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The BEST SEO Strategies for 2026

36m 34s

The BEST SEO Strategies for 2026

The transcription outlines advanced SEO strategies for 2024 and beyond, emphasizing adaptation to AI-driven search. Key strategies include optimizing for AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity by creating content that matches conversational queries and AI preferences, such as incorporating first-hand experience and detailed guides. This approach has led to significant visibility in AI overviews and citations. Additionally, traditional keyword research is no longer sufficient; instead, deep audience analysis—including customer journey mapping and psychographic personas—is essential to tailor content to specific user motivations and decision criteria. Implementing topic clusters and pillar content allows for comprehensive coverage of subjects, enhancing both AI and organic search performance. These strategies, derived from award-nominated campaigns, have driven substantial traffic and revenue increases for clients across various industries, from e-commerce to services, demonstrating their universal applicability despite the evolving search landscape.

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English
SEO is changing, you know that. There's AI, there's chat GPT, but of course, there is still mountains of Google traffic. How do you know what the best SEO strategies are for 20, 26 and beyond? What's the stuff that's still working? What's the stuff that's outdated? Well, today I'm gonna break down some of the best SEO strategies that we at Exposure Ninja are implementing for clients right now. How do we know that they're the best? Well, everything I'm covering today is part of a shortlisted campaign for the global search awards. That's right, these are some of the top SEO campaigns in the world as judged by an incredible panel of industry experts. We're gonna break down some of the Exposure Ninja strategies behind these SEO campaigns today. So there's around four or five different examples and across 14 different awards that we have been shortlisted for. We're gonna run through what we did, why we did it and most importantly, how to copy the best beers. Sound good? Off we go. Welcome to the Exposure Ninja Digital Marketing Podcast. (upbeat music) Welcome to the Exposure Ninja Digital Marketing Podcast. My name's Tim Cameron Kitchen. I'm the founder of Exposure Ninja. We are a digital marketing agency that helps our clients generate more leads and sales online. And for the last 12 years, we've been doing that through SEO and content. Today we're gonna be breaking down some of the most effective SEO strategies that we are seeing today. Now I'm gonna warn you, some of these are gonna sound a little advanced. This is way beyond, hey, just tweak your page titles or write some stuff that people find interesting. This is along the more advanced end of the spectrum. So forgive me, I'll try and break them down as much as I can and make these sort of actionable for you as well. There's a range of different businesses here from B2C, e-commerce, there's service companies, a whole range of stuff. So plenty of options. As always, the value is not in thinking, oh, this doesn't work for my business, but how do I implement this? Because the strategies, they really are universal. It's just how they apply it to different businesses. Okay, the first strategy that we're gonna take, the look through is implementation of AI search optimization. Of course, you know I was gonna cover it and it is the first thing that we're gonna be talking about. AI search is here right now and it's only gonna become more important. People are searching for things on chat GBT, you're searching for things on chat GBT. Google is serving up AI answers, whether we like it or not, we need to be optimizing for this. And if you don't have an AI search plan already, you are probably getting left behind by those in your space who do. So what does an AI search plan look like? Let's go to one of the examples. One of our clients runs an e-commerce store, they sell lawn care products. So how do we build them in the AI search plan and how do we get them lots of visibility in AI tools? Well, we carried out thorough keyword research, identifying the type of conversational topic queries that LLMs and these AI search tools like Poplexity were surfacing. We were playing around with these tools, seeing what types of underlying queries that they were running when we asked them questions about lawn care. We then built a keyword research plan around these. Once we had the keywords that we wanted to target or more accurately, the topics that we wanted to target, we then produced content which targeted those and in a way that we knew these tools liked. I loads of first person experience in the content, really detailed guide, very, very high quality. This led to some incredible visibility on Poplexity. If you go to the video version of this podcast on our YouTube channel, you'll be able to see breakdowns of all of this stuff. You'll be able to see the examples in front of you. But we got some great visibility on Poplexity, both getting cited as a source in the answers on Poplexity but also being referenced in the answers. And we also got some amazing visibility on AI overview. So if you search for, you know, particular weed killer types or advice on how to kill types of weeds that won't kill grass, you'll often see this website, our clients website cited as one of the top sources, as well as ranking nicely on organic search. In fact, because we'd put so much energy into optimizing for AI early on, and in fact, this was one of the clients that we were optimizing for AI search, really from the sort of style middle of 2024, which was when this was such a new thing. We were exploring this for Google's AI reviews before they even launched with this client. So when Google actually rolled out its new AI mode, this client was already ranking in top positions because the content had been so well optimized for these AI tools. Now a quick tip on this. If you want to rank and be mentioned by these AI tools and you want to be featured a lot, sometimes you can actually reverse engineer the strategy that you need using a tool like Poplexity. So for example, with this client, one of the things that we did is ran some different search terms, quite extended search terms, so long tail phrases. What we wanted to do was see the underlying web searches it was carried out. So Poplexity for those who don't know is sort of an AI search tool. It gives you answers if it's a simple question. For more complex questions, it runs off, and it does lots of searches online, and then compiles its information, compiles its answer from a bunch of sources that it finds. Now if you do these long tail searches and you head over to the tasks column, you can actually see the underlying searches that Poplexity is running. This then allows us to design our content strategy for these searches to make sure we're covering these topics in the content that we're publishing. It's not an exact science because Poplexity might run different searches each time, but if you do enough of this, you start to notice the pattern of the types of searches that Poplexity is running. Best X for Y, best X 2025 or 2026, that type of thing. So you can make sure that you're either creating content, covering these topics or covering these topics within existing content, and that can really help with your visibility in Poplexity. Now for this particular client, all of this meant that we were able to help them increase their website traffic, a hundred and 20% year on year. This is despite the carnage that AI has been causing elsewhere in their industry with traffic volumes. One of our skincare brands, we've got a skincare brand client that's very well known, and we've helped them dominate chat GBT for product recommendations. Now we use the similar sort of strategy here really, rather than focusing their content section on individual keywords, we help them build a strategy around topic clusters. So thinking about Pylotopics and then supporting content that we could write about those Pylotopics, this, when we're producing this content, use the same strategies before, you know, emphasizing first-hand experience, talking in a very natural way, making sure we're structuring the content in the way that we know these AI tools like to use inside. Now despite this brand being very well known and having a huge online presence, this strategy for them helps to increase revenue from the content section of their website by 451%, so a huge increase, given what an established brand this was, and how established their website has been. So that's a monster, monster result. So how do you use this sort of strategy for your business? Well, the key really is identifying the topics that your audience is most interested in and producing clustered content that hits them from all angles. You know, what does that mean? Well, let's say that we're going to start a phone case business together, right? And we're going to produce really high quality phone cases, and our USP is that they're going to be made of really high quality premium material. They're going to look as good as the phone that they are covering up, right? Well, how might we approach this kind of topic cluster about that? Well, we might identify that one of the topics we want to target is premium phone cases. So we're going to produce some content around premium phone cases. Now, as well as premium phone cases, that might be the pillar topic that we want to cover. But there might be sub-topics around that, like phone cases encrusted with diamonds or premium material phone cases. So these are related topics for this idea of premium phone cases. And that allows us to produce loads and loads of content from all angles. Then we could go on to Poblexian search for, you know, I've just bought the new iPhone 17 Pro Max. It looks amazing. I want to cover it in a beautiful case that actually makes it look better than if it didn't have a case. What are some of the options I could look for if prices know objects? A really long tail phrase. PoblexT is going to break that down. And it's probably going to do some background search of some things like best premium phone cases or stuff like that. We can then have a look at the different search terms that it's running in the background and make sure that those are all covered by either new pieces of content. Or we're going to make sure that each of those topics is covered as part of our existing content pillars. Has that makes sense? So that's how we're going to use this thing for ourselves. To do this, we obviously need to understand more deeply both our audience and what they're interested in, which leads us very nicely into strategy two, which is completely rethinking audience and keyword research. Now in the early days of SEO, our audience research was basically going on to some search tool and seeing how often people search for different phrases. We would then use that to design our content strategy. So if lots of people were searching for phone cases, we'd write content about phone cases. If lots of people were searching premium phone cases, we'd write lots of articles like best premium phone cases. Audience and keyword research has had to evolve because SEO has changed because search tools have changed. Keyword research on its own is not enough now. People search for much more longer and more detailed queries. They're getting more customized results from tools like chat, GBT or even Google. They're finding that they can ask much longer, more advanced queries that actually stack up lots of different topics and lots of different criteria. So the way that we're researching needs to change because we need a deeper understanding of our customers than just, hey, 58,000 people are searching for premium phone case every month. Yeah, but what are they interested in? What are their decision points? What does premium actually mean? Does that mean a $50 phone case? Or does that mean a $5,000 phone case? You need to really understand a lot more detail if you're going to be featured in the sort of answers that these AI tools are serving. So let me give you some examples to sort of make this seem a bit more normal for one of our clients that sells mortgages. We identified that there are actually a few different buyer journeys that their customers would go on. So some people would see a Facebook ad targeting a particular customer segment. They'd land on a page about this customer segment, they'd request the call back. They might download an app and complete some paperwork and apply for their mortgage. Other people would be searching online to see if their property qualifies for a certain type of mortgage. They'd then be in deep in the research and they'd be understanding this topic. And maybe if I moved here or if I moved here, or that type of thing, then they'd call a number shown on a Google ad that they see through remarketing and so on. Other people might be doing the numbers. They might be searching online for different mortgage calculators. They might visit a mortgage calculator on a website sign up for newsletter and so on and so on. So we identified that there were lots of different customer journeys that people would take. And actually people on these different journeys would need different types of content. They would have different questions. They would have different motivations. The people who are searching for the loan calculators are working at how much they can afford. The people who are searching if their property qualifies for certain types of loans are more interested in the location and making sure they're eligible for those loans. People who are seeing ads targeting different customer segments like veterans, they want a very tailored experience, which is all about veterans, they want to feel like they're working with a specialist. So we need to make sure that we were reflecting these different customer segments in the content that we were producing. So that's exactly what we did. We built a resource section on their website targeting people at each stage. We broke down all the information, the expertise inside this business into different categories. And we then segmented these out. Let me give you an example. So we had a category called mortgage essentials. Now that mortgage essentials category had a number of different articles inside it. It had some pillar content about different types of mortgage and do people qualify. It had some pillar content about what makes up monthly mortgage payments. So helping people understand the basics of the finance concepts behind the mortgages. Then it had supporting content. So these weren't necessarily pillar topics, but they might offer sort of niche advice on a certain subtopic. So mortgage dues and don't explain, for example, we had all of this, we had these categories, we had these pillars and these supporting pieces of content. And we could then tailor them to these different audiences and make sure that, for example, the content about what makes up a monthly mortgage payment, that's going to be most suitable to the more financially driven people who are doing the numbers in their heads. So we need to make sure that we're then linking through to those loan calculators and the other pieces of information on the website that are most relevant to that audience segment. Whereas the people that are thinking about, for example, buying versus renting, will then more about mortgage eligibility. Could they afford a mortgage, that type of thing? So we needed to make sure that the other content that we're referring to and the tools and calculators on the site were most relevant for them. So as you can see, this involved a lot deeper understanding of the different types of customer on the website than just smashing out some content based on some keyword research. Now this helped us grow traffic from a very measly less than 1,000 sessions in the first year to over 150,000 sessions after the 12 months or the first 12 months of the campaign. That's a 20,000% increase year on year on their traffic volume. We then more than doubled it again in the next year. And we're going to come back to exactly what we did and some other stuff that we did in strategy five. For the skincare brand, we took, again, a similar sort of understanding of their audience. But rather than looking at buyer journeys this time, we actually broke their audience down into six different personas. Now, historically in an industry like skincare, the personas might be broken down based on demographics. So, you know, women of a certain age, in a certain income bracket living in certain areas. But we found that actually those were really restrictive categorizations and really didn't tell the full story. So what we did instead after our research was we broke their core audience into six personas. These were, I guess, different levels of experience. So one of them, for example, was skincare newcomer. You know, these were kind of psychographic profiles. Really, we broke out these to understand a bit more about this target audience. So we built psychographic profiles for each of these audiences, working out what their priorities were and what motivated them to make a purchase. For example, how influenced were they socially? So the skincare newcomer called Alex is highly influenced socially. They rely heavily on peer recommendations, particularly from online forums like Reddit. How do they respond to innovation? Well, medium, they're open to new formulations of skincare, but they are skeptical and cautious about new trends. So we did this for all six of the personas. You might be thinking, why on earth would you do this? What does this have to do with SEO? Well, this allows us to understand these audiences much more detailed. It allows us to make sure that our content is tailored to each of these personas. For example, if we know that a persona is going to be interested in one particular topic, like a certain ingredient, for example, we know that one of these personas is going to be most interested in looking into the ingredients of a particular skincare product. We can make sure that when we're writing that content, we're tapping into the motivators and the sort of factors that are most likely to make these people buy. So for example, if we're talking about, let's say that we're talking to the skincare newcomer and we know that they are heavily influenced on peer recommendations and online forums like Reddit, but they are cautious about trends. If we're talking about a certain ingredient, we might want to talk about the fact that this ingredient is really popular on and it gets great reviews on Reddit, but this is a tried and tested ingredient. This isn't just a fad that's going to die down. This is a tried and tested ingredient with loads of scientific proof behind its efficacy. So we can tailor the content to these audience personas in a really precise way because we understand them. Now, why is that important? Well, as SEO becomes more and more long tail and the conversations that we have with search engines become more detailed, these search tools are looking for content that matches our priorities, our understanding of the world, our world view. So if I've already had a conversation with chat GBT that says, you know, I'm not interested in the stuff that's, you know, Fadi on TikTok, I want the stuff that's scientifically proven. When it's going to do its research and its finding products to recommend me, it's going to be recommending me stuff that matches my values, that matches my priorities. And if we've written our client's content in a way that is really targeted to those priorities, we've got a much better chance of being the recommendation or being the source in that answer. Hopefully that makes sense. Now, another one of our clients installs bathrooms for the elderly. We identify different audience segments for them. One of the key audience segments for this business is younger family members or carers that are buying a bathroom for their parents or relatives. Okay. Now, these people are early on in the research and they are very AI inclined, AI, they are using chat GBT for this type of research. So we needed to think about where they were at and the sort of topics that they were most likely going to be into and also what their decision criteria were going to be. By using this, we were able to create really tailored content for these different audience segments and we got some amazing results getting picked up in chat GBT, getting some local recommendations, getting some national recommendations. And we got an amazing testimonial from the people at the business saying, "Explosion is had a fantastic impact on our business through continuous optimization. We've had a steady flow of high quality traffic to the website, which steadily climbed their rankings by focusing on the keywords that matter most to our audience. And that's really what the next level of SEO is about. It's about making sure you are so focused on your audience." So how do you use this? Well, mapping your target audience into individual buyer personas is a really useful exercise. And by the way, if you find this super hard, even that's quite a useful and telling thing. A lot of Marxists have historically thought of their target audience as a sort of homogenous blob, and a single individual that they write to, whereas what we really need to do in the future and even in the present obviously, is break our audience into these different segments so that we can speak directly to them. At Exposion Engine, we'll often use things like scouring Reddit forums or conducting customer surveys or running customer calls to profile people to get under their skin. With the skincare brand, we ran surveys on Facebook so we can map people's responses against these profiles to understand what their motivations were. What you really want is you want those sort of quotes that define a customer persona. That allows you to work out what they're interested in, what objections they have, and what information they need to move forward. Then you can produce the content and rank for the sort of things that most matter to them. Strategy number three, content-driven commerce. With AI tools gobbling up more and more informational traffic, we need to make sure we're converting as many visitors as possible that find their way onto our website, including our content pages. So you might have noticed that traffic to your blog has dropped. Now, Google's trying to persuade everyone that the quality of that traffic is really high. That may be true, that may not be true, we don't really know. But the point is we need to convert as much of that traffic into sales as we possibly can. So here's exactly what we're doing right now. With our lawn care client, for example, we've worked with them to embed product features directly into the content pages. So you're on a content page, you're reading about different types of weed killers, then you see an embedded add to cart button and product tile for the weed killer that you're reading about. Perfect. It means you don't have to click onto another page, you don't have to go navigate to a link to see the product page, you can just click, add that product to cart directly from the blog. Maze it, right? Our skincare client, their blogs are previously mainly existed to tell the brand's story and cover product launches. But we knew that the content section on their website could do more and we knew that we wanted to drive commerce through that content section as well. So we help them restructure the content pages on their site around topic clusters as we covered earlier, things like skincare routines. Because if you've got an article about some sort of brand storytelling thing, like giving some information about a particular ingredient, that might be sort of interesting if you embed a product there. But if you've got like a, here's a skincare routine blog post that's ranking really well for certain skincare routine type phrases, and then you're embedding the products from that skincare routine in that post, well, that's a much more natural fit. So we've targeted a topic that has a bit more commercial intent and then we're embedding the products at the relevant point in those posts. Now, all of this really, really helped with the monetization of their content section, a 451% increase in the revenue generated by the content section of their website. And that helps contribute to an 8.5% overall increase in e-commerce revenue, which might not sound like a lot, but for a brand this size that is absolutely huge. So how do you do this? Well, obviously if you're on e-commerce business, you can just embed product tiles into your site, pretty straightforward. If you're not an e-commerce business, are your goal is to generate leads or to generate bookings or to generate software signup, you can still embed CTAs, calls to action in your content pages. Really important. Now, when we learn something through some great information, we're much more likely to buy from that source of that information because by teaching us something, they've just demonstrated their credibility and authority on the topic. So if I'm thinking about buying a lawn care product, someone's just taught me loads of amazing stuff and I can see they've got sick lawn themselves and these are the products that they use. I'm much more likely to buy from them than gone to Amazon and risk getting some generic product that may or may not even be what it says on the tin, right? That's how we work and that's how your customers work as well. If you've given them some really useful information and you've embedded a CTA at the right time in your content, that can be so effective. Speaking of which, let me live demo this concept for you, if you're listening to this thinking, I wish that our SEO campaign was shortlisted for global search awards, well, maybe we can help you out with that goal, right? The team here at Exposion Ninja do this all day every day. All of this that we're talking about today is their work. I've had nothing to do with any of this. So if you want this sort of stuff for your business, you can request a free website and digital marketing review from the team at Exposion Ninja. Just go to Exposion Ninja.com/Review, click the button. When you click that button, there's a little form that'll ask you a bit of info about your business and it'll ask you for your marketing goals. You give us some marketing goals, we will then have a look at your current digital marketing where things are good, where things aren't so good, and we'll map you out or prioritize that action plan that gets you to those goals that you specified, we'll then send this to you via video usually within a few days. This is an amazing service, but you know what's coming? Kaviat, not everybody is eligible for this. So you do need to apply for this at ExposureNinja.com/Review, okay? Super, okay, strategy number four, seasonal authority or using seasonality to benefit you. Many businesses experience some sort of seasonality, even if they don't realize it, and if they don't realize it, they're definitely not capitalizing on it. Far from being a weakness, most people think of seasonality as like an excuse when sales are down, right? Oh, it's seasonality, that's what we really think of seasonality, except we had a client for many years that saw fireworks. My gosh, you think about a seasonal business, they do like 95% of their revenue around fireworks in the UK. Yeah, they do a bit for New Year's Eve as well, but really November the 5th, that was their time. Nothing's more seasonal than that business, I can't think of anything, maybe Christmas stuff, but anyway, far from being a weakness, seasonality can actually be a really useful source of customer momentum to generate your results. Let's go back to the lawn business, for example. So we identified that there's real seasonality in lawn care, because of course, people are going through this sort of annual process with their lawn where they're getting things ready and they're spraying and they're sort of making it all pretty and enjoying it in the summer, and then they're prepping it in the autumn and the winter, ready for next spring. So there are different things that people are searching for, there are different things that people are interested in at different times of the year. So we basically built them for content strategies to spring summer autumn and winter or fall, based on the different keywords that people were searching for the different topics that people most interested in at different times of year. Why do we do this? What's the point of all of this? Well, by tracking these different keywords and by tracking the search volumes and publishing content just before it's about to be really trending, we got some really, really good results. So we could publish an article on something that we knew was just about to sort of come out. To say there was a particular type of weed that's growing at a certain type of year. Well, if we can produce some content and publish it like a week or a couple of weeks before that weed really starts to kick off, when people are starting to think about that thing, they go online, they search, they see some really fresh new content. This stuff also works really well on Google Discover. So Google Discover likes to share new stuff and we timed some of these articles really well so that they absolutely blew up. One I'm looking at here had 146,000 views for this article that we produced because it really just took off on Google Discover because it was the right time of year for that thing. People were starting to think about it. And total, by the way, this website's now ranking in the top three positions on Google for 4874 keywords, massive, massive visibility. So by establishing this seasonal content strategy, we can actually reuse it every year. Right, the same things happening on the same cycle every year. So we can then either produce new content about these topics in the right season or we can optimize and boost existing content at those times as well. It's a bit like, you know, the Garden Center, right? The Garden Center essentially has this real seasonal pattern. Every September, all of the Garden furniture gets sold off and they bring out all the Christmas decorations and a lot of this has just been in storage since last Christmas. And it's a bit like that with this type of content strategy. You might have no seasonality in your business or you might think you have no seasonality in your business so you kind of mentally tuned out here. But I bet if you think about it, actually, you do have a bit of seasonality in your business. For example, you might see patterns around the end of the tax year. You might see patterns around summer holidays, Christmas holidays, a new year, cold weather, warm weather, right, these are universal human experiences. Every business is really susceptible to these. And it might be that they are influencing search behavior in your space. It's very tailored, it's very bespoke. So I can't really give you specific recommendations. But we've noticed, for example, with our own business, Exposure Ninja, we've noticed that a lot of marketers, they start to think about their digital marketing strategies around sort of October, November and December, the Q4 period, we actually call it internally strategy season, which is why you'll notice us posting loads of content every August and September about strategies for the next year because we know that it's then going to have a bit of visibility ready for strategy season. Now you wouldn't say that digital marketing is a particularly seasonal business other than things like Black Friday or holiday campaigns, but that's the pattern that we've noticed. Not because there's some inherent pattern in purchasing behavior, but because that's where our audience of marketing managers and CMOs, that's the routine that they go through each year. Hopefully that example's useful and you can think about how that sort of thing might play out for your business. The final strategy we're going to cover today is trust and authority boosting. AI tools can give generic information, so there really is no point in 2026 and beyond you publishing some really generic sort of crap on your website. SEO in the future of content is really about leaning into experience and first-hand expertise from your business. So let's go and have a look at how this is implemented in some of the award campaigns. So with the bathrooms brand, if you're buying a bathroom for your elderly parent or relative, you know, this is a pretty important trust sale. You need to know that you're trusting the people who are going to be going into their home. This is like your money, their life type purchase. So when we're publishing content for this client, we're leaning really heavily into the credibility of the author of that content. In many cases, using the founder of the business, who has a really personal story about why this is so important to them. And that's a great way of building credibility with users and visitors of the website, but of course, it's also a really amazing way of building credibility with the search engines. Now for this business, we wanted to step beyond just the typical sort of EET thing. We actually commissioned a study to collect data on a topic about the difficulties that people have of sharing or bathing in their homes. This is an area that the founders of the business are really passionate about. And obviously the business serves this area as well. So we commissioned a study using Yuga of, which is a study company that's fairly expensive, but the data is generally trusted by the press. We commissioned a study by Yuga to collect some data, which we could then use to both build the credibility of the business when this stuff gets picked up by news media. But we also now have a real thought leadership piece. So when the sales team from this business are talking to customers, they can say, oh, if you've got difficulties bathing or sharing, well, you're not alone actually. We conducted an industry study and found that 26% of people had someone who had difficulty bathing and sharing their home, like huge credibility and thought leadership. But these types of studies can really last for many, many years. The benefits can be very evergreen. We've had examples where we've published studies for clients. And then months or even years later, some news publication has needed some data to back up something that they're saying and they've gone and found our study. And they found the source of the information they've ended up linking to our client as the source of this data. Because there just wasn't data about this topic. So it's a really great way of building credibility and authority. And of course, these are the types of statistical evidence, I guess, that the AI tools like to cite, like to reference in their answers. And when they do, they're linking back to your website. So it's a good way of producing something that these AI tools just won't be able to do themselves. Because chat GBT is not doing a study to work out how many people are having difficulty with bathing and sharing. Right, it needs to find a website that has that information. And that's where you can really stand out. To amplify this issue even further, we actually ran a petition on change.org. We petition the government to take this issue more seriously. And again, this was a way of getting more attention on the issue, but it's also a way of, I guess, positioning the business as the friend of people who are experiencing these issues and showing what this business stands for. So really useful way of building credibility there. Now, that approach isn't going to be right for every business. So for the mortgage client, we took a very different approach to trust and authority boosting. Instead, compiling lots of data that was already about out there and turning into things like maps and calculators. Maps so that people could work out if they might be eligible for particular types of mortgages, calculators so they could work out how much they can borrow and that type of thing. So that also gives the business credibility, not because it's their own or new data, but because they've taken that data and formatted in a way that's much more useful to people. And again, it goes back to helping someone. If you've just helped someone identify how much they could borrow, you're in a much better position to get that person's business than if you're just advertising for a certain keyword and you're just saying, hey, we can help you. Right, you've just helped me do this thing. You've given me some information. You've shown you understand my area. I'm eligible. It's a small step to then say, well, click if you actually want to inquire. This has worked really well for this business, building out these calculators, great way of picking up visibility. This site is now ranking for 69,000 keywords. And that was in the first 12 months of us working together, 30,000% increase in traffic to their content as a result of rolling this stuff out. So there you have it, five strategies that we've covered. So the first was talking a bit about the AI search optimization piece. The second one was really rethinking audience and keyword research and going a lot deeper on that. Third, we covered content-driven commerce. Fourth, we covered tapping into seasonality, even if we might not think we're a seasonal business. And then fifth, taking that trust and authority boosting to another level. Of course, the best results come from combining all of these things and don't just stop at SEO. So for the skincare client, for example, we improved the conversion rate of product pages to take one of their failing hero products back to growth. They could then take that product page as conversion rate optimization recommendations and changes that we made. And they could roll that out across the site to improve the performance of all of their product pages. For the mortgage client, we built out a killer segmented email marketing strategy for them. For the bathroom company, we increased their lead 50% year on year by improving the performance of their paid search. So the things that we've covered today are everything that you need to do. But SEO is not going away. And these are some of the SEO strategies that we are putting most energy behind right now and in 2026 because they are working for traditional search. They're also working incredibly well for this new world of AI search. I hope you found this useful. If you have, don't forget to leave us a review or whatever podcast platform you're listening to. And don't forget to request your free digital marketing review at ExposureNinja.com/review. And I'll see you next time. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. AI search optimization is critical, requiring content tailored to conversational queries and AI tool preferences, such as using first-person experience and detailed guides.
  2. Audience and keyword research must evolve beyond traditional metrics to include deep customer journey analysis and psychographic personas for content targeting.
  3. Implementing topic clusters and pillar content helps cover subjects comprehensively, improving visibility in both AI tools and organic search.
  4. Strategies discussed are based on award-nominated campaigns, demonstrating significant traffic and revenue growth for diverse clients.

Summary:

The transcription outlines advanced SEO strategies for 2024 and beyond, emphasizing adaptation to AI-driven search. Key strategies include optimizing for AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity by creating content that matches conversational queries and AI preferences, such as incorporating first-hand experience and detailed guides. This approach has led to significant visibility in AI overviews and citations.

Additionally, traditional keyword research is no longer sufficient; instead, deep audience analysis—including customer journey mapping and psychographic personas—is essential to tailor content to specific user motivations and decision criteria. Implementing topic clusters and pillar content allows for comprehensive coverage of subjects, enhancing both AI and organic search performance. These strategies, derived from award-nominated campaigns, have driven substantial traffic and revenue increases for clients across various industries, from e-commerce to services, demonstrating their universal applicability despite the evolving search landscape.

FAQs

The best SEO strategies include AI search optimization, rethinking audience and keyword research, creating topic clusters, and producing high-quality, detailed content with first-person experience.

Conduct thorough keyword research to identify conversational queries, produce detailed content with first-hand experience, and use tools like Perplexity to reverse-engineer search patterns for content strategy.

Traditional keyword research is insufficient because users now ask longer, more detailed queries, and AI tools provide customized results that require a deeper understanding of audience needs and decision points.

Break down your audience into psychographic personas based on motivations and priorities, then tailor content to address each persona's specific interests, such as peer recommendations or scientific proof.

A topic cluster strategy involves creating pillar content on broad topics and supporting content on related subtopics, which helps cover all angles of a subject and improves visibility in AI and organic search.

Use long-tail search queries on tools like Perplexity to identify underlying web searches, then create or update content to cover those topics, ensuring it is detailed and high-quality.

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