SEO in 2026

Izzy Wisniewska believes that you should befriend other marketeers and go holistic in 2024.

Talking points include:

What does holistic actually mean in practice?

How do you unite as a marketing department in a large organisation?

How does a content team, PR team, video team join forces with sEO to deliver a more effective customer experience?

What other teams impact areas like:

EEAT, technical performance, user experience, speed, user intent, content quality

What does this mean for channel team members - do they need to train themselves on other channels?

How do you measure success?

Who gets credit for a customer purchase?

In this episode, David and Sukhjinder discuss the importance of knowing your audience, meet their search intent & ensure your content is “Helpful”.

Discussion points include:

Why is knowing your audience and meeting their search intent even more important in the age of SGE?

How do you know your audience?

How do you meet their intent?

How do you ensure that your content is helpful for both users and search engines?

What does having E.E.A.T.-worthy content actually mean?

How is this changing in 2024 and beyond?

Luke Carthy believes that 2024 is the year of the yearning for original, creative and well-written human content.

Discussion points include:

What can humans do that AI can’t do?

What’s the difference between well-written human content and AI content?

What should humans stop doing and hand over to AI?

How long will this be the case for?

How is TikTok a competing ecosystem to Shopify and Google?

What should SEOs do about this?

Is it an SEO’s job to optimize for every platform?

Nikki Halliwell shares that creating actionable audits that your client understands, and can be used by stakeholders at all levels and being able to follow them through and get fixes implemented by working closely with dev teams and speaking their language for faster implementation.

Discussion points include:

What is an actionable audit?

Is there any type of audit that you see SEOs doing that don’t provide much value?

What stakeholders should be using this audit?

What language should you be using in your audit reports to assist you in engaging with various stakeholders?

How do you get dev teams on board to implement fixes more quickly?

What software do you use for your audits?

How often should you do these audits?

Andor Palau shares the importance of investing in additional tools and external testing when doing a migration.

Talking points include:

What are some examples of some of the preventable errors that can occur with migrations?

What tools do you use?

How do you end up paying with missing revenue?

What different perspective or different data layers might you end up missing?

How should you plan for a migration?

Who should you involve in a planned migration?

Is there anything that you need to keep checking post-migration?

As many contributors to this project have alluded to, the long-reaching arms of AI are reaching into many aspects of digital life, which is why Emma Russell from Oxford Comma Digital says that you need to be a more discerning gatekeeper, and that you should Limit crawlability to your content.

In this episode, David and Manu discuss the importance of keeping a wide open eye and being flexible in your SEO approach.

Discussion points include:

Can you give an example of the new possibilities of integrating AI in your workflow and processes?

When you say, “make sure you have access to the right and accurate data”, what data are you referring to?

How do you work cross-channel?

How do you determine what delivers the most value to your audience?

How do you know when to pivot an SEO strategy?

Fili Wiese shares what impact site speed and Core Web Vitals has on SEO in 2024.

Discussion points include:

What impacts site speed most in 2024?

- Server and hosting

- File sizes and types

- Plugins and add-ons

- Traffic volume

- Poor coding

How should we be using Core web Vitals to direct our site performance improvements?

Inside Search Console?

- Loading (Largest contentful paint - how fast is fast enough? How do you improve this?)

- Interactivity (First input delay - how fast is fast enough? How do you improve this?)

- Visual stability (Cumulative layout shift - what issues are key?)

Tom Pool advises that you ensure technical quality throughout your entire site.

Discussion points include:

What does good technical site quality look like in 2024?

Has anything changed in terms of technical setup best practice in the past couple of years?

How does a good technical set up deliver better user experience?

How do you build a solid technical foundation if you’re not sure how large you’re going to grow?

If users are happy using your site is it worthwhile to continue to invest in further technical improvements?

How do you measure the impact of technical improvements?

Alexandra Tachalova shares that building the right links should be one of the biggest priorities for marketers.

Discussion points include:

What are the right links at the moment?

What are the wrong links at the moment?

How do you get the best links?

Why is this more important than other marketing activities?

You say that Sites that have a strong domain authority can easily reach excellent results in Google SERPs without building any links back to their individual pages - does this mean that you only have to build links to certain pages?

Can you stop building links after a while?

Will links stay important with AI results?