SEO in 2026

David and Claire discuss why businesses should get clued up on how to manage and influence their Local Knowledge Panel.

Talking points include:

What is Google’s New Merchant Experience?

Why has Google done this?

What do you have to do to sign-up?

What is the upside?

Is there any downside?

How do you influence your Local Knowledge Panel BEYOND the functionality provided in the NMX?

Why is this important?

How do you measure the impact of this?

David and Greg discuss the importance of optimising your use of Google Business Profile.

Talking points include:

What are the key changes in Google Business Profile over the past year?

How has the verification process changed?

Google will restrict content or access if there's a violation of their policies - what are these policies?

There are Clearer standards on who can own and manage business profiles - why is this and what are the changes?

What are the new guidelines on user contributions?

Businesses should have only one profile to avoid discrepancies on Google Maps and Search - what happens if you have 2 profiles?

Specific instructions for appointment-based businesses and those with varying operational hours - what are these?

What are the current best practices for content posting?

What are the current best practices for getting found?

Will a business without a physical address ever have an opportunity with Google Business Profile?

David and Si discuss the importance of using generative AI to supercharge your productivity and business outcomes.

Talking points include:

Why?

What software and systems are you referring to?

How do you set them up?

How do you integrate this with the rest of your business and your clients?

Are there any downsides?

Chris Alderman shares that in 2024 you should focus on outcomes rather than outputs, and that best practices are great but they need to lead to your site being found easier.

Discussion points include:

What do you mean in practice by focusing on outcomes rather than outputs?

What sort of outcomes do you like to focus on?

How does this alter your SEO strategy?

How does this alter your SEO activities on a day-to-day basis?

You say that focusing on outcomes can make it easier to find a site - what do you mean by that?

How does focusing on outcomes rather than outputs impact the way that SEOs should work with other marketing functions?

David and Aleyda discuss the importance of leveraging AI to support you and accelerate your SEO workflows beyond content generation.

Aleyda says: “Start leveraging AI for the day-to-day SEO tasks within your workflow in a smart way – in a way where you take care of the quality, but you use it to accelerate the tasks that you need to do.”

What SEO workflows can be enhanced with AI?

“There are now tools that use AI, like the Horseman SEO crawler, which integrates with the OpenAI API to provide you with suggestions and recommendations for the issues it finds when crawling your website. If it identifies that you have title or description issues, because they’re empty, duplicated, or too long, it will give you suggestions to make them shorter or populate them with descriptive information. You can develop your SEO recommendations much faster by using these tools to support you."

SEO and Data Consultant Lazarina Stoy offers up a new way of thinking about the way that you do your job, that is designed to give you more time and freedom to focus on what matters most now.

Lazarina says: “Incorporate programmatic approaches. I’m specifically referring to rule-based automation for SEO best practices and AI-driven automation for process enhancements."

"Mainly, this means taking some time to better understand different programmatic approaches and learning how to incorporate them in a responsible way – both for the brand voice of the company you’re working for and content quality. However, you’re not doing that just to put out content. You’re doing it to satisfy search intent and be helpful to users."

David and Katie discuss the importance of thinking better, and rushing less.

Talking points include:

- We can use AI to get stuff done faster

- For everything?

- What should we use AI for?

- We shouldn't rush the thinking part

- What thinking part?

- AI can't do that; it doesn't know your audience, not truly.

- AI can’t do thinking?

- Understand your client's business first, plan your research, PRIORITISE and then figure out how to use AI to accelerate that plan and get results faster.

Carmen Dominguez shares with David Bain that in 2024 you should look after your CTR as the most precious KPI for your organic strategy.

Talking points include:

Why is your CTR so important?

Why is click through rate a KPI?

How do you keep track of your CTR - what software do you use?

How do you identify the terms that you need to optimise for?

How do you influence your CTR?

What other KPIs do you track?

David and Adrijana discuss if you want to progress with your SEO career, you should stop overworking.

Talking points include:

How much work is overworking?

What if overworking is your company culture?

What if you’re your own boss?

Is it not OK to overwork at the start of your career?

If you’re an SEO manager, how do you ensure that you don’t overwork your team?

How do you detect if you’re doing too much?

When does overworking lead to burnout?

How do you recover from burnout?

David and Irina discuss the importance of learning analytics To better understand user behaviour.

Talking points include:

What aspects of analytics do SEOs have to master?

What do we need to know about GA4?

— GA4 offers a lot of options on how we can analyse content consumption and user funnels.

How do you analyse content consumptions and how do we measure where this fits into the bigger picture?

What is a user funnel inside GA4 and how does this add value?

Do you prefer using another tool like Looker to analyse your data?

Do you add data from other ounces such as Search Console?

Is there a decent alternative to GA4?

Will the way in which data collection and analytics continue to evolve?