socialbot robot tool does) – (beta). Details on that soon. The more social places your content appears, the better and you are lucky if your social posts last more than an afternoon or a day max these days.
Folks’ attention span is in the toilet, so you need to be, unfortunately, feeding that frenzy, and I built a tool to do it.
Content
We are also going to need a robot that updates your WordPress site, too, which my WP Agent (beta) does. Eventually, I will have one for Shopify.
Now, altogether, these independent tools form my Hobo Robot (essentially does all above), and this is my effort to target the new SEO paradigm. https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/hobo-robot-an-autonomous-marketing-solution-for-your-business/
The future of SEO is robotic, agentic (AI) systems and tools, and it’s not just Google we are targeting here. It’s all chatbot, too.
As usual, meet Google’s guidelines, and you 100% get into the rest (probably).
How these big players end up cooking their results is still up for debate.
Anyway, that’s how I am approaching things.