How to Set an SEO Strategy for 2026

How do you plan your SEO strategy for the coming year? Is it best to plan your SEO activities for a whole year or is it more effective to break down your overarching plan into smaller chunks?

That’s what David Bain will be discussing with Georgia James, Kelsey Libert, Sabine Ljunggren and Sukhjinder Singh.

Watch On-Demand

Listen to the Podcast

Transcript

David Bain  

Hello and welcome to the January 2026 edition of the Majestic SEO panel on setting an SEO Strategy for 2026.

I’m your host, David Bain, and joining me today are four wonderful guests. Let’s meet them. Starting off with Georgia.

Georgia James  

Hi, I’m Georgia James. I am a Senior Technical SEO lead at an agency called Flaunt Digital, who are based in the UK.

David Bain  

Thank you, Georgia. And also with us today is Sukh. 

Sukhjinder Singh  

Hi, my name is Sukhjinder Singh. I’m a freelance SEO consultant at I Do SEO. I’m based in Leicester, UK, and I’ve been doing SEO for nearly 18 years now, and I’m having a blast doing it as a freelancer.

David Bain  

Okay, thanks so much, Sukh. And also with us today is Kelsey.

Kelsey Libert  

Hi, I’m Kelsey Leibert. I’m a co-founder at Fractl. We’re a Digital PR and earned media agency based in Florida, and I’ve been working in this field for about 18 years.

David Bain  

And finally, also with us today is Sabine.

Sabine Ljunggren  

Hi. My name is Sabine Ljunggren, and I’m from Sweden, so tuning in from Stockholm. I’m an SEO specialist working at an agency called Maia Marketing.

David Bain  

Thank you all for joining us today. We’re going to have a great discussion about how to specifically set up an SEO strategy for 2026.

Let’s start by thinking about how we were optimising in the past. I guess the assumption would have been for Google, but perhaps not so much nowadays, in 2026.

So Sabine, shall we stay with you? Where does discoverability happen in 2026?

Sabine Ljunggren  

You may have heard that SEO has been referred to as Search Everywhere Optimisation lately, which is a return to the shortening of the term. I’d say that this sums it up. Search happens basically everywhere now. 

For some of our clients on the agency side, we see real opportunity and search volumes, for example, on social media. So, looking into the actual search trends happening on YouTube and TikTok, and not only mentioning those channels when you talk about the social media strategy, but also including them in the SEO and search strategy, for example.

David Bain  

This is obviously opening up a whole can of worms in terms of who’s responsible for it. If you work with a social media department, how open are they to actually receiving some form of direction in terms of optimising for social media? 

Georgia, let’s go back to you? Where does discoverability happen as far as you’re concerned in 2026?

Georgia James  

I think Sabine’s right in that touchpoints are becoming increasingly complicated, and users are finding brands in places that we can’t even anticipate. 

It could be it’s kind of word of mouth and actually off-site, and that trust and authority are really helping to bring authenticity to those brands and to inform user decisions, which, again, as you say, you kind of face the same problem as you do with social, where that’s then quite hard for SEOs to manage and who you then get to manage that and manage that kind of community and building that trust.

It’s really important for SEOs entering 2026 to consider how they can work cross-channel more effectively, anticipate those touchpoints, and encourage brand managers to build those communities. 

People talk about Reddit a lot, but that’s not really somewhere that necessarily rewards extensive marketing efforts, such as targeted advertising from brands. So how can you show up on Reddit authentically, if you can at all? Is that something that really needs to be handled by SEO, or should we be trying to work more collaboratively, cross-channel, to help appear at every one of those touch points?

David Bain  

And Kelsey, what would you think about discoverability in 2026? What should we be aiming for?

Kelsey Libert  

Yeah, I think they’ve nailed it, right? I mean, everyone’s talking about cross-channel distribution nowadays, and it’s a term that’s been around for probably 20 years, but it’s really a key point now.

I think it depends on your target market. We use SparkToro, a tool that I highly recommend for consumer research, audience research, and persona building. It tells you what podcasts people are listening to, whether they use ChatGPT over Perplexity, Claude, or Google, and which publishers they are reading. 

Really, any talented SEO, Digital PR or Social Media teams all need to come together to infiltrate all these channels. In my opinion, these teams should come together on a monthly or more regular basis to ideate on topics that our audience cares about. Then, we should determine how to distribute them across all the channels where our specific audience exists and engages. 

Typically, any content strategy that’s done well can penetrate each one of these channels, especially if you’re taking a more data-driven or subject matter expert lens on it and providing true value to that community. 

I think that’s a great way to get into anywhere versus doing an advertorial that’s pay to play, because you’re not going to get as much engagement in any of those channels, generally.

David Bain  

Before we move on to discuss specifically what we should be doing within our SEO strategy in 2026, I’d like to touch on how we measure success and what we’re aiming for.

But just before we get there, Sukh, what are your thoughts on discoverability in 2026?

Sukhjinder Singh  

I try to take a step back and root everything in global KPIs. So, I’m thinking about collaboration with different departments and team members, and establishing the main KPIs or metrics that will have a direct impact on the business. Then I work backwards from that to associate those with the relevant people and the relevant teams. If there are any shared KPIs, agree on what we will do to contribute towards this KPI. 

For example, if I’ve conducted extensive keyword research that I want to optimise for some TikToks and Instagram Reels related to the blog content I’m creating, as well as podcasts, then we can work backwards from the responsibility of KPIs or metrics and I can share what I’ll do to contribute toward this, or hand it over to you with a nice little template to include keywords in there. 

So it’s basically that top level agreement of metrics and KPIs that I tried to root all of this in, as well as other fundamental plans, like which audiences we’re targeting, the personas, what’s going to get them to engage and convert, and how can myself and people in the team contribute towards the content to get them to engage and convert. 

It’s that initial agreement and rooting everything into KPIs, or at least metrics.

David Bain  

How do you go about deciding what the KPI should be? I would imagine that if you’re working with the business, they will have a certain idea. However, from an SEO perspective, what metrics are more likely to measure success more effectively? How do you combine your thoughts to come up with a metric that satisfies both of you?

Sukhjinder Singh  

For myself, I’ll examine whether it’s lead generation or E-commerce and review those top-level conversion metrics. So, as a result of all traffic, then conversions or revenue or transactions, and then working backwards from that, specifically for my channel, organic conversions or revenue or transactions, and then backwards from that, and what’s going to impact that, from keyword visibility, AI Overviews, brand versus non-brand, etc. 

It all starts with the top-level conversion or transactional metric, and then works backwards from that.

David Bain  

Let’s get everyone else’s thoughts on metrics and KPIs. Georgia, how do you decide what metric to use to measure the success of your 2026 SEO strategy?

Georgia James  

It’s difficult. I think it’s something that should be a conversation with the people commercially who are responsible for if you’re working at an agency for that client, or in house for your organization to find out what is actually going to if you’re reporting back on it, what is going to help you see the value in what you’re doing as SEOs, there are many metrics that are kind of useful to us. 

People have been talking about rankings and impressions as a bit of a vanity metric for a while, but as we’re moving into an era with increasingly more AI search, those sorts of metrics are becoming less and less useful. We don’t necessarily have that data for LLM search in particular, but these are great indicators for us of where the needle is moving. 

Keeping a focus on those end of the line conversion metrics, the form fills or the conversions in kind of a traditional e-commerce sense, is really important. 

The other thing that I think a lot of brands are thinking about at the moment is improving efficiencies internally for them operationally, which doesn’t necessarily feel like something that we as SEOs would support with. However, we’re currently receiving more inquiries from clients about not wanting to add that weight to their customer service or sales teams. There are a lot of resources available, and can we streamline them? 

Getting direct feedback from people involved in sales can really help inform what additional content might need to be added to the site and highlight where there might be pain points in the conversion path. If you can obtain the kind of verbal feedback from them, then their time can be spent elsewhere, and they can focus on more difficult or complex challenges in their job role. 

That is also something that, as SEOs, we can report back on and highlight to stakeholders and shareholders as a result of our optimisations.

David Bain  

How do you tie back the referring medium or the channel responsible for that call to action? Because obviously, if you have a brand mentioned within an AI search engine or something like that, you’re not necessarily gonna be able to get a click-through from that and measure the impact of that. What are your thoughts on that?

Georgia James  

I mentioned that tracking the impact of mentions from LLMs is something that I think a lot of SEOs are struggling with, nailing down your on-site tracking so you’re not just tracking those final metrics that you are converting on, but you’ve also got tracking in place for other interactions on the site that maybe you don’t see as commercially as being as pivotal, but you’ve got better to use the data point can be really useful in tracking that user journey when users land on site.

Then in terms of tracking that attribution, you can see referrers in GA4, and that’s probably the most useful way of seeing how much traffic you’re getting through, and then figuring out how much of that is, whether you’re seeing kind of increasing conversions from that. But it is hard. 

UTMs are also an idea that people might want to explore further. Adding UTM parameters to the end of URLs for specific campaigns, press coverage, or other relevant sources, wherever possible, allows us to track where users are coming from when they are cited. This enables us to gain a better understanding of the marketing channels involved.

However, it’s somewhat uncertain, and I think a lot will change in 2026 in terms of what different tools offer to help us with that tracking as well.

David Bain  

Kelsey, what are your thoughts about tracking, about metrics, about how you measure success in 2026?

Kelsey Libert  

Everyone here agrees, right? If you work in SEO, you get measured generally by qualified traffic, and can come from many different sources, whether it’s Google or ChatGPT or social. 

When I was a moderator at SMX Advanced, I was on a session for Athena HQ, a new AI tool that helps quantify the value of certain authoritative brand mentions or placements and accurately measures the frequency of these mentions across various chat platforms.

I would say, beyond the traditional things we’re all used to, the qualified traffic and building content hubs around the topics that you want to drive your entity or your digital footprint around, so that you can be recognised across all these platforms as the expert in your specific space. 

Another thing that many clients specifically measure us by is the volume of authoritative brand placements we can secure for them. So, press on like CNBC, USA Today, or the Daily Mail, depending on their industry, or Vice, and similar publications. For us, the signals we’re looking at often focus on the authority of the brand. 

So whether you measure that by Domain Authority or Trust Flow, really looking at that over the course of the 6 to 12 month engagement has always been a big signal, as well as the number of authoritative brand placements, which I’d say, generally, we’re looking for anything over a Domain Authority of 60 or 70 is a big publisher within that industry that can help drive those signals for clients in that they are the expert in their industry and just build out kind of that entity awareness for their brand, or the profile right for both AI systems to have build out their knowledge graph around that brand being expert, because they’re cited in a lot of different places as the authority on this topic, in addition to general traffic signals as well.

David Bain  

Sabine, what are your thoughts on measuring success in 2026?

Sabine Ljunggren  

That’s all really like the same relevant topics that we have had with our with our clients, but I’d say that it’s kind of in two parts.

The first part is, how do we measure if we’re a part of the discussion, like our when there are citations to be tracked, can we track them and to go together with what other brands are we being mentioned so kind of still, kind of evaluating what type of LLM trackers that truly give us value that we can do any like actions on. There are a few that we are evaluating right now, and some are a bit too pricey, according to me. 

When it comes to the type of value they actually give businesses, it’s one thing to know that you’re cited for the five prompts that you’re adding to this tool, but then how can we scale that and understand our share of AI search? 

I don’t think that tools are necessarily there yet, since there’s limited data that we can access right now. However, we are finding those metrics and citations or mentions in the AI spaces to determine if we’re part of the conversation, as well as the quality of the traffic. 

As Georgia mentioned, perhaps we should consider not just the end conversion, but also micro conversions, and how we contribute to generating qualified leads or acquiring subscribers to our newsletter from our sales traffic. This approach would also involve looking at what contributes to specific purposes. It’s a matter of breaking it down to the value as a whole.

David Bain  

So an integral part of what’s included in the SEO strategy for 2026 has to be content, and the way that content is done, the volume of content that is required has changed significantly, the competition out there, the challenge to raise your heads compared with your competitors out there. So what’s the secret? Do we have to focus on volume? Do we have to be highly, highly selective in time, in terms of the type of content that we published the persona that we were attempting to optimize for?

Kelsey. What are some thoughts that you have in relation to what should be incorporated within our content strategy for 2026?

Kelsey Libert  

When it comes to content strategy, you have to think about how you stand out from these new AI systems, whether it’s Google AI Overviews that is distilling content, or one of the chat platforms or anything. 

You don’t want to just be regurgitating what’s already out there, right? Because AI systems won’t be trained on that. In the very near future, they’re going to be able to detect their own AI slop and then not include that in their training sets. They won’t query against it. And so really, you want to go above and beyond what’s already being said. 

The best way you can do that is using your own internal, proprietary data if you have it. You can use your in-house subject matter experts, whether you’re doing interviews with them on a monthly basis and then spinning that out into 10 custom articles, or you’re using those quotes then to pitch them to get featured on a publication. Adding unique value and expertise from your brand to the internet is the way to kind of stand out and build that profile online nowadays.

Beyond just using your proprietary data and in-house experts, really looking at how you can conduct research within your field so that you are providing something new to the internet that could be used and referenced by these AI systems, especially when you can attach your brand to something that’s happening in the news or something that’s coming up in the news cycle. 

There are lots of cyclical events, from back-to-school, summer breaks, tech events, to other things like Valentine’s Day. Most brands can attach themselves to relevant topics to stay current in an emerging news cycle and distance themselves from the vast amount of AI-generated content that people are producing. 

Brands used to go super tangential to what they did just to get a lot of traffic, but that traffic doesn’t convert. Nowadays, it’s much more on brand and leveraging the unique lens and expertise that you have through data and people, and then spreading that out across social media, podcasts, influential publishers, niche publishers in your industry, and building that profile that way, versus just cranking out a bunch of fluff.

David Bain  

It’s interesting that you led with thought leaders internally, the kind of data that you can actually produce as a company. I don’t think you mentioned the phrase “keyword phrase” at all. 

Do you do much research in terms of keyword phrases?

Kelsey Libert  

I think it’s more about conversational search than necessarily keyword dumping. Yes, you need to understand the keywords within your space, but generally, the way that people are querying outside of Google is more conversational. 

I think even I saw a recent study that said on AI platforms, it’s more like five to nine or seven to nine phrases versus the one to two words that people searched. Google isn’t going anywhere, right? I have a stat I wrote down earlier that there’s 80 billion monthly visits to Google versus 5.8 billion to ChatGPT, right? Like, that’s a nominal amount by comparison, but it’s still 5.8 billion, and it’s growing rapidly, and that’s the only reason that I am including more of the AI ways in addition to traditional search, because you really want to be everywhere now to leverage all the different platforms and to do that, I think it’s less keyword based.

David Bain  

Sukhjonder, what are your thoughts on content strategy for 2026?

Sukhjinder Singh  

I’m a really big proponent of owning topics and trying to because you can have competitors that have a higher Domain Authority or Trust Flow and who produce a higher rate of content, etc, and you’re churning it out. But you know, there are unique things to each brand that they are best positioned to talk about topically. 

I think a lot of people fail to even go outside their marketing teams, to the sales teams, let alone the people on the shop floor or within the office, wherever there are experts on topics. People who have been at the company for 5, 10, 20 years. There’s often a rich amount of content ideation that you can perform within an organisation.

If you put on paper the topics that the people you have are experts in, you can have a list of topics that we can about, and then cross-reference that with what you see online with what the competitors are talking about and how well they talk about that stuff? 

You can quickly isolate if you’re better positioned to talk about this stuff than they are. So focus on these topics and OWN these topics. It doesn’t matter if they have a higher Domain Authority or Trust Flow or if they put more budget into Digital PR, we can smash it on these topics. We know that this activity will rank because it has been proven to, and you can outrank people by owning topics, not necessarily having the most backlinks.

But that has a knock on effect to being an authority on these topics and having your EEAT and Helpful Content boxes ticked. You’ve got visible authors associated with those topics, and then you will naturally earn those links, or be in a position where if you do some outreach, people will prefer you over other people, because you’ve got an author that’s an expert on this topic, and this big piece of data driven content that you pushed out, and you’ve got a spokesperson, and then you’re basically primed to do some Digital PR, or at least earn topics, because you’re seen as the authority on that. 

So I’m really a big proponent of owning topics and doing that work ahead of all of that to figure out what are we best at talking about, and pulling from those internal resources beyond the marketing team and even the sales team to get those ideas.

David Bain  

It’s one thing to optimise for a topic and to eventually, hopefully, own that topic, rank for that topic, drive traffic for that particular topic. But how do you ensure that the topic you selected is the right topic for your brand and resonates most with your customers?

Sukhjinder Singh  

I try and identify that at the content audit and strategy stage. So when I’m figuring out the buyer’s journey, what kind of content and topics are our personas engaging with or will engage with? Where’s the value in that? And basically do some research to kind of back that up a little bit, some keyword research, and looking at the search volumes, etc, and just what people are searching for versus what they land on a certain page with. Where in that buyer’s journey, does that page exist? 

From that point, I can paint a picture of what these engaged with topics from search volume through to click through rate etc, through to engagement conversion, and then basically map that to the buyer’s journey. If people are engaging with these topics in the form of FAQs, in the form of a long form, short form guide, a blog, etc, to progress them a little bit throughout this stage of the buyer’s journey, through to conversion and even retention, getting them back. 

It’s that little bit of research and looking at things like search volumes and engagement, click-through rates, conversions, etc, related to the topics they searched for and Georgia.

David Bain  

Georgia, how do you select the content that should be incorporated in your 2026 SEO strategy?

Georgia James  

There’s a lot of pressure on brands and SEOs at the moment to scale content as quickly as possible, now that AI facilitates this. They should absolutely incorporate and utilise it to streamline their workflows. 

I was listening to a podcast recently, and Kate Winslet was speaking about grief. She was speaking about how after she lost her mum, the first thing she did was she went into Google and she just searched up coffins. It was this really human moment where she explained that she didn’t know what to do, so turned to Google. 

That really resonated with me, as I think that’s the situation we’ve probably all been in, where search isn’t actually just about discovery, it’s also some really desperate human moments that come into search. We’ve all sort of been there, worrying about ourselves, what to do next, worrying about people who are close to us, and turning to search engines to ChatGPT to LLMs in times when we are quite vulnerable and quite delicate and sensitive.

I think it’s important for brands to remember that and to show up as human and connect to your users as people, and not just as kind of this all-consuming mass. If we lose sight of that, then we’re making our content a lot less useful for users. 

Like Kelsey said, we’re reproducing stuff that’s already out there, and if we end up with loads of AI slop, then we’re inhibiting the opportunity to form that connection with users. And yes, healthcare brands, funeral brands probably know that they have those really vulnerable users, but I’d say, don’t underestimate the power of your content as well. 

You might be putting out an article that’s like, how to dress for X event, say a garden party, thinking, oh yeah, this is just going to go out, and it’s going to be read by those people who are just looking to shop and looking to do whatever. But it also might be read by somebody who has got no idea of the cultural norms of that event and is completely new to it, and is desperately trying to fit in and to not feel uncomfortable there, who then is, like I said, in that kind of vulnerable stage of searching. 

I think if you can capture those users, then not only are you genuinely being a nice person and helping them out, you know can have an impact on their lives. I think that’s quite rewarding as a marketer to think that. However, you’ll also have a customer who’s connected to your brand and will be much more loyal. And loyalty, in this era where there is so much competition and so many distractions and different touch points, is sort of more valuable than ever. 

There’s a lot of different approaches to content strategy, and this panel have said some great things, but my advice to SEOs would be to try and keep that human element and use real writers who are going to care about their craft and care about the work they’re putting out.

David Bain  

Keep that human element. Use real writers. Sabine, is there anything that’s particularly resonating with you and something that you’d like to add in terms of your content strategy for 2026?

Sabine Ljunggren  

I think a lot of people are sitting there and trying to use these AI tools to be more efficient, but you really need to listen to people and their recommendations. So to have that human aspect as experts on your content on your websites are super central for multiple different reasons, and also going back to why are we going to social media to do research? 

Well, maybe it’s because we trust those content creators, or we want to hear recommendations from a person and not just read through a very well-written guide. That, I think, connects that we need that human aspect of the content.

David Bain  

So talking about the human aspect of content, we have a comment on the livestream saying, definitely the human element is the one very critical thing and it’s a differentiator among a plethora of AI generated articles. 

And talking about AI-generated things, there’s definitely a few bots leaving comments that I’m not going to read out because they’re just mindless rubbish, really. And it’s intriguing that it seems to be relatively easy to distinguish between AI and human in terms of comments on videos, but also, I guess, content within webpages as well. 

Are we going to move to a stage where AI can produce incredible content, perhaps incredible videos as well, or are we some time away from that? Kelsey, I saw you nodding a bit away there. What are your thoughts on that?

Kelsey Libert  

I think there are definitely ways to incorporate AI in the creative and writing process that don’t rely on it 100% but allow you to scale your production in a voice that still emulates you. I’ve written for sites like Harvard Business Review and a lot of marketing publishers over the years, and what I’ve done is I scraped a lot of those articles that I’ve written, and I fed it into a GPT, and I had it create a writer’s genome for me. 

I got the GPT to analyse my sentence structure, my writing style, and the way I make claims, since I do a lot of research in the industry, and it identified that typically, I’m opening sentences with like a surprising stat, and then I’m closing them with the answer to the potential concern. 

It can get very, very granular. It was like a 30-page document that it ended up being created for me. And now, whenever I do research, I’m able to work with AI to both analyse the data that I’m doing and then also help me write an initial outline, or first draft that sounds exactly like me.

I can definitely spot when people just go to GPT and say, write a sentence about Digital PR or something like that, because they all have the same kind of phrases that it uses. And everyone talks about em dashes. For the record, I do love an em dash in general, but I will filter them out and just instruct it not to, because everyone’s kind of so on the fence about it. 

There are ways to incorporate it that allow you, when you’re using elements like, Okay, here’s my specific subject matter expertise on a study I did, and here’s my writing style from like, a 30-page doc of my writer’s genome, now pair this together into first draft that will produce a content quality that’s 10x what somebody might just spit out in a single prompt and GPT without any context. 

Fractll has over 40/50 clients that we work with, and over time, what we’re trying to do is kind of do the same and distill their writers voice, their brand voice, and help us scale it this way. I feel like when people are hesitant to use AI in that way, maybe they’re just not thinking more critically about how you can use its analysis to help scale content versus just regurgitation of what’s out there already.

David Bain  

It’s always challenging as well to actually decide what to do first because we want to talk about changes in terms of technology and where we have to be, but we also want to talk about things like buyer journey as well, and it’s challenging to actually determine where that buyer journey takes place, if it takes or takes place on our website, or perhaps some of it takes place off our website as well. 

So is buyer journey something that we need to identify and map out before essentially agreeing an SEO strategy for 2026?

Kelsey Libert  

Yeah, I think the buyer’s journey, yes, it takes place on your site, but also it takes place everywhere else that people haven’t found you yet. So the more you can assess your buyer’s journey and then get that content and all the places that your target market might be asking those questions or engaging, whether it’s Reddit or, you know, a podcast in your industry or an association’s blog in your industry. 

Think how can you lend your expertise on any one of those sites about those questions, in addition to answering it on your site as a very robust guide with your unique subject matter expertise and data, and then that will naturally earn links too, and then you’re also getting it out everywhere else that people are searching with that question. 

I think it’s a bit of both, but it always starts, I would say, with the buyer’s journey and their pain points. There are tools that give you a lot of the drilled-in details about what your target market is asking online, where they’re asking it, what content of your competitors is out ranking yours, does it gets more traffic than yours, and where are those content gaps? 

SEO 101 is still very much relevant today, and building that very robust on-site content strategy around the hubs that you want to be found for is key. And then really pairing that with the authority building is where then you become a bit more untouchable in your industry.

David Bain  

Sukh, does it all start with a buyer journey?

Sukhjinder Singh  

I think a lot of people don’t expand that scope to include those external sources, particularly for looking at the awareness stage, and they might list the homepage or a blog article, for example, but they also need to list a LinkedIn or X post that was well-engaged with on a topic.

I think they do need to expand the scope of that, and I find it a useful tool to map everything to a buyer’s journey as much as possible, without trying to be too stringently focused on it as well, because people can find you in all types of places, not just on the website, but externally as well, and result in a conversion. It’s important to expand the scope of that and to use that as a tool to get more bang for buck in terms of the content pieces that you produce as well. 

I like the example of podcasts, because you can get the audio podcast, you’ve got the video, you’ve got a transcription, and then you can convert that to a blog post as well, and then you can snip that up to, you know, the different platforms with little image clips and that, and then also little quotes and that. You can get a variety of content just from one bit of content. 

I also like to do that on the reverse with blogs and case studies as well, and chop them up to highlight the statistics for all the different mediums.

David Bain  

Let’s just get Georgia’s and Sabine’s viewpoint on the buyer journey. Georgia, how important is the buyer journey, and is that what you start off with?

Georgia James  

It’s important to have an idea of where your audience might be showing up and make sure that you’re delivering in those places. I think if you get too way down the net, you will just go a bit mad, because trying to map journeys that are so complicated is just impossible now, but making sure that there’s a connection between each of your platforms and that there’s consistent messaging.

Maybe there’s a social trend that your social team have jumped on and that’s great. Can you get a blog post for people who see that on social media and go, Oh, what’s that? I’m going to look that up on Google. Great. Now they found a blog post. If it’s e-ccommerce, like a landing page showcasing your products that fit into that trend, like a collections page or PLP. Having that connection between your touch points and not just putting anything out in isolation, I think, is an important way to ensure that your user journey, no matter where people do come in and find you that they’re then on a path that they can continue until they get to that final stage, and you’re facilitating that as easy as possible, rather than just putting something out there, doing really well, but actually not having any connection with what’s going on with your other channels. 

So that’s why that cross channel communication, again, is just becoming more and more important.

David Bain  

Sabine do, you try and set out a path that you’d like your users to take?

Sabine Ljunggren  

I think with buyer journeys it’s easy, especially in bigger companies, that the social media team do their version of a buyer’s journey, and then the search team do theirs, and then the ads team. When we talked about setting KPIs and common goals within the company, we need to make sure that everyone has the same basic kind of view on what the buyer’s journey is, so that we’re working towards the same goal and then merging them. Of course, the search buyers journey can be a bit more in detail, but just so we speak the same language within the company.

With the repurposing of content for the podcast, I definitely agree that it’s a common discussion we have with our articles, guides, and everything we create within the SEO team, which is of huge value to other teams. So, when we’re evaluating the success of the SEO work we’ve done during the year, we also need to consider how we make life easier for other teams within the company and how we create value for them. And what does that like equal in money or a metric or so?

David Bain  

Sabine, you mentioned the search team and the ads team, and you also touched upon the social team earlier on as well. How do we ensure that what we wish to do as a strategy aligns with other people within the marketing departments, other marketing channels out there, and get some kind of coherent picture running? Kelsey, shall I ask you to start on this one?

Kelsey Libert  

I really think if you’re working in an agency, that onboarding period is really critical. Typically, we have people join from the founding team and Social PR brand. It’s always interesting to me, the bigger the company gets, the more subsets of PR and then brand, and then earned media, and they kind of can all overlap. So getting the biggest amount of data dump upfront, we have like a 30-40 question Client Onboarding Questionnaire where we’re looking for all those questions around your favourite pieces of content, your customer pain points will run surveys for their customer profiles to ask those exact questions to feed the content funnels. 

I think that bringing people together, though, it can be challenging, right? Because, especially in bigger companies, I think everybody wants to impress the boss and say something. And that can result in a little bit more contention sometimes. So that’s why I’ve always really liked a form or a Google Doc that people fill out, because then it can be kind of much more open ended and honest, and then we can distill that, versus it being a meeting where, you know, maybe that doesn’t happen as well in certain companies than others, but getting that, I think, is really important. 

Silos have been a topic of discussion for years. And while it’s good that each team can potentially run their own, I think now more than ever, if you can really focus on doing very robust content, using your experts, using your data and using those client pain points and build one really great campaign that can be spread across all those channels. 

That’s what’s going to move the needle best, as opposed to everybody doing their own disparate things.

David Bain  

You also talk about earned media and SEO converging. What do you mean by that?

Kelsey Libert  

When I started in SEO, people really just talked about link buying and link networks and kind of offshore teams that you could use back in the early 2000s and then kind of SEO evolved over the years into more instead of, you’re not paying for links, right? Because Google penalizes that, we all know, that you have to earn them. You have to earn press coverage, and the best way to do that, and my experience has been, you have to produce something of value, that’s newsworthy, that’s surprising, that’s emotionally evocative. 

We did a study on Harvard Business Review about how the element of surprise can evoke the greatest sharing, so you’re more likely to share content if it surprises you or provides that value, right? And so we kind of weave those elements into any type of research that we’re doing, so that we have those kind of newsworthy hooks, but that are also educational and valuable resources that people want to engage with and share and that publishers actually want to cover, because they’re they’re interesting and they’re timely.

You’ve got to nail that trifecta. And I think by involving more people in that ideation process, you’re more likely to hit that nail on the head. It’s like this golden unicorn that you can achieve when you do. But I think that is really key to success nowadays is going beyond kind of the basic blog posts, while they’re still very valuable, the more robust it can be, the better chance it has for being an evergreen link building magnet, where you don’t even have to pitch it. People are sourcing it because it’s appearing in all the platforms, and it’s a great guide. And then you can pitch it because it actually is something that’s newsworthy and valuable to whether it’s niche publishers or mainstream. 

But I think what it comes back to is those signals, right? Your goal as a brand right now is to build your entity profiles, the keywords and things that you want to be known for, and the best way to do that is to target a lot of different platforms and sites that then point back to you as the authority in your industry on the topics that you’re getting coverage on, or that you’re writing on your blog and earning coverage from. 

And by doing that, that’s the best way to drive your site authority and your overall ability for these systems and their knowledge graphs to define you as the number one authority in your industry on this topic, and then constantly be referencing you and reinforcing that, versus, you know, traditional Google search, where they had 10 people or 10 sites to look through. 

Now they’re getting one distilled answer. And the more and more you can build your site up as the authority around your specific topics, the more likely are you are going to be referenced when somebody queries that later.

David Bain  

Georgia, how does an SEO work more effectively with other channels in order to actually develop a more holistic strategy for the coming year?

Georgia James  

It’s become more and more important in the age of AI search as well, that we just ensure that we’ve got consistent messaging, that we’re speaking to social teams and paid teams, and actually non-digital teams as well, about what they’re putting out there. 

Previously, searchers would, type something in, and they’d be presented with whatever we’ve put on the website, and that would be the information that they get. But now, because AI pulls from so many different sources, it’s going to be pulling in information that’s put out on social as well, and the information that is put out and kind of impressed, that’s the coverage of that out of home piece that you did, and so making sure that all of that ties in and that there’s no kind of big gaps there, that you’re all aligned is really key to just making sure there’s no discrepancies in those answers. 

I think really what it all comes back down to is brand is driving search more than it has done previously, and I think that also goes for kind of all of the channels. So if you don’t have a really nailed down value proposition, then we’ll sit down together and figure out what that is, what is the value that you’re going to be focusing on that you know you can bring to the market. And how are each of you demonstrating that in kind of your different channels is a really good place to start. 

Then think about commercial priorities, where you want to push and who that responsibility is going to sit with. Is that going to be something that’s pushed across all channels, or actually, does it make more sense with certain channels to push more heavily on certain platforms, because maybe search is happening more for one thing on Google and another thing on Tiktok, which is absolutely fine, you just need to make sure that then when those users from Tiktok are landing on the site, they’re able to still find the whatever it was that was being advertised on there easily, and we’re facilitating that full user journey, no matter where they’ve come from.

David Bain  

Sukh, I saw you nodding vigorously there to Georgia. So what do you agree with? And what do you perhaps wish to add?

Sukhjinder Singh  

I like the idea of a tangible example that you can share amongst teams and looking at sources. So what I was going to say was we could root these in KPIs that we all share, etc, and that’s cool. But what I was doing as well as going into LLMs and seeing under a prompt who’s appearing for that, high or low competitors. Then you click on what sources are behind that appearance, and I can say, oh, this is you guys and this bit of coverage is you guys, whatever something that you did. Then I can basically say, okay, let’s do more of that. So can we generate and encourage more user generated content? Do more engaged social posts along with this, and do more paid stuff that results in a click to the landing page that comes up in these sources. 

That’s I like using. The idea of using those tangible examples to buy people in in different teams, and basically have that kind of visual representation of this is what we’re kind of impacting. So the more of them that I tend to use in the past, the more successful that buy in and collaboration seems to be, as well as kind of scheduling in these catch ups and brainstorming and this, that and the other. 

David Bain  

Sabine, what are your final thoughts?

Sabine Ljunggren  

I think the struggle is for everyone to understand why this matters for me, for our developer team, or for the PR team, or, why I should care and truly show those examples of okay, why does the SEO team talk so much about the impact of social search or AI, and then truly show those examples of, okay, look at this piece of Instagram content that you did. 

Look at the opportunity that we have if we would actually optimize this for search, doing this, this, this, and tap into the search volumes that you haven’t increased that discoverability on on Instagram, or showing the other teams on actual concrete examples of how this could make them look better as a team, for their boss, because their channel would perform better if they had this layer of of search added to their work.

David Bain  

A lot of incredible thoughts shared as part of the discussion. I’m sure the discussion could keep on going, amd hopefully it will result in a part two at some point. 

In the meantime, let’s go around our panel and ask where the listener can find out more about them. Starting off with Georgia.

Georgia James  

You can find me on LinkedIn, Georgia James SEO, or if you want to find out more about the agency that I work at then, flauntdigital.com.

David Bain  

Thank you so much for joining us today. And also with us was Sukh.

Sukhjinder Singh  

Yeah, just Google Sukhjinder Singh. I should be appearing at the top there, or just put that in LinkedIn as well. My website is idoseo.co.uk as well.

David Bain  

Lovely. Thanks so much for joining us again, and also with us with was Kelsey.

Kelsey Libert  

Yeah, I’m just my full name Kelsey Libert on LinkedIn, and my agency is Frac.tl, and you can also find about 25 AI workflow tools that we’re currently testing as well on our site for free right now.

David Bain  

Thank you, Kelsey, and also joining us today was Sabine.

Sabine Ljunggren  

So you’ll find me on LinkedIn, Sabine Ljunggren, or have a look at maiamarketing.com, which is the agency that I represent.

David Bain  

Lovely. Thanks so much. I’ve been your host, David Bain, and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO panel. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at Majestic.com/webinars, and, of course, check out SEOin2026.com.

Previous Episodes

Follow our Twitter/X (@Majestic) and Bluesky (@majestic.com) accounts to hear about more upcoming episodes!

Or if you want to catch up with all of our previous episodes, check out the full list of our Majestic SEO Podcast episodes.

Back