Most marketing experts will agree that SEO has changed throughout the years. But more radical changes are going to be happening in 2025. Let’s take a look at how SEO has changed and how it hasn’t changed over the last couple of years with the advent of AI and resources like ChatGPT.
The Blog That Made You Oodles of Cash
This is the first thing to start with. Many people became entrepreneurs because they got lucky with a blog. Some of these blogs were powerful affiliate portals for people. They could drop links on these sites, make money, and just go to sleep while they hired someone to manage the site and the content. Here are some of the various types of blogs that you might have encountered:
- Recipe blogs.
- Product review blogs.
- Blogs that let you find public records.
- Self-help and wellness blogs.
Why did these types of blogs fail over the years? They lack one thing. Many of the owners lacked topical authority in an area.
What is topical authority? It’s a really simple concept. Topical authority is the expertise of the website. So let’s say that you had a keto foods website. If you’re really not an expert on keto foods, your recipes probably seem unoriginal, don’t get a lot of engagement, and there are better websites out there that have authority information on the subject.
Here is another example: inmate lookup websites. Do you remember the day you could go to the Internet and just do a search for “inmate lookup” or “jail roster?” You would get a ton of websites that were not the actual jail or prison where someone was being held. Now, you get the actual jail or prison or the requisite government website that posts that information. This is what topical authority is.
Is it still possible to make money doing something with a blog? It might be. If you are an expert in something like music, you could get a website and create content and monetize it that way. There is a great website called “Bach Chorales,” written and published by a composer that could probably be very easily monetized.
If you had a blog website that ranked and tanked, it wasn’t because of the ads or the content. It was simply because you lacked the topical authority and expertise to write it in the first place. And even if you are an expert on something, there are probably websites where people can get 100% accurate information.
The AI Has Completely Taken Over (Well, Not Really)
There have been SEO heists because of AI. There have been good advances in AI. There have been bad advances in AI. If you think about it, AI actually really hurt the freelancer industry. Maybe not as much because there is currently an aversion to AI content. But some companies and websites have stopped using the human content writer entirely. Now, a person inputs a prompt into a box, puts in some keywords in another field and writes a “brief” in another box after a platform has learned a site. They hit “publish” and the magical piece of content suddenly appears.
But the AI content has problems. Did you know that, as of the writing of this piece, AI has a tendency to hallucinate legal cases? That’s right, if you are a law website, ChatGPT will make up cases if it can’t find any. You have to be smarter than the AI. You have to go make a list of cases, summarize them, and then ask it to find a unifying concept among the cases (and you better damn well check that.).
There has been one thing that is really neat about AI. It’s a great way to earn free backlinks. If you have an older blog post, it is indexed in search engines, AI will likely find it and create a backlink to your website. Those link coops on platforms like BrandWell (formerly Content at Scale), will create backlinks for your clients. And your SEO agency might not even be aware of it.
People Are Always Going To Use Something Akin to Google Maps or Apple Maps
Local SEO is not going to go anywhere and it’s never going to die. Your business should always set up a Google My Business Profile. Your business should make sure that all the requisite fields are filled out. If you are a new online store, you should utilize Google Merchant (it’s mentioned here because it’s part of the Google Business suite). You should also build location pages on your website. These will help you a ton. You should think of ways that you can also build location pages at scale. For example:
- Find a WordPress option that lets you clone pages for locations and have a shortcode that lets you dynamically add the city to the page wherever you want it.
- After you have about 100 location pages, go through each one and tidy up the first paragraph so that it’s slightly different.
- John Mueller at Google has said that you can say whatever you want on your location pages and duplicate content will not kill you.
- Do not get into the location page glut. Creating a location page and then a location service page that silos everything off can become excessive quickly. Many websites that use the /city/service, /city/service-2, ad infinitum can make your website heavy and Google might not crawl or rank the page.
It’s Going to Be All About the Strategy…
Strategy in SEO and owning a business is everything. For example, if you sell something online, think of a freebie that you can also have on the website. “Free” keywords are incredibly easy to rank for. And if you get a ton of traffic for something like “free army guy scenes,” your army guy online store is going to rank well. Having a lot of traffic come from an easy keyword increases your overall traffic and thus your overall positioning score for your website, which is a Google ranking factor.
Strategy is more than just blogs and backlinks, which is what you’ll get from most SEO agencies. You have to have a strategy that is unique and will help you rank better.
John Mueller Is Really Full of Baloney a Lot of the Time
John Mueller is a smart guy. He’s really good at diluting what is important. Except that point above about location pages. It was an honest assessment and he was spot on. He divulges a lot about Google’s ranking guidelines when he talks. You just really have to be listening the right way.
You Should Buy Backlinks
Google says “Don’t Buy Backlinks.” But in reality, you should buy backlinks because it’s the only way you are going to be able to get them. But there are some other options with backlinks that you might not have thought of:
- You can get a good backlink if you sign up at your Chamber of Commerce.
- You can get good backlinks from local directories. These are really important for map SEO.
- You can get good backlinks from a wide array of other sources, but they are really hard to get and you won’t find them as easily as Brian Dean does. Those people have a lot of help.
And to make a point, one little backlink can make a huge difference. Take a look at this website. There was only one link that was bought. You can see where the clicks pick up for that one page. It’s not a huge search term, but one backlink basically doubled the number of clicks that the website got (think about the accounting sector and a company that does accounting for one type of company). This was one of those situations that made someone $10k per month without even having to pick up the phone and make an outbound call. Backlinks make a world of difference.
The Fundamental Tenets of SEO Really Have Stayed the Same
If you think about it, the fundamental tenets of SEO has really stayed the same over the years:
- Good content (we don’t really know what that is), but let’s just assume that it’s the content being appropriate for your website.
- Backlinks - you need backlinks to rank.
- A good website. Your website can’t break, it can’t have a ton of 400 errors and it must be easy for people to use and for Google to crawl.