At a recent Yext Summit, 27-year-old search marketing expert Duane Forrester shared tips on how to become a better SEO and develop the skills to better anticipate where search marketing is headed.
Who is Duane Forrester and why his advice matters
Duane Forrester is one of the rare search marketers who has experience on both sides of the search box. He has 27 years of experience in the search industry, with nearly ten years as a product director at Microsoft. He helped build and launch Bing Webmaster Tools, wrote the original Bing Webmaster Guidelines, and worked with the core search and spam teams, as well as the teams that built and maintain Schema .org, Robotstxt.org and Sitemaps.org.
Five steps to becoming a better SEO and predicting future trends
Duane said that in 2022 no one was talking about AI. It’s been a little over a year now and it’s all everyone is talking about. He said this is an example of how SEO is one of the fastest changing industries and said this has always been the normal pace.
What’s happening in AI is just another change in a story of change, not all of it visible to the search community. Machine learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence have been part of search behind the scenes for many years, largely unseen and not always well understood, underscoring the importance of learning
Duane said:
“… this industry requires a dedication to continuous learning. All the time, there is always something new. … Big steps, small steps, but it is constant”.
He suggested the following activities to achieve and maintain a strong SEO position.
Research 60 minutes a day Follow well-known experts Use official sources for SEO guidance The value of developer resources Anticipate consumer trends
1. Research 60 minutes a day
Duane recommended setting aside time for research.
Explained:
“…spend at least 60 minutes a day, an hour, reading new sources and the official blogs, even the unofficial blogs, go in and read that stuff.”
For some it may seem like a lot of time to spend researching something they already know, SEO. But Duane is right and I’ll tell you why.
In 2005 I was shocked when a Google engineer revealed that Google was using statistical analysis to identify unnatural links. It was a mind-blowing moment that made it clear that I needed to start reading research articles to keep up with search engines.
I reached out to Duane about it and he said that now more than ever it’s important to research everything because SEO is changing so fast that at some point it might be inappropriate to call it SEO.
This is what he told me:
“Man, if things continue the way they are, we’re ALL going to have to learn a new profession. It just won’t be called SEO if it’s on the edge of what’s coming.
In short, if you don’t invest in work now, there won’t be a tomorrow. Sorry, this train stops. A new train will leave the station shortly; I suggest you get on it.”
2. Follow known experts
Duane says it’s important to keep an open mind and absorb what others have to say. It is considered that this is a person with 27 years of experience who says how important it is for him to read what others have to say. So if it’s important to him, it should be important to everyone else.
Duane recommends:
“Follow well-known experts on Twitter and LinkedIn threads, Bluesky, TikTok, wherever they have an account, go find it. If it’s medium, sign up. If it’s on Substack, sign up.
Make sure you have direct access. You don’t want to rely on what someone said they read. Go read these things yourself. It makes a huge difference in your understanding. Listen to the podcasts, watch the webinars, follow their YouTube channels and recognize that you will be drinking from a fire hose.”
3. Use official sources for SEO guidance
Duane emphasized the importance of getting as much information directly from search engines as possible. For the normal sources of official information (Search Center, Developer Blog, Webmaster Tools) he said to keep them bookmarked and ready to be checked daily. But he also advised expanding your sources of information to sources most people don’t go to.
Here’s what he had to say about alternative sources:
“So for SEO, you want to look at Microsoft, Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu and Naver. And before you say, but why Yahoo? It’s because they’ve been doing a lot over the last year with search and they’re willing to even more in the next 18 months. So pay attention to what they’re doing. They’re not investing in it because they don’t think there’s any reason to. They really believe there’s room for them in this market, and I bet that consumers will agree with them.”
4. The value of resources for developers
This part of his keynote is interesting because it’s about seeing where the industry will be 18 months into the future. Part of engaging with developer resources is understanding the technology, but he also sees it as an opportunity to get ahead of everyone else by seeing where consumers are going (because the money will follow).
Duane recommended developer-focused resources at Meta, Amazon, Apple, TikTok, OpenAI because these are the companies that are developing the customer experiences that impact consumer behavior. He is right. Shein revolutionized how clothing is marketed by bypassing search altogether, targeting consumers on social media in a way that appeals to them.
Duane said:
“I also ask you to take a look at what’s happening for developers, and there’s a very important reason for that. META, Amazon, Apple, TikTok, OpenAI, they all have dedicated locations for developers to come in and interact with the our latest products and services…
The reason it’s important to pay attention to this is because these are the companies that are developing customer experiences and understand how those experiences affect customer action and behavior. These are the official sources where these experiences are built, talked about, and developers can interact with.”
5. Anticipate consumption trends
One of the things I found interesting was how he kept coming back to how technology affects the customer experience and their behavior. When he talks about Apple or Meta, it’s in the context of how they’re influencing customer behavior, he also relates it to how money follows consumers.
For example, in our conversation, he mentioned the possibility of AI search without ads and said that we need to think about where the advertising money will go.
“This leans towards ‘being at the top of your game’ and we need to talk about how ‘search’ is expanding to new platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.).
So knowing how business models think and these become a very important part of the game. If ChatGPT launches an ad-free search experience and its current consumers adopt it (100 million monthly active users), how does that affect current search models built on advertising? How does this affect how teams are tasked with working within brands, what skills are in demand and where ad dollars are moving?”
See what he’s doing there? It’s looking at today’s technology trends and then thinking about where it’s headed and how that affects what jobs will be in demand and where advertising and consumer spending is headed.
I’ve known Duane for almost twenty years and he’s always doing this kind of thing where he puts context into what’s happening now and what it means for the future. The questions he asks show how to anticipate where the industry is headed.
His Yext keynote ended with a hockey analogy:
“You don’t want to skate to where the puck is. You want to skate to where the puck is going to be. The greatest hockey players to ever play the sport knew that and acted that out every time they stepped on the ice.
Skating to where the puck is is a surefire way to miss the point and fall behind. Skating to where it will be is how you stay ahead and on top of things. And you can get there by being curious, continuously learning, and building a strong network.”
Watch Duane Forresters lecture:
How to keep up with SEO best practices
Featured image by Shutterstock/Artem Samokhvalov
[ad_2]
Source link
