How to do seo in 2025 and rank on google
We’re going to be going over next gen seo, pretty much how you can dominate in 2025 and all the things that you need to change. So, let’s dive right, in uh. My name is neil patel I’m, the co-founder of np digital uh, and today with us we have scott and rob um scott. Do you want to give a quick introduction of yourself and then rob go for it? Next, absolutely hello! Everyone? My name is scott simmerman I’m. Our associate director of technical seo at np, digital and oversee the tech success for our global clients, and my name is robson. Dula I am the director of seo here at np, digital um, I oversee all of our seo clients, and you know, have fun on webinars and doing thought leadership. Things like this and excited to talk with you all the day, I’m like is it me or where the imag is switched of you. Two underneath I could be wrong. I’m like wait, I’m confused here, all right, so um we’re np digital we’re global ad agency um. If you ever want to work with us, you can scan the qr code right there and lead you to our website. We offer all the services out there that one can think about seo paid media, email, cro, social. The list goes on and on um, we have quite a bit of tools.
We’re over a thousand people. We’ve won tons of awards have a lot of clients. In other words, you know, we’ve produced a lot of amazing results for the companies we work with. So what is search in 2025? Most people look at search as hey it’s a google game. We did an interesting study in which we looked at how many searches on each and every every single platform out there. The one platform- that’s not in this study here- is chad gpt. The last time I looked up their numbers, it’s around a billion a day. So if you include that there would be around 46.1, but in this chart is 45.1 billion um and based on the chart, data google has 18.8%, if you add in chat gpt google still roughly at 18% but it’s just 18% of searches like when people like oh yeah, everyone, searches on google, no they’re searching roughly one out of every five times on google they’re searching four out of every five times on other platforms, like amazon, has 3.5 billion searches a day. Instagram has 6.5 billion, and people on instagram are searching for friends content type right now. The type of searches people performing on different platforms varies like on amazon. People are looking for a product to buy, but this just gives you idea that you need to optimize for all platforms that can sell your products and services versus just google and if you think, seo is not really worth investing in anymore.
We looked at sites that were new websites less than three years old websites that were established, and we looked at the return on seo over time for new websites versus established established websites see a pretty quick return. New websites do see amazing returns. It just takes a little bit longer. People turn to google because of search right, whether it’s for brands, which is roughly 31 27% of uh searches, which is kind of crazy to think about, and you know it’s a lot of generic searches um as well as brand. If you look at the top 10 queries and it comes out each year um. The last time I checked, I, haven’t checked out the 2024 data, I believe on the 2023 data, or was it 2022 either one of those years, I believe like seven of the top 10 queries were for brands and they also search for informational and navigational.
Those also make make up big chunks um. All this data really does help. You determine what kind of content you should create to maximize the traffic you can get to your website. People also turn to other channels for s, like social media. You can search for a friend, you can search for content type people also search turn to ai chat bots like chat, gbt and gemini, and you know perplexity just wanting quick answers. Google is also integrating some of these features in but there’s other platforms. People use in search is turning into a game of what we see with social media. The average person uses over six platforms per month think about that for a minute people talk about facebook, being dead, people still use it. Uh I believe meta makes roughly the same amount of money from facebook as they do from instagram. The last I checked technically the last I checked. It was actually facebook generating more revenue, but it’s getting neck and neck where instagram may overtake facebook soon, but it just goes to to show that people use a lot of platforms. Even if you ask most people like oh I, don’t use facebook. Well, the revenue data shows that people still do use it, in other words, search is multimodal 90% of consumers use multiple devices to complete a single task, such as doing a research or purchasing a product, or even figure out which service provider to use not just looking up reviews, but also doing things like seeing what other companies have that alternative or figuring out all right? Do they? Actually, you know, are they doing or they solving their problem the correct way or is there another solution, that’s more efficient or faster and here’s an example of how search works in today’s world.
So someone goes to a conference, they see someone writing notes, but on a digital device they take a picture. Google has something called lens. You then take your phone. Google shows you hey. This is remarkable. This is a notebook that allows you to write. Then you go to their website sign up for their newsletter. Look at reviews on reddit, maybe check them out on amazon and other main. You know platforms and sites that sell the product. You get an email announcement, then for remarkable, because you choose not to buy and like hey, we got a deal. You then like all right. Let me go check in person at best, buy uh, you go drive there and you’re like all right, I like actually using I test out the product. Then you go home and then you complete your purchase online because you found that cheaper deal because they’re running a 30% promotion and best buy didn’t have that. That’s an example of a journey and it is people using multiple channels, multiple devices, and that is how they’re buying in today’s world. So that means for your seo strategy. You got to look at a lot of channels a lot of devices and you got to think not just hey. People are typing some people search through google lens, which is visual, some people search search through voice.
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If you have young kids, you will find that the younger generation has learned to search through voice before they even learn to type so for the future. Generations you’re going to see voice search being the main way they search because that’s how they were taught. While we were taught to do it through text, first and seo still plays a crucial role in customer acquisition. Look at the study that we did on window window shoppers versus buyers and when you look at quality visitors, seo still does extremely well, so does pay to ads and so does direct traffic right, but don’t take it for granted. It’s a channel, that’s harder, but it’s a channel that has a much higher roi from what we’ve seen and when we talked about search everywhere, optimization as a new seo.
It’s because of this study we surveyed 5,343 people in 2020 and most of them use search in. Like google to do their searches in 2024, we surveyed 11,15 people and they’re using search engines like google and being they’re, also using social media and ai chat, bots you’ll notice that the percentage adds up to more than 100% and. It’s because people can use more than one channel to perform a search. It just shows that you got to optimize for all these channels and the new channels will start dominating 2025 that a lot of people haven’t f focus on yet like social shopping, and you bet they’re, going to start integrating things like search.
Chat gpt is already doing that. It’s pretty much search, driven, podcasting google, actually indexes podcasts within their search engine um organic social search is really huge. If someone types in purses, why doesn’t louis, vuitton or chanel show up right, even if it’s brand awareness, it’s all really important to drive the most roi and google sur is also focusing on on diversifying their content. You’re, seeing videos and images really boom you’re, seeing the ai responses really boom, as well and in google there’s tabs for different video types as well. When you also think about zero clicks, yes, zero clicks have been increasing over time, but danny copan from google released a statement saying, google has driven more clicks to websites each and every single year from its existence and he’s talking about organic clicks and we’ve seen that true in our data as well so clicks, aren’t everything I want you to start thinking about seo as really full funnel marketing- and it can also be used heavily for brand awareness and we’re seeing it provide really effective results, the new opportunities you also need to think about are long form, videos short form videos and also optimizing images.
You can’t see it in the screen shot on the right side, but if you do a google search, you’ll see a tab for short form, videos and long form. Videos that’s how popular different video formats are for them to be willing to create multiple tabs for long form versus short form. So now, let’s dive in on how you can dominate search in 2025, awesome I’m, going to take it from here and walk you all through some things. That may already be sort of table stakes in seo, but also some new concepts that we think are going to be important. This year and the first being really focusing on the fundamentals, I think we hear this a lot, but when it comes down to it, you want to remove anything that is going to decelerate your progress so sight, speed related issues any crawling issues, any redirects. They may not be working and, most importantly, I think trimming the fat when it comes to both the technical debt and the content. That’s on the site, it’s always good to keep a focus on these fundamentals. There you want to highlight your experience, expertise, authority and trust, and one of the ways you can do that are several ways is collaborating with industry leaders actually acquiring links that are from quality websites, because youve deserved it. Looking for ways to increase the amount of times your brand is mentioned in different communities, and then with that, you need to be updating your content um as a byproduct to keep things fresh.
Looking at the depth of content is quite important and I think what sticks out here is this second point where you want to aim to create the most informative resource on the web on a given topic and I, think if you you ask yourself if you’ve done that or not it really should serve as a basis for if you need that piece of content to begin with, there are a lot of different ways to discuss factual information, but having your own unique details and insights are what’s going to set that apart in the coming years. Building a brand is one difficult, but it’s also very important for longterm success. So the way that you’re able to sort of build a community around whether a personal or a business brand, sharing your insights and valuable opinions and thought leadership opportunities gives your brand a chance to get more credibility in front of the eyes of others who are searching for similar concepts, and so there are a lot of ways, you can do that multimedia content and we’ll discuss some of the tactics there, but having an authoritative brand is a foundation. You can rest on um in order to build the rest of the marketing channels. Up the organization of content is key, I think you know. Historically in seo we we pursue these keyword, themes and sort of exhaust them to death, but when you look at the structure of the underlying concepts, so in this we have a guide to email marketing. Each one of those sub pieces really are what the user is looking for to ladder up to the ultimate guide um. So you have to think about what are the individual needs pain points and what is the information that someone needs in order to master this concept and then by clearly grouping those together?
You give them an opportunity to understand this from the top down, adding more structure to any page content, whether it be fa, cues or more user generated which we’ll get into in a few slides here.
Um provides more information, one for crawlers and different llms. To pick up, but two shows that you have an active audience and you’re engaging in answering their questions, so um consider adding some of these components within the copy and also sourcing those answers and questions from your own users to begin with. If you do that correctly, then, typically, what we can see is that those questions, if a user has them in search, could surface your responses via that page in the search results directly, which is positive for the brand schema, goes without saying for a lot of for a lot of cases. But you know we’re not just thinking about google anymore and other systems and other platforms use structured data to help understand content as well, some maybe even to uh a more extensive um in a more extensive nature than google given google’s algorithms are quite advanced, so leveraging things like the knowledge panel making sure your person place and organization schema is in place and then, in some instances, implementing same as to help establish those connections between different concepts. That search engines will try and understand. We like to go uh where google favors things, but, of course only when it’s justified for the user.
In this case, you know you want to cozy up with a few of these tactics that tend to get rewarded in search more than others and related to consumer. Guides having corresponding youtube videos and then social forums like reddit and kora, where you know the community actively engages around a brand and then there’s an opportunity there to essentially have your voice heard, while not being commercial because community like reddit, for example, that can go south very quickly, you want to create truly new content and factual information is a bit of a thing of a past in terms of getting rankings and clicks, you may be able to generate impressions for this type of information nowadays, but as far as the bottom of the funnel we’re going to lose a lot at the top here um. You know this example. Is our bananas, nutritious I, think it’s a very rudimentary one in the sense that we will see. Ai overviews start to answer more and more complex questions with certainty over time um, and so you should be thinking about your content in that sense and what is future proofed? What can’t be explained in a couple of sentences and try and build a strategy around that?
You want to identify trends and really jump on them, um before they become the talk of the town and so a lot of times in seo. We’re looking at third party volume tools and those are going to take some time in order to record trends that are emerging on different platforms- and you know, 15% of the searches on a daily basis have never been searched before, and so that’s obviously an opportunity for marketers um. But it’s also an opportunity for us to even create some predictive content around things we think are going to become more popular. After we hear it buzz on social media before we actually see that data reflected in a third party tool, suggesting the search volume so important to focus on keywords, of course. But if you see trends that are starting to bud on social media, you can capitalize on those without really having the seo data to back it up right out of the gate. Local seo continues to be just a massive deal for all businesses. In my opinion, with a local presence, you know, brands are losing around 54 billion dollar a year by just ignoring local seo, to begin with um often times you know, just in a personal level, you see a business you’re trying to search for it and as an seo you see their profiles not claimed. The knowledge panel is not there and you think they’re missing out on a lot of business here, because they could be engaging in consumers that are specifically looking for the brand, but their local configuration doesn’t really allow them to show up. So we find that brands with higher um visibility index tend to see a much higher uh revenue growth, year-over-year and again people will always search for for brick and mortar locations. It’s the nature of of how we operate in the world um, and so don’t ignore this. If your business has a local component as neil alluded to earlier voice and conversational searches are going to continue to be um, you know a focus in in coming years and I think the conversational component is the bigger one here.
You know there will certainly be users that are a younger generation that are innately. You know catered towards the voice experience, but the way llms I think are changing how people search and the nature of the follow-ups that they’re asking and the context they’re providing. So it’s hard to think about what are those conversations that are happening and how could we accomplish this with content um to serve what the user is actually looking for and if you can actually think just a step beyond that and go sort of above and beyond what the standard conversation would be, that gets back to what we’re talking about about creating truly unique uh information for the user
online visual search um, especially if you’re in e-commerce and have products to sell are, is going to be massive in our opinion, so I’ve used I use, google lens, all the time looking for products that I haven’t quite discovered yet, and we see that visual search is expected to grow um around 17.4%. You know over the next uh eight years or so so what do you do in order to actually capitalize on this? Well, you want to use custom imagery, you want to cap custom metadata and you want to make sure that you’re ahead and have all the markup in place before your other competitors do so um. Even if you think about the nature of the ser and how, in certain e-commerce scenarios, it has literally become a pure shopping experience, you need to be thinking about how your products are visually represented within the results and just think about it, google lens is used 10 billion times a month right, like that’s a lot of searches that people take for granted.
I know it’s not crazy popular yet compared to traditional google search, but it’s growing at a very rapid pace, very true and and to neil’s point now that they’ve really integrated it in you can rightclick search with google lens. It’s only going to promote usage as it’s innately featured in chrome, yes and as it gets better too right, because when you search on google tr, google lens it’ll end up showing you other similar products. But imagine when people need a problem solve and it actually solves your problem, because you can just do visual search and talk into it at the same time and show what’s broken. It teaches you how to fix it like when it starts getting more advanced like that and I know. Google shown clips of that uh in the past. It’s just we haven’t seen it come to fruition really, but when that kind of stuff comes to reality, you won’t see 10 billion searches a month, you’ll see hundreds of billions of searches, a month, yep absolutely um, so you want to be prime position uh to take advantage of this, as the trend continues all right, so you want to also find ways to combine both the intent and traffic, and this is this is a balance that we always try and strike um, you know, the high traffic stuff is still very important in this example accounting software um.
But if we break that down into what is somebody actually looking for? You can start to see that the best accounting software for general contractors, while that might represent a much smaller volume of 210 searches. If you were able to convert 30% more visitors off of that volume versus getting more traffic to your business, which one is going to matter more, so it’s important to consider the niche topics and the nuance queries in addition to your top level terms that you’re really trying to go after um, and we find that for businesses that aren’t number one player in their space going after some of the more secondary terms that you can actually win on ends up being more fruitful from a business perspective and reviews will I.
Think above all else, the trust signals and the way that you engage your community going forward is going to matter significantly beyond google as well. So we look at reviews, it’s an important component of our seo campaigns and we had three review related algorithm updates in 2023 um. You can look at the traffic for pages with reviews and on average you can see how this scales up so with 2011 reviews or more um you’re, seeing an average of over 700 visits where, with 10 reviews or less um, you see less than 200 and that actually makes sense when you think about your own search, behavior online. You know if you see the markup in the results where you have the stars under the results. You click through you’re able to consume those reviews and make a better purchase decision, whereas some brands that don’t feature them leave the consumer wondering. Has anyone had a bad experience with this and may be reluctant to stick around creating a great user experience is always something that’s been important, but I.
Think some of the leaks earlier this year highlighted these systems and engagement as truly actually being part of some of the core algorithms, previously google’s liked to deny this you know, but when we look at the user experience it’s beyond just page speed and the mobile experience, it’s really. How long are people staying? What are they actually doing when they’re on the site and when we think about experience, it goes beyond just the first consumption of content above the fold, it’s the entire thing um. So we keep that at the forefront. Digital public relations is one of the key ways that we can make sure our brand’s being highlighted in the right places and with the right conversations. So it helps boost brand recognition. You can engage different journalists, bloggers and influencers, especially nowadays, in order to promote your messaging and get it to the right people and encouraging um positive brand mentions through reviews and comments, even in forums to enhance the ai’s perception of your content. Quality is something that we’re starting to experiment with, as well and in general. You know where there is an active community discussing things related to your business. We believe it’s important important to participate and to engage those customers, whether it be through outreach reviews or simply just conversation, attracting natural links.
Um is you know something I think a lot of content, productions struggles to do because of the fact that it’s not truly unique. So when you add proprietary studies and data, infographics and videos, it adds a ton of value to the page and makes it more sharable. But you know you can’t just add any proprietary data and just sort of throw it out of thin air. It has to exist within some sort of context that the consumer gets um. In the example on the right, you know how marketers are spending their money in 2025. We validate right out in the headline that this is a statistically significant with 11 over 11,000 marketers surveyed. Um for us, this is obviously something that we do consistently and having proprietary studies and being able to put your own lens on industry. Data is important to attracting customers to your brand, because if you offer a different perspective and it resonates with them, you can reap the rewards of that yeah.
And if you look at our business, I post on social media and the company does um I post roughly twice a day. One of them use usually stats and data and graphs, and it’s been going well for us- doesn’t necessarily get as much engagement as let’s say, a short form video, but we’re seeing it drive better leads in the long run and it’s hard to track of course. But when we talk to people, a lot of them are like oh cool. Let’s the data that you put out there want to work with the data driven firm um that can look at what’s wrong and figure out what to do based on you know, data versus someone’s gut yeah. That last point is really important. Right like if you’re able to tell the audience we study this and here’s the data to support the claims that we’re making it’s far more valuable than just saying. Here’s what we noticed- and these are the claims um so great point, um couple of last ones here. So encouraging user generated content, I think, is something brands maybe have shied away from in the past, because it can be difficult to control if there is negative andor positive sentiment, but when you encourage users to come to the website, leave their experience and actually provide a sort of a real take on what it like to either use a product or engage with the brand um. It shows that there’s an active community and you’re actually listening to your users and this matters to humans, obviously, but when llms and crawlers scour the web, you know they’re looking for these context, signals to see. Okay, how active is this brand and engaging with their customers versus the other, because they will consider that in their in their question in their their data, so um it’s important to keep this in mind. We think it’s a good thing to let everybody sort of share their opinion and quell it back from there um, and then it in turn can allow you to use these in different content. Formats like these quotes that we have listed on the right hand, side all right, rounding it out here.
I think, there’s no question that you can’t afford to ignore bing anymore um. Obviously you know google has a massive dominant market share, but it’s dropped a few points um year-over-year into 2024, especially in the us, on desktop searches. So as the open ai integration with b continues to roll out, there’s apple ai, there’s co-pilot builds here. You can’t afford to ignore all of the other engines that are potentially driving traffic and to neil’s point earlier. There are billions, ions of searches happening across other search engines um and how we capitalize on that outside of google is really where some of these tactics are going to come into play and rob will actually walk you through a few of those as well and really quick, you got to look at how they’re also co-mingled too, for your own internal purposes. So, for example, bing powers a lot of chat, gpt, search right or search gpt, whatever you want to end up, calling it um and when you look at you know, chad gbt, you can bet you that co-pilot is just variation or version of it. Apple ai from my understanding, they’re using a lot of chat, gbt or it is powering it um and I- believe they have a sweetheart deal where apple doesn’t even have to pay for uh open ai to power it for them, because apple has so many users, I believe so and yeah so to neil’s point.
These I think we’ll see a lot of other integrations as well um. You know gpt may power, other search platforms and other tools. As well and google may exist, sort of in its own microcosm as the the organic algorithm sort of juggernaut, but um anytime, you see a market share. Loss of you know over three points for someone like goog. You know something is happening um and it’s interesting to see that most of this is isolated to desktop um, not mobile as well. So just some interesting stats for the group and just think about this right. Bing gets you ch. So when you optimize for being that means, it also helps you with chad gpt right. It also helps you with apple ai I’m, assuming one day they put it on a computer uh. Maybe they already have I haven’t seen it yet, but I have seen it on a mobile phone but yeah so optimizing for one platform like being when you think they have a much smaller market share can actually get you in multiple places and get you way more visibility than uh.
What you see on the surface level, because being’s true market share, is much deeper than what’s being reported due to their integrations and other platforms like chat, gpt, awesome, yeah and just to round this out. I think the ranking factors across the two are are very similar, but one thing google doesn’t have: is this massive partnership, obviously with open ai and the way that that directly integrates into gbt? In addition to search so uh, whereas google? It is just the search ui? You know you’re you’re not going to necessarily um get gpt results, powered by google search, so understanding where they’re embedded um the fundamentals still work for each of the platforms. There’s no real difference in terms of what should be focusing on as far as foundational elements, but I think on the bing side of things, the social, the engagement metrics that are really more public in terms of how they consider them. Um are things that are not going to be ignored and that dovetails into what we were alluding to with llms and engaging with your users: how is it doing on social? What are the external uh factors that are influencing user experience that can be considered? I think we’ll start to see more advancement out of that from the open, ai camp, alongside being in microsoft awesome.
Now we’re going to get into generative engine, optimization and I’m going to hand it over to rob uh to talk about if we think this is a new form of seo great thanks scott- and this is one of the biggest questions that we get from all clients that come to us: how do we optimize for ai? What should we be doing, and the answer that we give them is the same that you see here is that geo or generative engine optimization is very, very similar to seo. It es a lot of the same tactics that seo does um and there’s a lot of crossover um, and this doesn’t apply to just one type of generative engine right. This is for ai overviews. This is for search gpt. This is for microsoft co-pilot. This is for perplexity, um, and what we’ll talk about in some of the following, slides are ways that you can make sure that you’re optimizing for ai um, which again is very similar to seo, and you can take that directly from the horse’s mouth right. Even google says this. If you look on their support section of their website, there’s nothing special for creators to do to be considered uh for ai overviews other than to follow regular guidance for appearing in search as covered by google search essentials. So google is telling us directly there’s nothing special. You have to do you just have to do what you would normally do an seo to appear in all of these ai search engines and and a quick note. We actually saw this because, when google rolled out ai overviews, we looked at our client data from a week prior the roll out to week post the roll out on our smb division, because we had uh, more client quantity and we looked at us specific data. We saw a little bit more than a 1% increase in clicks because of the ai overviews right and then from there. Of course, we start optimizing more and more um, but a lot of our customers overall got included in ai overviews and it helped them with traffic. A lot of people said: oh, this is just going to kill traditional seo. It doesn’t it’s just another area to um get placement just like a knowledge graph absolutely, and you want to start thinking of search if you haven’t already in terms of intent, kind of, like scott, had said in the earlier section right um.
Yes, you still want to pay attention to keywords, but it’s not as important as it used to be right in the old school days of seo. You could stuff keywords and you could rank for things now. We want to think of what is the intent behind the query. What is the ser telling us? What is the overview pulling in as results, and you know what information is it giving so think of it through that lens, um and I think that you’ll see a lot more um success in future proofing. Your strategy, rather than focusing just on keywords, alone um and you know you- can use ai to help understand your content.
Um and formatting and I think the the main takeaway that you want to get from here is that you want to be concise and well structured right. You want to summarize key takeaways, you want to use nice structure with headings and subheadings use, bullet points and lists, be concise and then also structure. Your content, so search engines and ai can understand it right. Using schema, markup, like scott, talked about using faqs and howtos. Without your content, using you know, image objects using review, aggregate ratings and testimonials right so be concise, be structured well both for users and for search engines. That’s the path forward and again you’ll see some of our search. Gpt, optimization hacks follow exactly what we talked about on the previous slide right. Providing summary key points, make sure you’re mentioning your brand and reviews optimizing for longtail keywords and being conversational um. You know following technical seo best practices like site, speed and schema. You know using intent and relevance, maybe more so than keywords and making sure that you’re refreshing your content, that’s in depth that has high eat um a lot of times we’ll talk about this a little bit later in the presentation refreshing, your content can pay a lot bigger dividends than producing that new content and as the nice little neil chat. Bot at the bottom says this isn’t very different than traditional seo. Is it right so a lot of the same crossover um between ai, optimizations and seo, and obviously content quality is going to be super important, important.
It’s the cornerstone of current seo strategies and it’s going to be the cornerstone of your strategies moving forward. So that begs the question: what type of content should you be creating you know you, you want to make sure that you’re investing in blog posts absolutely but also tools like calculators and things like that products and service pages, and obviously your homepage as well. It’s going to be a lot of branded traffic, but um. You know. Brands are kind of the way forward, um in this new era of search so start thinking of all the different pages on your website. What their purposes are, what their conversion rates are? What the keywords they should be going after and make sure that you’re optimizing them uh to you, know uh to to fit your goals, um and knowing your audience is absolutely crucial right, as you can see on the graph on the right.
Different age groups interact with content differently right. The way that baby boomers versus gen x versus millennials, interact with different content and platforms are totally different right. You might be extremely successful on podcasts for one you know type of age group you might be extremely successful on blog posts or other type of content for other age groups. So understanding your audience is crucial in today’s seo and it’s only going to be more important going forward because you’ll know where to invest your time and money in terms of your audience and where they consume their content. The most uh.
We always like to talk about this in all of our presentations in terms of resisting the the ai temptation right. Our study show that people prefer human content over ai generated clutter. We like to think of ai as a tool right, it’s not the finished product. It definitely needs a human touch, so it can get you part of the way there it’s great for generating, outlines and giving you thoughts, but if you really want people to digest and respect your content, it needs to be infused with that human touch and that human element um again, you want to think about creating user centric content right so, like I was talking out about before use ai tools to help you right to help you understand who your customers are to help, you understand, you know what your content should be, but then you want to create that personalized content that delivers high value to different audience segments just like we talked about in the previous slid. So leveraging those audience insights, understanding who your audience are understanding their behaviors their intents and their desires, as well as their location and search. History is going to be very critical going forward in terms of crafting the right message for the right people in the right places.
Like we talked about here too, you want to infuse your content with authority. Think about the first e in eat that experience element. That’s one thing that chatbots and ai can’t do right. It can’t tell you about the vacation that it took in the bahamas right. It can’t tell you about the product that it used right. People need to infuse that so right in the first person include your own experience, add subject matter, expertise right. These are all the things that ai can’t do again. You can leverage it and make sure that you know it’s helping you get on the right path, but again focus on that first e of the eat and that’s going to really create those personalized experiences that users enjoy and want to see something else that I’ve seen kind of crop up in the chat and has been a hot topic in seo, is you know how long should content be, and in the early days of seo it was like. Okay, you could write a 2,000w article and that would you know rank for whatever your topic was now. You want to think of brevity and clarity right between 2000 and 2015 human attention spans shrank by a whopping 25%. This is more prevalent in younger generations than it is in older generations, and we’ve seen in terms of rankings that you don’t have to write 2,000 words anymore. To rank. You can write, succinct, um information. You can write a 500w article and as long as that information is structured right and it provides provides the answer clear and concisely. You can still rank and search um and again this mirrors exactly the trends that we’re seeing in terms of attention spans and how humans want to consume. Information and microsoft canada did a study and they found that the humans humans actually have a shorter attention. Spin than goldfishes now not surprised yeah, you can think tik tok for that one. That was my next comment, and this is exactly what we were just talking about on the previous slide.
Right value doesn’t require volume. If you can answer the question succinctly and provide users, the information that they want to know it doesn’t have to be 2,000 words right and you can see the average word count for all content that we analyzed in each industry right, it’s not very long and that’s. Okay, you can see that some of these are under 500 words. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, write, long form, content, I, don’t want that be to be the main takeaway. There are certain subjects and topics that do deserve a deep dive and do deserve a lot of those. You know long form, pieces and words, but it doesn’t have to be the end all and be all um and again thinking of your user attention spans. You want to make sure that you’re crafting content. That is going to align with the way they consume. Information yeah class example here is recipe content where, if you’re, if you’re searching for a recipe, there’s about a 2,000w article on top of the actual recipe in order to get to it, that’s an an instance where adding more content is actually not helping you and the user is probably going to bounce because it’s not giving them what they need quickly and don’t always think about content.
As text like, if someone wanted to google how to tie a tie, they want to see a video or animated gif on how to tie a tie. They don’t want to read text on how to tie a tie. Great point exactly- and this is a um- a metaphor that I use all the time you want to think of your website like a race, car right race, cars, don’t have a ton of fluff; they don’t have a bunch of weight weighing it down a lot of content that exists on websites just isn’t help helpful right. It’s fluffy, it’s duplicative, it doesn’t have target any keywords: it doesn’t serve any user intent and sometimes less can be more. This is especially prevalent in the e-commerce space. You can have tons of pages with parameters and products with colors and all these different things that users aren’t searching for and all it’s doing is weighing down your site and google’s helpful content updates and a lot of the subsequent algorithm updates that they’ve um.
You know created recently, are targeting exactly that right. Don’t write content for the sake of writing. Content. Make sure that your website is streamlined, cut out the fluff and write content and have pages on your website that actually matter and that users are searching for yeah along the same lines.
I think writing content. That’s not necessarily related to your business can hurt you here, especially if you’re in sort of a regulated space or your money in your life um that can hamper the entire website, if you’re writing about topics that you really shouldn’t or don’t have the credibility to do so so um, that’s important to keep in mind as well. Definitely yeah keep keep your eyes on the prize. Write stuff, that’s relevant for you and your business. Um, we I alluded to this a little bit earlier in the conversation, but people tend to spend more time creating new content than maintaining it and updating it. And you want to look at your most successful blog post and make sure that you are refreshing it over time right that you’re updating! You know if you have an article, that’s the best, whatever of 2023 go back and update it for 2025, you know it’s there’s! So much value in going back and updating and repurposing old blog posts, and it can actually lead to more and steeper traffic increases and creating that new content does at times, and this is exactly what this graph kind of shows here right. We worked with 846 marketers, who received at least 10,000 monthly organic visitors to their site, and we saw that you know the largest, growth can be seen by refreshing content, it doesn’t mean don’t write net new content, but if you’re writing stuff, that’s duplicated or you already have content on your site or again, you’re writing content for the sake of content, you can spend more time doing that when all the value is going back and refreshing the content that is proven to be performing. It can future proof losses down the road um, and you can see based on the graph here, that uh a lot of the largest growths that you see do come from refreshing content, not necessarily producing stuff, that’s net new. This is exactly what this slide is trying to say here right, the 8020 rule, the top 20% of your articles, probably drive 80% of your conversions, probably drives 80% of your traffic, make sure you’re updating those first um. Anyone who works in seo you’re digging through your analytics you’re digging through your search console.
You know that the line share of your traffic doesn’t come from all of your articles. It probably comes again from this top 20%, so focus on that focus on updating those um. Even if it hasn’t, you know dro in searches at all. You want to make sure that refreshes are a regular part of your seo
cleanliness, because if you don’t touch them for two years over time, they eventually will drop and you will see those traffic losses and if those are from your most popular articles, that’s going to really hit you in your bottom line, where you don’t want to be hit. If you are creating new content, you want to make sure that you’re creating unique content right, especially now that on the internet, you’ve had websites that have been around for 10 20 30 years. A lot of the topics are already covered right to some of the earlier points. Uh in this slideshow you’re not going to outrank the web mds of the world, um you’re going to have to write content, that’s truly unique that you know targets keywords that are maybe trending that don’t even have search volume uh and that match the intent that users have because you know they’re searching for it, whether you’re, seeing those trends on tik, tok or youtube or other search platforms. So not to say you don’t want to write, you want to write content that doesn’t target keywords, but it isn’t the end all and be all um and again you want to make sure that you’re writing unique content and stuff that isn’t internally cannibalized content that you already have you want to refresh that old content instead and you also want to keep an eye on social media trends.
This is exactly what I was talking about on the previous slide. You may not see search volume on google, yet for certain things that are trending you may see. You know the example that you see here: quiet luxury, cross body bags for one a brand like tory burch right. It might not have a ton of search volume on google, but you can see on reddit that people are searching for it. You can see on tik tok that people are searching for it and then you go over to google trends, and you know six months down the line, then that you see the search volume there. You want to be ahead of the curve. You want to be ahead of the trends and make sure that you’re keeping an eye on social media and using that as an inspiration for creating new content or pages on your website, uh to get there before users are searching for it, and you also want to make sure that you’re leveraging audience insights right like we said. Even if there isn’t search volume, people may be interested. One of my favorite hacks is looking at places like reddit or quora, and if you see that that is ranking in position one or two for a search query, that means there’s opportunity for you on your own website to write a page or a guide or something that targets that exact query, because you know people are searching for it and if it ranks highly, that means that there’s interest right. So that’s going to apply to linkedin facebook other keyword, research tool. Obviously you can use ours answer the public uh, but make sure that you’re leveraging audience insights and kind of look at these other platforms and see, if there’s opportunity for you to create that same content on your own website, where you know, there’s interest in demand already.
The real key to seo success in 2025 is a few things and we already discussed some of these things, but a you got to be everywhere. That’s why we call it search everywhere. Optimization your content really matters. It’s not just about cranking out tons of content. You got to update, maintain your content. You got to talk about new stuff that people haven’t seen seen before. You got to use stats and data to try to build the back links and when you build backlinks, you don’t want it from any junk site. You want to actually get it from webites that have traffic and the pages linking to you have traffic. So that way, people click on the links, because we’ve all seen from the uh google leak of their 2,500 documents that they look at even how many people click on the links right because they have all this chrome data. And you want to make sure that you engage and monitor trends like whether it’s turmeric face mask that really trended on tik, tok and instagram, and then people started searching for it and started buying products or the quiet luxury.
That rob talked about right, um and if I had to add in one more thing to really really do well is build a brand. You know a big part of google’s algorithm. These days is brands. Brands are crushing it in rankings. If you look, you know we showcase the stat earlier over 30% of the search queries are brand related. You got to have a brand to do well now your brand doesn’t have to be big like amazon or nike or netflix, or anything like that. But you need to have a brand whatever vertical you’re in and as long as your brand is turning up and to the right and growing. It sends the right signals to really boost your rankings.
So if you need help implementing any of these strategies that we discussed today take out your phone scan the qr code and you can book a call with our team um or you can just go to npd digital.com. We can help you with. You know seo in 2025 and beyond. We already know a lot of the new tactics and strategies we’ve been implementing this stuff. You know last year and the year before and we’ve been seeing really great results, hence we’ve been winning tons of awards like agency of the year um. We just won an award from google for our work in paid advertising as well. I forgot what it was called like uh, let’s see what it was but um and we won pretty much over. It was google, recognizes np digital fs media unification strategy at 24 agency excellence awards, in other words um. You know we’re even winning awards for the unique paid media strategies that we’re running, even though we didn’t really talk about that in our presentation.
So now, let’s dive into some questions all right colin. What do we have? We’ve got a lot. We’ve got a lot of good ones: first, webinar of 2025, happy new, year, everyone, some um, some pretty complex questions and some pretty uh some pretty fundamental ones. So neil, can you explain more about what direct traffic is? We’ve talked a lot about search traffic and social. Explain to the audience the difference between search traffic and direct traffic, and is there any sort of way to dive into direct traffic data to to glean any valuable insights? That question came up twice top of funnel is what really helps direct traffic. It’s people recognize your brand and they go directly to a website. That is a large chunk of your direct traffic. Uh people may also be coming from other platforms, and the links are trackable that could be considered direct traffic as well um, and it’s how you also want to define it uh in your analytics. This will show up as seo traffic or paid traffic, but someone could google your brand name like amazon, which is one of the most popular search qu.
They could count that as paid or seo, depending if they click on the paid link or seo, but I. Personally, look at that as direct traffic, yeah, bookmarks and all sorts of ways get directly. Yeah people still use those I think so neil there was another one for you. Would you and we we’ve talked about this in previous webinars? Would you say that blogging is still a good strategy? Is there a sort of roi number for just blogging in in general? That came up. Blogging is one of the most popular pages or blog pages are some of the most popular pages to a website you got to blog. If you want to do well in the world of seo, there is a huge roi to it for businesses that know how to do it right and I’m, going to caveat that, because most people look at like I got all this blog traffic and my my revenue didn’t go up yeah because it’s like neil patel.com, we’re owned by you know that website, even though it’s my name is owned by the ad agency np digital we sell marketing. Servic serves our most popular articles, used to be on things like discord or how to get more instagram followers, so much traffic from how to get instagram followers drive zero revenue. But on the flip side, you know revenue from things like uh, how to translate your blog into multiple languages and how to structure these weren’t the exact key word, but how to structure your blog? Should it be a subdomain or a subdirectory if you’re in multiple languages I believe that’s an article that causes to land adobe? Now, when you look at that, they spent millions of dollars with us right that article does not get much traffic, but it’s for the right audience and that’s why I wanted to caveat. It is people optimize for traffic with seo instead of optimizing for revenue, you got to really focus on your ideal customer profile and create content for them, and that’s how you do well with seo, combined with leveraging cro, because if, in our blog articles, adobe just reads it and it just breaks it down, but there’s no call to action that we have an agency like np, digital or collecting leads.
We wouldn’t have got them as a customer. So now you have to create the right type of content for your audience. You need to do conversion optimization on your blog, so that way you can funnel people who are reading to become a customer if you’re selling a product or a lead and number one and number two are the biggest mistakes on why companies don’t generate roi from their blog, if they do it right, seo crushes it look at our business.
Thank you so much for that scott’s, our technical guru. So there were several questions about schema. What the heck is schema, you know what uh, what are some best practices? What does implementing those best practices? Do you know maybe for uh voice search and some of the other things so scott. Can you just give us a quick crash course on what schema is and why? It’s so important yeah, so schema is essentially a code snippet that is placed on the website that helps define some sort of characteristic of the page, whether it’s the reviews on the page or whether it’s the author of the article, these are essentially entities on a page that google can understand in a structured way and then display them in search results. So um, if you have reviews on your page, for example- and you don’t see any reviews in the actual search result for that page, it is missing the opportunity to place a schema. Snippet to highlight that um, so in rudimentary terms it’s a small snippet of code that highlights a component of the page, so it can enrich the search results um. This plays I think the biggest role for
brands like e-commerce um, for let’s say not so much businesso business focus but where there are product pages, where there’s imagery, if you’re a local business um, all of these schema types help boost your visibility on the ser and help content, get better understood by search engines. There’s an extensive amount of resources in uh, google’s developer. Forums on this and there’re also several tools online that can use to generate these snippets for you without having to understand any code um so recommend that you uh try and test some of those out, yeah and and oftentimes helps with things like voice search as as well, neil, we got one for you, this one I know we don’t have a crystal ball um. But what is your vision for chat, gpt or search gpt, replacing google, both short and long term, any crystal ball stuff for 2025 and beyond I? Don’t see them replacing google I see it the same way as the social web, in which people use multiple platforms and that’s the data we’re already seeing we’re. Also seeing a huge trend, a lot of people use chat, gpt, including me, and my podcast co-host eric suum. We were talking the other day and now for a lot of basic stuff, we don’t go to chat gpt. We just type it into google, because we’re used to getting the response now from google and their ai overviews are drastically improving. When you talk to the older audience, when we talk about ai to them and when we talk to them in person and survey them, we notice that their patterns, they think like what you get in google through the ai overviews, a lot of people believe it or not that are like 60 70 years old, they have a ton of spending power.
Remember they bought their homes for pennies on the dollar. They believe chat. G gpt is the answer that google gave you in the ai overviews, crazy town. Why? Why we’re on the podcast topic, here’s a question for you, neil and and scott and rob. You may chime in here, because maybe schema has something to do with this one as well. But how do podcasts apply to voice search, conversational search is: is that a schema and a transcript thing like if you’ve got podcasts and and that’s a strategy for 2 like how do you, how do you get the most out of the podcast? Are they showing up in the serps, um, conversational, search, etc, etc? Any any thoughts or tips about podcasts, robert scott? You may know better than me um. For my understand. They just crawl and they’re, able to dis, dissect the audio and know what it is just like. Youtube knows what you’re talking about in a video but um I, don’t know exactly how they do it, but robert scott. You guys probably have a much better answer than I do yeah yeah, so I think it’ll depend.
You know based on the platform right, if you want it to be visible everywhere, I think having a transcription is nice I also think specifically for google search. If you’re able to annotate the video um, as so which points and what topics are discussed at which anchors, then that actually can show in search results when a specific query is asked um. So those those markers if you see on youtube, for example, um, are a great way to sort of index the topics of said podcast and then provide a transcription off the back of that awesome, so we got time for one one: more real, quick for robin scott. We talked quite a bit about authority and link building brand authority question twice: how do you improve or increase brand authority? What are like, the two or three most critical, most impactful strategies or tactics that businesses can take to increase brand authority yeah.
