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A year of splintered viewing habits, soaring costs, technological innovations, tightened data privacy and increased sustainability efforts
Head of Digital Content, Kantar Analytics, UKI
Since its emergence, the purpose of SEO has seemed straightforward: ensure your website ranks well on search engines, and your traffic will follow. The higher you rank, the better your visibility, and the lower the cost of acquisition. To achieve this, it’s been a must for the industry to keep up with Google’s evolving algorithm and updates to its search results pages.
But with advancements in AI automation, search marketing has entered a new era. One where the lines between sponsored and organic results are blurred, and the rules are far more complex.
With Google and the search industry in constant flux from changes that affect how brands advertise on and how users interact with search platforms, new strategies are needed. We tapped into the industry’s hive mind to understand what brands need to do to keep up with, and ideally ahead of this evolution.
We identified key industry opinion leaders and analysed over 16,000 of their mentions on social channels, journals and publications from the past two years to determine the macrotrends impacting the future of SEO. Along with our findings, we suggested actions for marketers to navigate these future SEO trends, organising them across the six different lenses of the STEEPe framework – Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, and Ethical.
The social perspective of search is manifested in the evolution of user behaviour, digital trends, and cultural shifts. It concerns just under 10% of the analysed mentions.
With the rapid expansion of platforms such as TikTok and ChatGPT, and the rise of social shopping on Instagram and Pinterest, Google is seeing its dominance challenged. As a result, it has begun to evolve the traditional search journey, with future SEO trends likely to be more experiential.
The search path for users is no longer linear: search with text, scroll down until you find a suitable answer, and click to follow the link to a website. Now, users can be more specific in their searches and ask their questions with images, voice, and even screenshots. Google is in turn trying to make those experiences frictionless; providing results in a variety of formats and allowing users to obtain their answers directly from the search results page itself with the marriage of AI and SEO.
This diversification of search results formats means it is not enough for brands to have well-written and well-optimised landing pages endorsed by experts to obtain visibility. Instead, there is a need for a variety of multimedia assets to be present in a wider digital ecosystem.
Neil Patel articulated this aspect of our analysis in this quote, “as habits evolve, so must content, intent mapping and, ultimately, the measurement of SEO impact in order to further grow”.
Roughly, two thirds of the conversation about search marketing concerns the future of AI and machine learning. The World Economic Forum projected that “AI will create 97 million new roles by 2025 in areas like content creation, AI development/testing, and AI maintenance”.
Within the search industry, the perspectives on the opportunities of AI automation range: academics Ziakis and Vlacholopoulou are quite positive about the future and AI, believing that “AI-powered SEO heralds a new era of precision and that AI in SEO paves the way for more targeted SEO campaigns that attract more organic visits to business websites”. At the other end of the spectrum, opinion leaders like Travis Tallent, VP of BrainLabs, question whether AI automation will render SEO obsolete.
Through our analysis, we found that the uses and benefits of AI, especially for content creation, are vast. Generative AI offers the opportunity to produce content at a high volume.
But, despite these undeniable benefits, there is a potential disadvantage to SEO writing with AI: that you risk it becoming commoditised and inauthentic.
AI-generated content may sound good and meet the standards, but does it actually reach users in a meaningful way? Does it have the same authenticity that a human-generated piece of content has?
For years, Google has been challenging the SEO industry on these very aspects of content quality – demanding that content adds value to users rather than be produced just to meet the search engine’s own standards.
The challenge for SEO professionals is clear: while AI can help with scale, the north star for brands should always be the user. The future of SEO demands that content be designed to resonate with users, and not just to rank well or meet the search standard.
The economic aspect of search contributes to around 15% of the mentions by key experts. The conversation is focused on the economic strain on small businesses, demonstrating ROI, and keeping costs low while adapting to change. This may lead to a paradigm shift where brands reconsider the value of SEO.
Gartner predicted that “by 2028, brands will see their organic site traffic decrease by 50% or more as consumers embrace GenAI-powered search”. With Google launching Search Generative Experience (SGE), the time for zero clicks search is here and the likelihood of this happening is no longer far-fetched. These kinds of changes pose ROI pressures for brands and businesses, and an immediate call to rethink how they’re measuring SEO value.
Yet, even as AI automation continues to rise, Google’s business model is still concerned with the visibility of brands. Trying to stay present in this evolving landscape is a battle, especially when the effort needed to stay relevant puts pressure on resources and quality. Search Engine Land reported that Google has begun to blur the line between sponsored and organic results, indicating that this would require advertisers to adjust their strategies and potentially rethink investing in long-term SEO.
As we posed earlier, brands may see AI automation as the answer to creating content that grants visibility, but there is still an underlying caution about the risks. The search industry must reconsider their role in marketing, observing that their objective is to craft positive associations of the brand and, in doing so, predispose consumers to buy them.
Content must first fully capture the heart of your brand, ensuring that the experience it delivers is meaningful, different and salient. This is ultimately what Google is still focused on, as noted in their latest core update.
So, the answer to cost visibility may lie in brand power. Brands are valuable assets and search professionals must support building them rather than putting them at risk with repetitive and formulaic website content.
The environmental aspect of the SEO landscape isn’t a major conversation – contributing only 1% of the comments. We found some early inclination towards green hosting, such as conscious browsers and search engines, which may emphasise the need for environmentally responsible AI, the promotion of eco-friendly practices across the industry, and the reduction of our digital carbon footprint. However, this is not a major concern for search professionals or brands.
The political perspective only contributed to around 2% of the conversation with a focus on transparency from Google, and the growing risk of misinformation online.
With regards to transparency, there are calls for Google to be more open about their algorithm and practices. While this would help search marketers understand how to rank well, complete transparency from search engines may challenge their innovation.
In that same vein, there is some commentary on misinformation and how Google needs to contribute to the fight against it. In July 2024, Google announced an algorithm update designed to combat deep-fakes, allowing swifter content removal processes, and demoting offending sites. Yet, there’s a concern that more must be done – especially as AI and SEO continue to be linked. AI Overviews may serve users with instantaneous replies, but there’s a call for those replies to be properly validated to prevent the spread of misinformation.
Ultimately, the issues with misinformation, regulation, and innovation return to the conversation about content quality. For brands, there is a social responsibility to be informative and accurate in the content they create, and this practice should encourage them to think of content quality and optimisation beyond the standards of search engines.
The final theme of our STEEPe framework is focused on Ethics and drives 6% of the analysed mentions. Here, industry leaders reach consensus on ethical SEO and content authenticity. The themes that arose from these conversations were focused on how brands should maintain user trust.
In a Moz blog post, Chima Mmeje highlighted that low-quality content can erode trust, leading users to seek out brands who produce content that is more reliable and has more authoritative information. For brands and SEO professionals, this means focusing on connecting the brand services or products with users via meaningful content which is relevant to their intent.
Balancing trust, as much as the cost of visibility, is a challenge that the search industry should address by focusing on the user and the seamless experiences that Google is striving to deliver. It suggests that optimisation should go beyond search gold standards and brand power and seek to address misinformation while being mindful and empathetic towards the emotions and time which users invest in consuming branded content.
Search marketing, as we know it, is undergoing a transformation shaped by many considerations: the shifting culture of user behaviour, the future of AI and SEO, increased economic pressures, new ethical considerations, and strict political regulations.
In this ever-evolving landscape, marketers must prioritise creating seamless user experiences, with empathy, across all channels, rather than solely focusing on achieving high rankings in search engine results. The value of SEO has never been more critical, or more complex.