SEO in 2025: How to Prepare for the Future of Search

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2 2 Download this deck: https://speakerdeck.com/ipullrank

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3 Salutations! I’m Mike King (@iPullRank)

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5 Predicting the Future of Search Going two for two with big picture predictions

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6 6 In 2016, I Said the Future of Search Looked Like the Movie “Her”

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7 7 PROOF. Now, who wants lottery ticket numbers? Proof. (watch it later, I’m fantastic)

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8 8 Where Do we Stand with the Required Tech? In the video I talk about everything required to make the Her chatbot and assistant real. We have had all these things since 2016 and they have only gotten signiﬁcantly better since. ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 😬 😎 ✅ Location Persistent User Context The World’s Information Always-on Device Natural Language Processing Machine Learning + Computing Power Speed Good User Experience

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9 9 What I Did Not Predict was Generative AI

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10 10 In May of This Year, OpenAI Rolled Out Voice-Mode that Sounded Eerily Similar to Scarlett Johansson

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11 11 Where Is Search in its Maturation Search is currently in its Minidisc era, where there’s innovative functionality that shows promise, yet isn’t gaining widespread traction. Much like the Minidisc offered better sound quality, ﬂexibility, and compact storage but failed to capture the market, search engines today offer advanced features—like AI-driven query understanding, personalized experiences, and semantic search—but users often stick to simpler behaviors or don’t fully explore these innovations. Vinyl 8-track tapes Cassette tapes Compact Discs MP3 Players Streaming Minidisc

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13 13 What Do You Need to Accomplish Bespoke UI Search? Location Persistent User Context The World’s Information as structured data Natural Language Processing with Transformers Always-on Device Machine Learning (GenerativeAI) + Computing Power Speed Good User Experience The innovations of of the past 8 years have made all of this possible now.

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14 14 Until we get there, we are trapped in the messy middle of Search.

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15 15 Then Google is Facing a Series of Existential Threats Some threats were more real than others (e.g. TikTok never got more traﬃc than Google), but it’s the perception of Google being in a downward spiral that they to contend with.

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16 16 OpenAI attacks Google on two fronts: 1. Polluting the index. 2. Disrupting the modality.

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17 17 The Last Time the Major Search Engine Died it Looked Like This

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18 18 Google Still Dwarfs Everything, but More People are Using More Channels

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19 19 Google Has Four Advantages Over Any Challenger to Search Multiple products with 1B+ Users More behaviorial data They invented the tech They don’t need Nvidia

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20 Government Remedies Are the Only True Threat to Google Search If the US government issues remedies that destroy Google’s monopoly on Search, that could change the complexion of the competition, but right now none of the competitors, including OpenAI can stand a chance. Google is positioned to chill out and watch everyone burn through all their cash while Google reﬁnes its product.

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21 21 There is a Precedent in the EU of Google Having to Share Its Data with Other Search Engines

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22 22 Remedies Could Also Include Breaking off Chrome or Android This would be somewhat meaningless because Chrome and Android are open source projects and Google could continue to steer them by dominating contribution.

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23 23 Some Say The Alphabet Setup Was Preparation For A Breakup It’s hard to know how a Google breakup might impact the digital marketing world, but it’s safe to say that Alphabet is prepared for that potential eventuality.

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24 24 Whatever Happens, The Future Will Be Built On the Past On-Page Content Structured Data Topic Modeling Behavioral Signals Content Layouts Page Performance Internal Link Volume External Link Quality External Link Velocity

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25 The Fragmentation of How Information Needs Are Addressed How search behavior is changing.

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26 Gen Z Has A Higher Propensity to Use Multiple Channels for Search We can expect that younger generations will look to get their information needs met in various ways rather than just going to Google.

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27 27 Track Where You Appear in Generative Search Companies like Profound are popping up with solutions to track how brands are showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. As these platforms grow in usage, there is value in understanding how you appear.

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28 28 Google’s Share of Advertising is Shrinking Google has seen softening in its dominance of search advertising in recent years. This is a threat to the business since search ads are its primary driver of revenue.

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29 29 Users believe Google Search quality is on a steep decline

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30 30 These threats will impact you as an SEO and a content marketer.

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31 31 The Last Time People Said Search Quality Was Bad we Got Panda and Penguin Panda fundamentally changed Organic Search. You could no longer create “SEO content” and rank. The SEO community then embraced content marketing knowing that it’s the only way forward with creating content that yields utility. Penguin did the same for links. Google’s Helpful Content update is the new sheriff in town.

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32 32 Many Sites Using GenAI Content Got Crushed by the HCU The Helpful Content Update stared as a benign series of algorithm adjustments, but has become more aggressive as cries about Google search quality have gotten louder. h/t @LilyRayNYC

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33 The TikTok Threat will Mean More Visual Content Ranking To compete with the visual content channels, Google is surfacing more visual content in the SERPs and adding more features that allow users to get exactly where they want to go. This will threaten standard Organic positions for web content.

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34 34 Short Form Video is About to Get More Competitive The video and image real estate in Google is going to become even more competitive since marketers recognize short form video as high ROI and the primary way to reach Gen Z.

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35 35 Action: Publish Your Short Form Video on your site A primary mistake that content marketers make is only publishing their short form videos on a channel like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. You should also publish them on your site using tools like Wistia and marking them up with structured data so they can appear in the SERPs.

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36 36 Ad Sales Being Down Means more Ads What’s up with all this whitespace? What’s up with this featured snippet?

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37 37 The real estate will get smaller, so your content must be that much more effective when it shows up in the SERPs.

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38 38 Action 2: Monitor SERP features for your target keywords to see if you need to pivot Monitor which keywords start showing SERP features like videos, images, and AI Overviews. If you don’t have competitive content in those formats, you’ll need to rebalance the keywords you’re targeting.

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39 Action 3: Indexing is Harder; Monitor it It’s not being talked about as much, but indexing has gotten a lot harder since the Helpful Content update. You’ll see a lot more pages in the “Discovered - currently not indexed” and “Crawled - currently not indexed” than you did previously because the bar is higher for what Google deems worth capturing from the web. Action 3: Monitor your Crawled - currently not indexed and Discovered - currently not indexed pages reports in GSC.

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40 40 Google Wants to Crawl Even Less Gary Illyes has indicated that he wants to have Google crawl less. Search quality certainly cannot suffer, so crawling has to get increasingly intelligent.

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41 41 Action 4: Monitor your Crawl Rates Settings > Crawl Stats in GSC. ProTip: You will often see that there is an inverse relationship between crawl requests and average response time. The faster you make your site, more Google will crawl.

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42 42 Action 5: Stop focusing on content volume. Focus on quality and information gain.

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43 43 Google is Turning Up the Dial on Information Gain Conceptually, as it relates to search engines, Information Gain is the measure of how much unique information a given document adds to the ranking set of documents. In other words, what are you talking about that your competitors are not?

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44 What You SHOULD Be Adding to the Conversation To avoid being a copycat of the content that currently exists on the SERPs, publish the content that only you can publish: ● Personal insights ● Relevant stories and anecdotes ● Original research ● Expert opinions ● Brand-generated content (videos, infographics, thought leadership) In other words, create the content from ideas and expertise that only you (or your team of experts) would have.

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45 45 The only content you should be making

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46 46 The Misalignment Of Incentives Between Google And The Web Will Continue

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47 47 It’s Goog Enough As @AJKohn discusses in his “It’s Goog Enough” article - https://www.blindﬁveyearold.com/its-goog-enough, Google is continuing to go in a direction that is more self-serving than user serving. Intent mismatches Overreliance on UGC Too Many SERP fe

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48 48 Google wanted to bring this to the SERP, but engineers pushed back.

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49 Aﬃliate Content Appears over Experts Why doesn’t a sleeping blog post appear in the top results for best mattresses?

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50 50 Google Will Continue to Build For its Minidisc Era.

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51 51 AI Overviews are here to stay, and they’re changing… April, 2024 October, 2024

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52 52 And they are increasing in volume… Source: https://www.advancedwebranking.com/free-seo-tools/google-ai-overview

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53 53 And they take up a lot of room on the SERPs… ADs

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54 Google Explore (2022 RIP) A 2022 failed experiment for Google AI Organized Search Results

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55 Query Refinement Google continues add query refinement and navigational tools that also clue us into how Google is identifying relevant topics. Source: https://blog.google/products/search/re fine-search-results/

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56 New Tests: Local - July 2024 Announced in May, Google will be rolling out AI-organized search results for local searches on mobile devices Source: https://blog.google/products/search/g enerative-ai-google-search-may-202 4/

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57 New Tests: Shopping - October 2024 Google announced that they’re rolling out new AI-Organized Search results on the Shopping tab Source: https://blog.google/products/shopping/ google-shopping-ai-update-october-202 4/

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58 SEOs Will Realize the Power of Search as a Branding Channel How search behavior is changing.

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59 59 SEOs will Finally Embrace Brand It’s no secret that big brands are rewarded by Google both via rankings and SERP feature placement. The signals that brands generate are reﬂected in how Google’s scoring functions work.

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60 Search is a Brand Awareness Channel Brands understand the value of being seen in the channel even if a click isn’t driven. SEO will need to shift from a pure performance mindset to partially brand mindset and adapt brand visibility metrics.

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61 61 The Helpful Content Update was about BRAND? Source: https://moz.com/blog/helpful-content-update-not-what-you-think

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62 Brand Authority Brand Authority™ is a score (1-100) developed by Moz that measures the total strength of a brand. Contrasting the BA:DA ratio of tens of thousands of sites in the Moz corpus allowed me to test a theory—that Google's Helpful Content updates heavily leveraged brand signals. It looks like they do! ~ Tom Capper

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63 The Helpful Content Update was about BRAND? Based on Tom Capper’s ﬁndings, there is a high correlation between the ratio of authority and brand performance and performance in the HCU updates.

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64 64 Action 6: Track Brand Visibility Track your rankings, impressions, and visibility in SERP features in a separate report to indicate brand health. Speciﬁcally, you should track average position, rankings, impressions, and presence in featured snippets, AI Overviews, and People Also Ask.

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65 Use this Dashboard as a Start We’ve created a Looker Studio dashboard that combines data from Semrush and Google Search Console to track brand visibility. https://lookerstudio.google.com/u/0/re porting/create?c.reportId=3ad27fb0-dd4 1-4a6b-a509-7d61895d93a7&r.reportNa me=iPullRank%20%7C%20SERP%20Feat ure%20Brand%20Visibility%20Tracker&c .mode=edit

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66 How to Ensure Your Content Continues to Perform Four tactics you need to employ to maintain visibility in the future of Search

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67 67 The Four Things You Should Do We don’t have time to cover them all, but these are four things that you should do to navigate the future of Search. See the post-credits scene for the remaining two. Topical Clustering Content Pruning Leverage All the Structured Data Embrace Retrieval Augmented Generation

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68 68 Tactic 1: Build Topic Clusters and Improve Your Site Focus

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69 69 You May Have Heard That About.com Split into Several Websites and they All Collectively More than Outperform About.com Source: https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/about-com-domain-splitting/

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70 70 One Reason is due to Better Topical Clustering The more related content is to other content on a site, the more authoritative the site appears to be on that subject.

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71 Here’s an Example of a Topic Cluster You should be orienting your site in a logical topical structure where related subjects are connected together by the internal linking structure. This reinforces the relevance of the subject matter that you cover. When the content is also recent, heavily linked to externally, and provides a strong user experience, that is the ideal state.

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72 Site Embeddings Are Used to Measure How On Topic a Page is Google is speciﬁcally vectorizing pages and sites and comparing the page embeddings to the site embeddings to see how off-topic the page is. Learn more about embeddings: https://ipullrank.com/content-relevance

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73 Content needs to be more focused We’ve learned deﬁnitively that Google uses vector embeddings to determine how far off given a page is from the rest of what you talk about. This indicates that it will be challenging to go far into upper funnel content successfully without a structured expansion or without authors who have demonstrated expertise in that subject area. Encourage your authors to cultivate expertise in what they publish across the web and treat their bylines like the gold standard that it is.

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74 74 Check How Focused Your Site Your Site Is Use this tool with your site to score how focused your content as as part of your content auditing efforts. https://ipullrank.com/tools/site-focus-c alculator Anything below a 0.7 is worth reconsidering.

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75 Build Topic Clusters Well deﬁned topic clusters can position your website and brand into an authority in your space and strengthen your entities in the eyes of Google. A site that focuses on a series of topics that are relevant to each other are going to beneﬁt in rankings. Here are a few tools that can help you design and build your topic clusters systematically. Thruuu https://thruuu.com/keyword-clustering-tool Keyword Insights https://www.keywordinsights.ai/features/keyword-clustering/

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76 76 Tactic 2: Prune Non-performing Content and Improve Your Site Focus

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77 77 Pruning and Optimization Work Quite Well Together

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78 78 We like automate to get to a Keep. Revise. Kill. (Review.)

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79 79 Content Decay The web is a rapidly changing organism. Google always wants the most relevant content, with the best user experience, and most authority. Unless you stay on top of these measures, you will see traﬃc fall off over time. Measuring this content decay is as simple comparing page performance period over period in analytics or GSC. Just knowing content has decayed is not enough to be strategic.

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80 80 It’s not enough to know that the page has lost traﬃc.

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81 81 Content Potential Score The Content Potential Rating (CPR).

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82 82 Interpreting the Content Potential Rating 80 - 100: High Priority for Optimization 60 - 79: Moderate Priority for Optimization 40 - 59: Selective Optimization 20 - 39: Low Priority for Optimization 0 - 19: Minimal Benefit from Optimization If you want quick and dirty, you can prune everything below a 40 that is not driving significant traffic.

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83 83 Combining CPR with pages that lost traﬃc helps you understand if it’s worth it to optimize.

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84 84 Step 1. Pull the Rankings Data from Semrush Organic Research > Positions > Export

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85 85 Step 2: Pull the Decaying Content from GSC Google Search Console is a great source to spot Content Decay by comparing the last three months year over year. Filter for those pages where the Click Difference is negative (smaller than 0) then export.

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86 86 Step 3: Drop them in the Spreadsheet and Press the Magic Button

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87 The Output is List of URLs Prioritized by Action Each URL is marked as Keep, Revise, Kill or Review based on the keyword opportunities available and the effort required to capitalize on them. Sorting the URLs marked as “Revise” by Aggregated SV and CPR will give you the best opportunities ﬁrst.

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88 88 Get your copy of the Content Pruning Workbook : https://ipullrank.com/cpr-sheet

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89 How to Kill Content Content may be valuable for channels outside of Organic Search. So, killing it is about changing Google’s experience of your website to improve its relevance and reinforce its topical clusters. The best approach is to noindex the pages themselves, nofollow the links pointing to them, and submit an XML sitemap of all the pages that have changed. This will yield the quickest recrawling and reconsideration of the content.

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90 90 How to Revise Content Review content across the topic cluster Use co-occurring keywords and entities in your content Add unique perspectives that can’t be found on other ranking pages Answer common questions Answer the People Also Ask Questions Restructure your content using headings relevant to the above Add relevant Structured markup Expand on previous explanations Add authorship Update the dates Make sure the needs of your audiences are accounted for Add to an XML sitemap of only updated pages

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91 How to Review Content The sheet marks content that has a low content potential rating and a minimum of 500 in monthly search volume as “Review” because they may be long tail opportunities that are valuable to the business. You should take a look at the content you have for that landing page and determine if you think the effort is worthwhile.

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92 Roll the Credits Recap

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93 93 Preparing for the Future Publish short form video on your site Monitor SERP Features Monitoring Indexing Monitoring Crawling Focus on Content Quality Not Content Volume Track Brand Visibility

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94 94 Focusing on Content Quality Topical Clustering Content Pruning Structured Data Embrace Retrieval Augmented Generation

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Thank You | Q&A [email protected] Award Winning, #GirlDad Featured by Download the Slides and Check out the Post-credits scenes: https://speakerdeck.com/ipullrank Mike King Chief Executive Oﬃcer @iPullRank

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97 Post-Credits Scene Things I could not ﬁt into the allotted 23 minutes

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98 98 Tactic 3: Embrace Structured Data and Appearing in Generative Search Experiences

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99 Embrace Structured Data There are three models gaining popularity: 1. KG-enhanced LLMs - Language Model uses KG during pre-training and inference 2. LLM-augmented KGs - LLMs do reasoning and completion on KG data 3. Synergized LLMs + KGs - Multilayer system using both at the same time https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.08302.pdf Source: Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap

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10 0 Action: Revisit Schema.org and Incorporate Anything Relevant to Your Content Historically, we’ve only incorporated structured data that has yielded rich results. Now is the time to use anything that is relevant to your content because generative systems use it all.

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10 1 10 1 Blocking LLMs is a Mistake. Appearing in these places will be recognized as brand awareness opportunities very soon.

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10 2 102 It’s all about the Fraggles. (Fragment + Handle)

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10 4 10 4 The Fraggles Show What AIO Used for the AI Snapshot

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10 5 10 5 Check out MarketBrew’s Free Tool to Help

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10 9 The GEO team shared their ChatGPT prompts The GEO team also shared the ChatGPT prompts that help them improve their visibility. You can augment them and put them to work right away. https://github.com/GEO-optim/GEO/blo b/main/src/geo_functions.py

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11 0 11 0 Tactic 4: Embrace Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for all GenAI Workﬂows

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11 1 11 1 Combining a Search Engine with a Language Model is called “Retrieval Augmented Generation” Neeva (RIP), Bing, and now Google’s Search Generative Experience all use pull documents based on search queries and feed them to a language model to generate a response. This concept was developed by the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team.

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11 2 11 2 Documents are Broken into Chunks and the Most Relevant Chunks are Fed to the Language Model to Generate a Response

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11 3 11 3 The Three Laws of Generative AI content 1. Generative AI is not the end-all-be-all solution. It is not the replacement for a content strategy or your content team. 2. Generative AI for content creation should be a force multiplier to be utilized to improve workﬂow and augment strategy. 3. You should consider generative AI content for awareness efforts, but continue to leverage subject matter experts for lower funnel content.

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12 3 12 3 Bubble - No Code Apps - https://bubble.io/

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12 4 Integrate Promptitude with Zapier or Make