Crafting an SEO strategy requires more than just focusing on the present. To be successful, we must anticipate future changes and adapt accordingly.
In this article we will talk about:
Developmental changes in the SEO industry. What these changes mean for our SEO strategies. How can we address and grow with these changes.
Note: When preparing an SEO strategy, keep in mind that most businesses plan on 5-7 year horizons, not 20-30 years. While long-term goals matter, the immediate relevance lies in shorter time periods.
Creation of the strategy: Hypotheses
Within this article, I’m making some assumptions about how you created your strategy.
I recognize that best practices end up being compromised from time to time for one reason or another, so I’ll lay out these assumptions for you:
The SEO strategy created has already been aligned with the business plan and 1-3 year goals. Have a measurement plan for your tactical cubes. You know what the 5-7 year goals are for the business. (For example, you’re at Netflix and you know they want to dominate the video game space in seven years.)
If you must commit to any of these elements, address them before you focus on preparing your strategy for the future. You need to know the kind of future your company wants to enter and have a way to measure it before you go too far.
If you’re committed to measurement and aren’t sure when or how to get the perfect measurement, find a solution that allows you to effectively monitor progress and value.
The first port of call I would recommend would be to talk to your finance team. See how they’re measuring similar activity in channels that aren’t usually as directly measurable, like TV or radio and other forms of traditional media.
If they don’t have an easily transferable metric, some other ways to address it include:
Get a “faith-based” finance number: If they don’t have a calculation you can use, they might just have a value they assign to that channel because someone somewhere did a calculation 20 years ago, and it’s now considered the gold standard internally.
Use a relative value: Each action on the website has a relative value to each other: signing up for a newsletter is probably not as valuable as a sale, etc. Put your metrics on this list, talk to someone with decision-making power, and ask them. where your goals are in the value hierarchy.
Use a default value of $1 for everything: This is the worst case scenario. The goal is to spark a conversation when you share this number and people ask where you got it from.
If you’re having trouble even keeping track of these goals, I’d follow a similar process to at least start putting a number on them.
Whether it’s an assumed contact-to-sale conversion rate or an estimated number of organic newsletter signups based on the current funnel split, you’ll find a way to apply an easily explainable number to a goal that at least , start a conversation. Hopefully this will lead to a conversation about how to measure it more accurately.
For a more detailed conversation about goal tracking, read this article by Avinash Kaushik. (He’s specifically talking about measuring offline conversions here, but it still applies when you’re struggling to get visibility into value or perceived value.)
As we are moving into a more fractured world of measurement, I would also make sure you clearly document your sources and assumptions. As we’ll discuss later, measurement for SEO will be even more obtuse than ever. One of those measurement black boxes will likely be Search Generative Experience (SGE).
Generative search, surfaces and SEO
There are a few ways to think about generative search:
These ways of thinking about generative search go beyond standard website optimization to branding and collaboration with other marketing channels.
So what does this mean for you as an SEO professional?
Get social. If you haven’t already, your work and the success of your work and strategy start to depend on much more than development (or engineering) teams and content.
At its core, Insights (now Forums) within SGE are social networks, but we know that Google is pulling much more than that.
So you want to start talking to other teams, especially social. Honestly, I would start learning about how they optimize content for these platforms and if there is an angle or level of expertise that you can share.
It’s also time for a change in perspective as a professional: it’s not just about the website anymore. It’s about your branded content, wherever it’s published.
measurement
I don’t have a perfect solution to measure now or in the future. However, I predict that the measure will become increasingly nebulous and extrapolated.
We already know that SGE and other Google surfaces (News, Discover, etc.) are poorly and incorrectly measured by default using source/medium attribution in Google Analytics, often attributed as (direct).
As these surfaces become further fractured and SGE develops, the measurement will likely continue to become less accurate.
For anyone who doesn’t already know, there’s still no way to directly track Google Discover traffic in GA4.
I just did an article that got 363,000 clicks on Discover, 5k on Search. Look at the GA4 data.
(If anyone thinks they got it, of course, please share!) pic.twitter.com/WzXJMkCY22
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) November 2, 2023
The emphasis will likely be on proof of concepts, where we make a connection between actions and outcomes, followed by larger programs that are inherently more difficult to measure. Or will it be about market comparisons to justify the work being done instead of “Well, putting keyword A in position B will give us X dollars of incremental revenue.”
It will be even more important that you, as an SEO professional, elevate your recommendations towards the larger business strategy rather than excluding them from your thought process because it will likely be more difficult to align a specific amount of revenue with your organic efforts and gain approval through brute force.
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education
The future of measurement is one reason why it’s important, if you haven’t already, to incorporate a training or continuing education program into your business.
Even if it’s a one-person shop, take the time to step aside and learn from some great people; in addition to websites like this, there are some great newsletters that will gather SEO updates for you.
If you have stakeholders, it’s even more important that they understand both the fundamentals of SEO and how the sands are shifting and what the future is likely to look like and why.
Find the metaphors relevant to your audience. Give examples and case studies from your own websites, if you can get them, and if not, use examples from your industry. From your competitors. Make your stakeholders understand the fact that, in many ways, digital media will begin to look a lot more like traditional media than digital media measurement as we’ve known it for the past decade.
You also want to continue to educate yourself on SEO and how the business works. Where do you need to get approvals? At what point is an initiative considered to break even or impact?
Dig Deeper: How to use SEO education for stakeholder management
Approval processes and doors
What’s a strategy if you can’t execute it?
To future-proof your strategic efforts, and likely as part of your educational efforts, you want to ensure that SEO is included in all relevant processes. This could include:
Codebase Quality Assurance Brand Campaign Go-to-Market Re-branding Platform Reform New Product Launch Annual High Sales Periods such as Black Friday
Again, this will mean getting out and talking to people, so your days can become a balancing act of getting things done and laying the groundwork for getting things done in the future.
It also means you’ll probably want to (or have to) commit to smaller best practices that might not matter as much in your industry, like chasing a perfect score on Core Web Vitals or rewriting your metadata.
While none of us have a crystal ball to see exactly what SEO will look like a decade from now (except maybe Michael King), when you take your strategy and then build a framework of training, processes, and collaboration in the around it, it’s more likely than not to be able to stand the test of time. Bend instead of break as market and technology landscapes change around your strategy.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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