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For my last 15 years in digital marketing, SEO has been the engine room of performance marketing around which everything else has been built. But the last 7-8 years has seen a plateau in the overall effectiveness — that’s not to say it has been ineffective but the Midas touch and excitement of the previous 8 or so years has definitely faded.
SEO is no longer just about traffic volume built on keywords and backlinks — it’s about delivering deeply relevant, technically seamless and intelligently personalised user experiences where AI now powers much of both the supply and demand side of the search experience. Search engines reward content that not only aligns with user intent but also adapts dynamically to context, device and user behaviour. AI is the engine powering this evolution and businesses that fail to adapt risk becoming invisible in organic search.
Outlined below are key components of a forward-thinking SEO strategy that leverages artificial intelligence without sacrificing human-centric values. This is today, it might not be tomorrow and that’s exciting in a way.
‘Traditional’ keyword research still matters in 2025 but the process has evolved and success lies in understanding why users search — not just what they search for which worked in days gone by. Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs illustrate this evolution — they have gone beyond keywords and now surface clusters of intent, search journey stages and question-based variants tailored for voice and conversational AI.
The focus shifts away from traffic volume to target the diversity of search intent for both pillar and cluster pages e.g. users today might go to a search engine for a quick fact, a list of local services or to start shopping whereas for something requiring a more explanatory response e.g. “how to plan for 3-day hike“, ChatGPT is a more likely destination.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools help determine what the user means when they search. For Chatbots, this is interactive but NLP also powers search algorithms like Google’s RankBrain and BERT and these can help to match tools to buyer intent (awareness, consideration, decision) and by scraping social media Q&As, Reddit threads etc. minus the interactivity (for now!).
I think of Chatbots as searcher’s assistants — researcher aides who make recommendations, based on summarised and synthesised web content and user conversations. This means brands need to be very convincing in how they jockey for position. Quality content which accurately conveys your unique selling proposition (USP) is vital in order to match your offering to this rapidly refined search. This requires a more strategic and less tactical mindset.
There is a danger that AI is seen as a silver bullet in SEO — that’s definitely not the case, in fact, it’s something of a double-edged sword. Over-reliance on generative AI can degrade the originality of content, impacting authority which can have a double-negative effect by reducing search engine (and chatbot) visibility and damaging trust in your brand. In effect, over-dependence on AI tools has the potential to undo years of good SEO work.
AI can definitely structure, guide and even co-create content but the undeniable competitive edge right now lies in editorial finesse and tailoring the content to suit your specific audience. The time saved by AI should be reinvested into making your content’s relevance and tone laser focused — how exactly is your content addressing the needs of your user? What story are you telling? What is your brand really about?
Search results now include things like featured snippets and answer boxes providing instant answers which reduce the need for the user to click through to a website — and of course, some users are not going to search engines at all, instead relying on the likes of ChatGPT to answer queries. Voice search is anticipated to account for 50% of search in 2025.
This puts pressure on search marketers to work harder for less traffic — optimising for featured snippets and embracing schema mark-ups will be important. Long-term, who really knows at this stage?
There are already a plethora of tools to help with content optimisation but whichever you choose to use, it’s vital that whatever content you produce aligns to Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) standards. The easiest way to stand out from the ‘rinse and repeat’ crowd is to include your own personal spin or research on the content you produce — or you could just wing it with the chatbots and hope for the best!
The most basic market research will tell you to target your audience where they are active — for B2B that’s invariably LinkedIn — so your content has to dance the native dance too. It can be like trying to ride two horses with one arse, optimising your own website content to build your brand while also surrendering to the algorithmic hypnosis of social media. The cynicism is real but you’ve got to play the game — if this is where your audience is, this is where your brand grows.
SEO tools have been central to advanced SEO strategies for many years and continue to evolve. Tools like Deepcrawl and Screaming Frog now include anomaly detection (crawl and/or JavaScript errors), crawl comparisons (with previous page versions) and proactively suggest fixes. Much of this work goes unnoticed by marketing team leaders and even customers but eliminating technical issues under the hood will continue to aid overall performance.
Schema strategies also help search engines understand and display your content (e.g. rich snippets, eCommerce schemas, LocalBusiness schema) and in the age of AI, that takes on a new dimension with voice assistant like Google Assistant. To increase the likelihood of being selected for voice search answers, using HowTo and/or FAQ schemas can help – Google seems to favour this type of content in voice search responses.
Another area to look at is mobile-first indexing — this is by no means a given and will depend on your industry, so ensuring that your website is optimised to suit the device types (mobile vs. desktop) more commonly used by your target customer is important.
Real-time analytics with tools like Google Analytics 4 and Hotjar, it’s now possible to make continuous updates to your SEO strategy rather than over-reacting to the inevitable drop in traffic. Behavioural metrics like scroll depth and exit rates are primed for A/B testing and AI-driven content audits can identify stale content in need of refresh or removal. AI backlink monitoring tools (e.g. Monitor Backlinks) can also help with cleaning up legacy backlink toxicity and harmful reputational signals.
Tools have a huge role to play in personalisation of organic search experiences. Whereas 10 years ago, SEO was largely a numbers game with volume of traffic a key metric, tools drive more nuanced SEO strategies. AI models can infer that the same keyword query may have very different intent — therefore are served different results and follow different paths. This puts an onus on marketers to cater for layers of intent and adjusting content for different user contexts. Tools like Optimizely and Dynamic Yield can show different web pages based on the originating source/device etc whike tools like Copy.ai can generate multiple variations of headlines and descriptions toiled to user intent, entry path (e.g. campaign landing page vs. organic visitor) while AI and ML models continuously learn what works and suggest follow-on actions based on what similar visitors did previously. Experimentation is the name of the game again.
I’ve kept this to the end because it really is the most important part — knowing your brand and how you deliver value is critical.
I’ve worked with many SEO professionals who were not good marketers and frankly, didn’t need to be. They did the technical stuff really well and won. They produced truckloads of well-optimised content and traffic grew. It was a numbers game. I expect that won’t be the case going forward.
Marketing — specifically brand building — is the vital ingredient for digital marketing going forward. Your brand strategy needs to think about converting the people at your digital storefront but also consider how to appeal to people on the horizon with a telescope, looking for something even if they’re not sure what that is yet. SEO isn’t finished, it’s becoming more strategic, SSO (Strategic Search Optimisation) maybe?
We are now in the era of zero-click search — for SEO pros, the attribution modelling which justified budgets — the ‘proof’ of success (traffic metrics) is disappearing before our eyes. So we must adapt. Years of SEO work hasn’t become redundant overnight — earlier I compared SEO to the engine room, today I would say it acts like an anchor while a storm blows and we work to steady the ship.
Looking back, on many occasions I felt some businesses I worked with got more than they deserved from good SEO — they made sales even though they weren’t the best fit for the customer. Over time this corrected itself and customer loyalty dwindled because product offerings didn’t stack up in the medium to long-term. Often SEO was about who shouted loudest or who ticked technical boxes earliest and oftenest (it really is a word?!).
When traffic volume was the goal, SEO strategies were more generic — AI advances on the supply side and demand side of the search equation are reshaping what optimisation looks like and while AI tools can speed up much of the mundane SEO work, there is a need to develop tailor-made strategies to align to your users intent and serve your business goals.
Today, tomorrow, that’s not going to cut it. AI will serve user intent better. I believe SEO fundamentals can act like an anchor in the changing, choppy seas of user search but matching brand to user intent is the platform for building success.
It would be naive to think that in the AI age, doing more of the same SEO will work. There is no hack! The truth is we’re at the start of a steep learning curve on the future of SEO, especially with respect to how old school search overlaps with chatbot usage and consequentially, how traditional SEO interlaces with optimising for Chatbots. It will be interesting to watch how SEO evolves over the next couple of years.
