Cutting Through the Noise

SEO is changing, SEO has changed. I have said those things myself few times and we've heard many others say them as well. But I also came to the realization that, we are becoming volatile, flip-flopping between new tactics and latest trends, and this may not sum up to a sustainable SEO strategy that builds growth over time.

If you're wondering why am I saying this, or let me show you two examples of what I exactly mean:

1# Schema

For some reason, schema is one of those SEO tactics that has long been seen as "worthless" by many SEOs unless it relates to a handful of mainly ecommerce schemas. This conversation has been taking place long before the ai revolution hit the industry and the emergence of chatgpt and other LLMs.

The problem is, there has been a lot of chatter recently that we do not need schema nay more as LLMs can understand the content. Some individuals who have been known for their their experience on schema have also took this stand.

I was hesitant to agree, it's hard to believe that the schema.org project is "dead". I even posted about this on LinkedIn, in an attempt to find get some answers.

But sometimes answers come as a surprise! Nadeem Haddadeen on LinkedIn. Nadeem noticed that Open AI bots are crawling JSON data more than HTML.

So hopefully that clears the situation up. But it does show that we are working in a volatile industry and while we need to keep up with the emerging trend and new tactics, we need to "hold our houses" when it comes to taking strong measures like dropping schema.

#2 Reddit

A study from reddit says "Reddit conversations are the new landing page for business discovery. According to new Reddit research, Reddit ad investments lead to more organic posts, creating a multiplier effect of discoverability." And I think a lot of SEOs including myself would are now talking about how reddit is taking over SERPs, and how important it is for SEO.

This still stands true, because reddit is also used as LLMs training data for example. But when it comes to search tactics, we need to be careful, we don't know yet the future of reddit in search.

Some SEOs like Jonas Sickler have been saying "reddit is the biggest SEO bubble"...

And? Ok here's what we know so far:

• According to SISTRIX "The domain reddit.com is the 3rd most visible domain in Google Search, US (SISTRIX VI, 16th October 2024). The US Visibility Index for Reddit represents a click-potential of over 573 million clicks per month from organic positions in search."
• Google has shifted part of the algo to UGC content
• But on the other side, a few days ago, someone spotted a decline in organic traffic to reddit.

Ok so reddit was a bubble? should we stop optimizing for it and making it part of our SEO strategy? because we've been saying and hearing the opposite for a long while now specifically after the $60 Million deal with Google earlier in 2024. Luckily someone came to the rescue, Glen Gabe mentioned that on January 7th, there was notable volatility across sites with user-generated content (UGC), including Reddit. Reddit appears to have experienced drops in organic search rankings for branded queries, which could indicate a Google relevancy adjustment. Additionally, Reddit is seeing declines in SERP features like "What people are saying," People Also Ask (PAA), and image packs. While the findings are preliminary and require further investigation, this trend is worth monitoring.

Here's his exact words:

Will future search results show less Reddit? We’re not sure yet. Just like with the schema example mentioned earlier, it’s important not to make drastic changes in this constantly changing and unpredictable ecosystem.

Okey Sara, so how do we adapt?

We need to find a balance between our classic SEO tactics and integrating new approaches. I recommend the following:

• Review your SEO playbook, some tactics are dead, like really dead, dead dead, and we're not just saying that. Make sure none of this is part of your regular checklists.
• Make sure you're aware of new and modern tactics that work today with the current state of search "as-is", and test things yourself. A good example I heard by Mike King recently in a live event was that, a website experienced better performance, after they "removed" all the meta descriptions. This is very interesting and a different approach.
• Emerging trends are what will impact you tomorrow. You want to future proof your strategy and get ready shall the winds of organic search changes, so depending on your business goals, type of business and how likely is your audience to use LLMs to get referrals to businesses like yours, you way to integrate a moderate amount of efforts towards this type of tactics but not too much.
• Last but not least, a lot of the classics still work. Don't throw out everything yet, the search is changing, but the dust has not settled yet.