SEO is currently going through a great deal of change. But what does this change mean for the future of SEO?
Joining host David Bain to explore The Future of SEO is Irina Papuc, Jono Alderson, Tom Winter and Laura Iancu.
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David Bain
What is the future of SEO? Hello and welcome to the April 2025 edition of the Majestic SEO Panel, where we’re going to be debating the future of SEO. I’m your host, David Bain. Joining me today are three great guests, so let’s get on with meeting them right now, starting off with Irina.
Irina Papuc
Hey everyone. I’m Irina Papuc of Co-founder of the award winning agency, Galactic Fed. And you can find me on LinkedIn, and you can also reach me on galacticfed.com.
David Bain
Superb stuff. Great to have you on here, Irina and also with us today, is Tom.
Tom Winter
Hey. Great to meet you. My name is Tom Winter, I’m the founder at seowind.io, which is an AI writing tool that is research first. You can also find me on LinkedIn. It’s basically my second home.
David Bain
Second home, okay. And also with us today is Laura.
Laura Iancu
Hiya. My name is Laura Iancu. I’m the founder of SearchPedia. So it’s an online glossary for all things search engine marketing. You can find me on Bluesky and on LinkedIn.
David Bain
Superb. Thank you for joining as well, Laura. So three great panelists there as well. And let’s ask them all the same initial question. So start starting off with Irina. First of all, Irina, what is the future of SEO?
Irina Papuc
I think the future of SEO is kind of like the beginning of SEO. There’s going to be one clear overarching principle that never goes away, which is maintaining the authenticity of your brand’s voice, and regardless of what tech comes in, that’s always going to be the North Star that should be guiding any type of content creation, which remains the backbone of what we do.
David Bain
Superb. Tom, what are your thoughts on this one?
Tom Winter
So probably SEO will be dead in 2025 as every single year. But jokes aside, definitely we’re going more into conversational SEO. So keyword stuffing is something that we will not continue, and we’ll go back to the principles. So value first.
So something that Google said 25 years ago, we want to provide the best value to the end user, and we actually will have to do it, because Google became really a good referee. So I think we have to add as much value, as much opinions and as much context to create EEAT content.
David Bain
Okay, Irina, we had an attempt to joke there by Tom, and you said that you were going to share. No, I’m not going to put you on the spot there. Laura, let’s, let’s ask you the same question, please. What is the future of SEO?
Laura Iancu
Well, I’m going to probably bore you by saying it’s all about collaborating with SEO and LLMs. I think, if I don’t know, maybe a year ago, we were quite sort of scared, I suppose, of taking charge and taking the initiative to start optimizing for what people call nowadays GEO.
I think that’s going to be a thing nowadays, and I think we’re going to get to that point where we’re going to build enough confidence to start doing our own tests, especially because there’s so many resources out there right now that help us do it very efficiently.
And I think in the next couple of months, I think we’re going to be a bit more proficient in actually measuring our impact. So yeah, something to do with that, really. And I think it comes down to what both Irina and Tom were talking about, value and authenticity. So I think that’s probably the main two pillars that are going to drive our strategy forward.
David Bain
Okay, value and authenticity. We talked a lot about AI beforehand as well. Now is value and authenticity more important in the age of AI, Laura?
Laura Iancu
Absolutely, like we all know that large language models nowadays, they crawl like there’s no tomorrow, right? They don’t have the, you know, search crawling capabilities, like a search engine. But because they’ve been relentless, really, like there’s, for a lack of a better word, I think it’s so important that we as website owners or content creators or SEO specialists and so on, take charge of what we actually show them.
And there’s so many ways to sort of start testing that, like, I think last week or two weeks ago, I can’t remember my time’s a bit all over the place right now, because I’m I’ve had a lot of like things happening at the same time, but I remember logging in for this amazing, I want to say a panel of, yeah, like a panel on YouTube for an SEO charity, like it was, like SEO for Paws, or something like this, where we had someone who’s been in the industry for a very long time. I think his name was Alan Bleiweiss. I don’t want to say the wrong name, but I know he does like, really in depth and almost like ruthless SEO audits.
And he was, you know, talking about the possibility of actually involving a new protocol, similar to robots.txt and your XML sitemaps called llms.txt, where you’d be taking that kind of control, or at least trying to, because we all know it’s, you know, the disallow is not necessarily working all the time.
So, yeah, he was, you’re sort of saying, You know what, you can’t hurt adding that to your website. And sort of start doing best practices between SEOs and and, you know, LLMS really so, yeah, I genuinely feel like moving forward, you need to show expert opinions, authenticity, and, again, provide value to what you feed into an LLM in order to sort of get anything back, even brand mentions, like Irina said, you know, I think it’s vital we do it.
We move forward very consciously, rather than just stuffing your entire you know, content or because realistically, you can spam the hell out of any kind of new protocol, you know, if you’re cheeky enough, but hopefully people won’t do it, but we’ll see, I guess, and sort of add anything in there. So, yeah, I think moving forward, that’s the two main pillars. And change my mind if you want to, but that’s it for me.
David Bain
So, Laura, this LLM text. How far are we down the line with this? How likely is it to be supported by the majority of the LLMs, and is it likely to be really adhered to?
Laura Iancu
Oh, I’m in my discovery phase at the moment, but I think it is something that will probably become the standard. Perhaps not. I suppose if a website owner, you know, finds value into adding it to their website, definitely, yeah, go on for it. But I wouldn’t expect them to, sort of, you know, every large language model out there to be like, yeah, right. You know, I genuinely feel like, if they see the value, right? I don’t think they’ll necessarily adhere to it.
Again, coming back down to value. So I suppose it is the way you frame it. Like, for instance, I mean, yes, content owners, and again, as website owners, we get a bit of a value from that, because at the end of the day, you kind of, you know, tell LLMs, do you know what? This is a shortcut to crawling something that’s less likely to cause you hallucinations or actual authentic content. And now coming to what Tom was saying about authenticity.
Whereas, if, I suppose, if they see the value of doing that, rather than just crawling and crawling and crawling, you know, for the sake of doing that and gathering all information and getting very deep, I suppose they’ll get to that point where, where they can see it as a shortcut, there for a benefit. But I suppose we just have to see. We’re kind of beginning right now, so at least I think so, like, I’m not, I’m no expert, so.
David Bain
Irina, are LLMs likely to replace traditional search engines?
Irina Papuc
I don’t think they’re going to be replacing traditional search engines in the near future. But I certainly think that’s a very likely outcome in the medium to long term future. I think in the short term future, you know, we’ve clearly seen mass adoption of LLM based search. My grandma’s using LLM based search, which, to me, is the defining test that I take to see how far this has spread. I know it’s not real science, but and, but I do see another thing going on here.
I was reading recently. I forget where it was, and I should have had this ready to cite, but there was a really, really telling poll I read recently. It might have been Pew, but maybe not, but it was predicting that in the next two years, LLM based search will make a significant land grab of most search traffic, and that means we have to begin preparing ourselves as SEOs for a whole different paradigm. You know, this is not just like rethinking traditional SEO. This is literally a paradigm shift as we move towards far more contextual, semantic, conversational style, query building, you know, things like long tail keywords are going to be increasingly important in the way that they probably weren’t before.
And just to piggyback on a few really excellent points that Laura made this llms.txt proposal that came out back in September, this is very powerful, because it helps level the playing field of the internet and how websites choose to receive and allow their content, to be parsed by LLMs. So it, I think it’s only natural that eventually regulation will creep in, like it does with any new technology. And when that happens, I’m excited to see how this text paradigm is going to impact things. I wanted to quickly go back to the LLM text file, because I just find that to be such a fascinating topic.
One thing that I wanted to point out is there are going to be, certainly, caveats in the way it’s implemented that brings up a lot of questions. For example, the fact that manual input is required, you know, it’s not quite the same as a robot text file, because unlike search engines that crawl the web, current LLMs do not just automatically find and index these files. So you, as the site owner, you’re going to have to manually provide the file content to the AI system, and also the way you created making it highly readable to LLMs is going to be a big deal. The content written inside this file needs to be concise, clear, organized, easy for it to be understood by LLMs.
So I’m a little worried. Like with anything that requires manual human intervention, there is going to be some prone you know, it’s going to be prone to human error. So I hope that we’re able to adopt this in a responsible way, and I guess, take back our power as content creators, and how we choose to allow that content to be used, which I think is an important, worthwhile question.
David Bain
So, Irina, I think it’s worthwhile focusing on a few things that SEOs need to stop doing in terms of optimizing for traditional search engines that won’t work so effectively for LLMs. One of the things you said earlier on was that LLMs are likely to prefer longer tail keyword phrases.
And you also talked about the content, the structure of your content as well. So are you saying that SEOs probably need to stop targeting short tail keyword phrases and stop writing long form pieces without any structure in them?
Irina Papuc
In a nutshell, I think so. Don’t hold me to it, because these are still very much educated guesses, but I do see things moving in that direction, simply because LLMs have become so powerful in picking up and quickly synthesizing content.
So I think over time, the I guess you can say the standards, the bar will be raised. And this is where bringing up EEAT makes a lot of sense, because, as we all know, EEAT has been a gold standard for years now, in driving how we build authoritative, trustworthy pieces and how we advise our clients to do so. So I think that is going to become more powerful than ever before, even more crucial creating content that is not just a rehash of something that’s already out there, but truly unique, truly built upon original sources that only you perhaps have access to, either from your own proprietary learnings or data, I think, is going to be incredibly powerful and allow you to set yourself apart from the rest that’s out there.
And just to quickly recap on your question, David, other things that I think will differ when it comes to optimizing for LLM versus traditional SEO. I think there’s a few key key differences there. One, I think brand mentions are going to become incredibly powerful.
You know, link building has always been a big deal since Google came around, and just by the way, the internet is set up, right? Pages link to each other. So Google placed a lot of emphasis on links as a deciding factor of authority. But now that LLMs have come in and they’re based around tokens, and don’t give a hoot about links. Brand mentions are going to be more important than ever before. And by that I mean the most relevant, most authoritative brand mention you can possibly get from a site that is clearly in your space, that is clearly a source of authority, that is really pawned EEAT standards. If that site mentions your brand, that is a vote of confidence for your brand and gives you more powerful. I guess you could say vote of confidence to an LLM, as it picks up knowledge about your brand.
I also think that maintaining active social media profiles is going to continue to be a very powerful digital strategy, because LLMs train on diverse data sources, which include social platforms. And I also think generating organic brand mentions by becoming a mention magnet, let’s say, is going to be a helpful strategy to think about. And just in general, moving away from the more traditional keyword based search to more entity optimization, which I know is this really like esoteric meaning. And people always ask me, what the hell is an entity?
But if we want to talk about that, I’m happy to philosophize, but thinking more broadly in terms of the entities that make up your unique brand, and not just focusing on the trees in the forest, the keywords, I think, is going to make a big impact in how you think about ranking.
David Bain
Sounds great. Okay, I’d love to come back to entity optimization, with regards to, obviously, the future of search and optimizing for LLMs as well. But Tom just maintaining on keywords for a second there as well. What are your thoughts on how to go about selecting keywords that are appropriate to target LLMs?
Tom Winter
So definitely, as I said in the beginning, keywords will go away. But for the sake of understanding the entities, keywords are still useful to understand and map it out, just to know where’s the starting point where we’re trying to actually focus on but I agree with both Laura and Irina that like, entities are important. I would simplify it like, it’s kind of like being authority in a specific space. This is the entity.
So like, kind of be the small Wikipedia of your niche. Like, be able to provide as much knowledge within this space as possible to be able to become the authority. Because I agree with Irina that the brand mentions are the new backlinks. So it’s easy to spot from Google’s perspective, how many people actually put your brand name into Google and drive traffic directly to you. So this means that people know you, and that’s a similar indicator as it used to be with the backlinks that people mentioned that.
But we all know what we SEO experts do with backlinks and where we get them from. It’s far harder to do it with brand mentions. Of course, there will be people that will try to do it, but definitely the authority. This is a very important indicator of authority when it comes to the eyes of Google. But keywords are there. Keyword stuffing is definitely not like because Google understands the text far beyond that. So we are about understanding what we say, how we say, and solving the problems, because this is the key when it comes to both GEO and SEO.
And coming back to your question about the different like, are we going into GEO? So LLM search? I think it’s really hard to draw a line right now between normal search and LLM search, because looking at, for example, informational keywords, basically we have AI overview that are in 90 something percent of informational keywords when you put it into Google, both in Europe and the United States. So that’s an LLM search. So when it comes to this type of keywords, it’s already there. And if we go to Google Search Console, any Google Search Console, we will see the transition of the keywords to more conversational ones. There’s a lot more longer conversational keywords in your Google Search Console.
David Bain
Irina, you were wanting to talk about entity optimization for LLMs. And Mohammed asked a question actually, in relation to what we do when we’re cited, when our brand is cited and there’s almost no visibility. Zero click and search or within the LLM, how do we go about measuring visibility and the impact that that has, that that has, if we don’t actually see traffic back to our website?
Irina Papuc
Oh, boy. I need to think about this for a second. If anyone else wants to jump in the meantime, feel free.
David Bain
Laura, do you fancy?
Laura Iancu
Yeah, sure thing. So, yeah, indeed. LLM, at the moment, the text is not a big deal, because we’re not, you know, implementing it like crazy at the moment. And yes, there is a WordPress plugin for it, I can’t remember the name. I think it’s actually WP can’t even remember. I saw it briefly. I didn’t look to see what it does. Instead, I remember reading an article on Search Engine Journal, I think, where they were suggesting a couple of tools that already do it for you. And sort of you have a bit more control than just generating with a plugin, with a WordPress plugin, but in terms of brand mentions with zero click search, that’s a bit of a complicated one, because you have to think about, are you already a settled brand?
Are you someone who’s got their brand awareness out there and people know about you, or you’ve just launched your brand and you expect that you’re going to be showing up in LLMS because you’ve done, I don’t know, LLMs text? Yeah, it’s a bit of a weird one, I think, like, if you think about, you know, startup brand, right? That’s a bit of a long process out there. It’s not as simple as asking this question, I think. Whereas, if you’ve got, I think if you’re someone who’s already got that brand recognition out there, and you got to that point, I think you’ve got a branding problem, not an SEO problem.
Irina Papuc
That’s a fair point. I appreciate that a lot, Laura and just to add to that, I think there is an aura effect we have to consider here, because, like you said, once you reach a certain tipping point of brand recognition, SEO, you’ve built an SEO moat. You probably have a paid media strategy like you have just all these different ingredients simmering in the same pot, then the additional brand mentions you get are going to be an extra layer on top of that, and I don’t think that you should be looking so closely at those and measuring those separately, because all of these ingredients contribute to the overall flavorness of the stew, if that makes sense.
So I think in general, brand mentions are going to be very powerful, and at some point it has to be taken in fate that as you collect those provided that they are from high authority relevant websites to your brand, similar to how earning links is a faith based science, because you cannot directly attribute SEO value to any particular effort you make within SEO, right? There’s hundreds of factors that Google takes into consideration when they rank a page you cannot just pinpoint and say this is the reason why we are succeeding now. So I think that again, it requires looking at the whole ensemble of what your strategy is like, and all the moving parts that contribute to that overall success.
David Bain
“Earning links is a faith based science”. There’s a t-shirt for you. That’s a phrase.
Irina Papuc
Sticker right there in the making, right next to “baby on board”, right?
David Bain
Tom, shall we continue the conversation about measurements? Obviously Mohammed’s question was about measuring the value of entities within LLMs, but you talk a lot about EEAT and creating content on your website based upon that, and not keywords. So for not creating content based upon keyword volumes, how are you measuring the impact of what we’re doing?
Tom Winter
So definitely, when it comes like, you have to look at it from different levels. So definitely you can look at it from the content perspective, from the whole website perspective and your own authority. So like, these are at least the three levels that I would look at when it comes to EEAT.
I was on the conference just two weeks ago in Lithuania, and there was like, EEAT all over the place. They were talking about the EEAT, EEAT that, unfortunately, I wasn’t the nice guy there, so, like, I raised my hand and asked the question, “but how do you measure that? Like, that you’re doing it right or wrong. Like, what do you do?” And to be honest, nobody could answer the question because they were just doing EEAT not measuring it. So if you have two pieces of content, the problem was always which one is more EEAT, like, simple as that.
So I try to measure it like, the simplest way to measure it, like, just go to AI and ask it the question, like, tell me which one is more EEAT at a grade. Maybe create even simple metrics like, what do you count? Like, what is the, I don’t know, the value. One stands for this. Two stands for that. And just ask even the AI. If you don’t have a way to measure it, this is the simplest way, probably, to get any measurement, to be able to compare things together, run it twice, see it if it’s predictable, if it’s repeatable, if yes, this is one of the things that you definitely can do.
But definitely we need to start measuring things like EEAT, because this is the value that we are providing if we create “fluff” as content, if we have to understand that we do it. Because many people think, when I’m talking to them, that their content is the best in the world, and whatever like somebody else has is worse. So actually, find a way to compare in an objective way, not subjective, because always what I create is the best in the world, that’s obvious, but try to measure things like that.
Irina Papuc
That is a great point Tom, and I just wanted to quickly add to that. I think solid what you said about how we can measure EEAT, those are simple and very, very high impact ways to do it. I also think we can go back to analyzing backlinks and mentions as another way to measure EEAT success.
If you’re getting a bunch of authoritative mentions from other websites that are in your brand space, then that could also be an indicator that you’re writing authoritative content that the EEAT standards are working, right?
I also think if your pages are being referenced in AI overviews Google snippets, that’s, again, a great indicator that you’re being seen by LLMs and search engines as a source of authority. And then also user engagement metrics, I think, longer dwell times, lower bounce rates, probably signals that people are interested and view your site with a level of trustworthiness.
So just wanted to add that as a few other ways we can look at and maybe measure EEAT efficacy. But they’re like I would say if you measure it in different ways, you have to understand that some of them you can measure here and now. Some of them, you have to wait until you get results, right? So, think about it from this perspective, and also just measure it. Like, if you don’t, then you will not see the results. Totally.
Laura Iancu
Interesting point. Would you, I’m curious, consider a review management system that a site owner implements, for example, whether it Trustpilot or whatever they use the new QR code that Google released. Now you can just do it, just by scanning the QR code after their updates. Would you consider that as a KPI for measuring EEAT so whatever you’re getting, you know, as reviews?
Tom Winter
An indicator. But as we all know, it’s really easy to scam Trustpilot, Google mentions, like Google Reviews and everything else, but definitely one of everything that shows trust, I think it’s worth working on that’s a trust signal. Like when we go to restaurants, right? Like if we see 4.8 and 1000 reviews, like we go there. So I think it works just the same.
David Bain
Okay, interesting. So obviously a related metric, but it’s not necessarily tying directly back to the content on your site, but rather the authority of your brand. Laura, in terms of EEAT are there any specific metrics that you look at in order to actually determine whether or not what you’re doing has been successful?
Laura Iancu
Yeah, I still do it manually, funnily enough, because I feel like I get a lot of error by testing AI at the moment, mind you, I don’t have the experience that Tom and Irina have at this point, but I feel like it’s best to stick what it actually says on the documentation on Google Developers like I actually check the material quite often, especially after an update, to see if they’ve added anything on there.
And it’s worth sort of like, you know, sieving my content through the new guidelines, let’s say. I never had the time to actually go through the entire 180 something pages of the I think they’re called raters. So Google Content Raters, or something like this. So which are actual people who have a list of like, sort of checks to see if the content is up to standard, but I feel like that’s a very good sort of document to refer to.
And I also always ask myself the, I think it’s at the bottom of the actual source, the “whys” and the “what,” when I think about my content, regardless if it’s a product page or if it’s an actual blog post, or regardless. And I feel like it’s very important to not lose sight of what you actually want to achieve with that piece of content, and if possible, as Irina and Tom said, add authority signals. Add author pages. Make sure your structured data is on point, you know, make sure you’ve got all that sorted before, you know, asking yourself, “Oh, why isn’t my content performing as well?”
So in terms of measuring, as I said, EEAT is a very long conversation, and it’s something you’re not adding it to your website, like we saw this Reddit forum, like, I think, a couple of days back, where people were selling EEAT to the point that we were talking about this before, to the point that I think John Mueller did like a release where he said, “That’s not a thing.”
Irina Papuc
It was a press conference.
Laura Iancu
Yeah, exactly. So, no, you can’t sell EEAT. I mean, there’s parts of it, obviously, where they bring together to the point that you can actually prove that you’ve done the right thing. But yeah, when it comes to measuring, it’s a bit elusive, isn’t it? It’s Google at the end of the day.
David Bain
Irina, we said we go back to entity optimization, and that obviously relates to brand mentions as well, and perhaps merging the value of brand mentions without actually resulting traffic back to your website. But in relation to entity optimization, what are a few key tasks that an SEO needs to do in order to actually ensure that their entity is as optimized as possible for an LLM?
Irina Papuc
That is a great question. So I think there is no one size fits all answer here, and that’s why this often becomes a very esoteric topic.
People often ask themselves, what is an entity? An entity can be anything, any way you want to slice up the pie that is your brand. That’s the way I like to say it. And I must be hungry. I don’t think I had breakfast today. This is why I have all these food references.
But essentially, right, initially we were looking at as SEOs 10, 15, years ago, it was all about keywords, and keywords still matter a great deal, as Tom said, that’s a way we can map out entities. But nowadays it’s really important to take, let’s say, I’m just going to use an example here. Let’s say you’re trying to grow your plumbing empire, right? Let’s say this is your brand, and within this plumbing empire, let’s say you have departments focused on different areas of plumbing. Maybe you have a commercial and then a residential branch in your plumbing empire. So these are, I’m just giving you some examples of how you might be able to slice up this pie, but that’s going to depend entirely on the brand that you’re building and its unique journey and its unique connection and relationship to humankind, to how you want it to interact with the audience.
But the idea here is that you look beyond just the keywords, and you look at the these parts of your brand that you can then do specific strategies around to grow at the end of the day, I don’t think there’s any big, innovative, new, radical thing that differentiates keyword optimization from entity optimization. I think it’s more about how you decide to split up the thing that you’re trying to optimize and look at it. I don’t know if that was very helpful, but if anyone else wants to chime in.
Tom Winter
I think it was like, and coming back to your plumbing example, I would say when it comes to entities, Google will not let you into the big pool straight away. It will first let you into a small pond. So coming back to the plumbing thing, if you become and you want to build a plumbing empire, you start from your neighborhood. So like you start with maybe a piece of the city, then you actually branch out the whole city. Then probably something else, and the whole country, and then probably worldwide.
If you start to go worldwide from day one, with all the possible things, when within plumbing, Google will not believe you that you actually could have done it. So start within your small niche, like something small that you do really perfectly, become the expert, become the Wikipedia of this small niche, like small thing fixing leak from the sink, like, and this is where you become experts, and then go into another thing, another thing, and then go wider, because Google let you in piece by piece, like pond by pond, to a big pool, or even a sea or an ocean.
If you’re Majestic, then probably you can be marketing big ocean, but if you’re a small company in marketing, then probably start within your niche. And this is where Google and probably LLMs will let you in and tell like, “Yeah, this is the expert within this specific niche, within this area.”
Irina Papuc
Just really quick, just to add a few thoughts. We were chatting just a minute ago about measuring EEAT impact, and now we’re talking about measuring entity optimization impact. And I think in both of these examples, just to tie it in with what Tom said when you are an early stage company, right? And you’re literally building the seeds of your plumbing empire, and you’re trying to become the expert in this one faucet leak in your neighborhood, you might not have the traffic, the clout, all these things that we were chatting about earlier, the ability to ask ChatGPT and to verify that you’re doing all the right stuff by showing yourself show up you’re just at the start of your growth journey.
So you might not be able to track any backlinks to see if you’re authoritative because you haven’t built any yet you literally are just starting out. So I wanted to quickly address that use case, because there’s more of those than there are not. And perhaps a lot of the audience here is wondering, how do I track something if I’m at the very start of growing my company?
And I think what always helps, whether it’s EEAT impact or entity optimization impact, is the old true and trusted way of rounding up a few of your clients or a few outsiders, people who live outside your head. Because, as Tom said, we all believe we are creating the best content on Earth and having a few of your clients who you’re closer to, or simply just outsiders read your content and give you feedback on what they’re reading. Survey the people who are connected to your space and ask them personally what they think of what you’ve created. Is it useful to them? Is it driving value? Is it answering their pain points? Is it solving their problems? Is it a delight to read? Are there enough jokes and humor, like, is it something that they’re actually going to want to consume?
And I think that always works, regardless of what stage you’re at in your plumbing empire’s growth, just good old fashioned surveying, right? And if you don’t have friends that you can ask, just go to any AI and ask the same questions there, they can become your best friend, and they will answer honestly what they think.
Laura Iancu
That’s exactly what I was going to add. Sorry, so I remember one of the first projects I’ve ever done to sort of see how I am doing in my entity optimization, right? I was using Diffbot, like the better free version a while ago. And I remember I kept looking at these like metrics that I didn’t understand at that point, because I’m not a network engineer. I don’t know how these things work. I just read about them, and I try to understand them my best and talk to people about it, right? And there was salience, it was sentiment, it was these kinds of metrics there, obviously, that the Diffbot were sort of getting from my text and say, “This is between zero to one, this is between one to two and so on.” And there was also an option where you could sort of just see how your crawler would have seen, would have read your website pretty much, and understand the context.
Again, context, which I think is very important when we talk to LLMs as well, because that’s kind of the key to sort of like, look at your website and be like, alright, cool. So I feel like this website is doing this because of this and because of this entity, because of this entity, and this is their connection kind of thing. So I feel it’s very important to sort of like, play around a bit. I agree with what Irina said, talking to people, if you’ve got friends or, you know, although a lot of time, they’re gonna be biased, if they know you, they’re gonna they’re gonna be like, yeah, it’s amazing.
Irina Papuc
Friends, I didn’t mean friends, I meant people you are friendly with.
Laura Iancu
Yeah, they might be like, yeah, it’s amazing. But yeah, it’s very sort of easy to kind of just rely on any type of AI that’s, you know, free or not out there if you can afford it, to sort of see how you’re doing and verify your knowledge graph.
If you’re a business, if you do a local SEO, for example, your plumbing business and so on, make sure your Google Business profile is still optimizing and absolutely fine, you know, like little things like that, that, I think, in terms they do count for LLM optimization as well. Because as much as you’re doing, you know, standard and up to date and best practices for SEO, then you’re a winner to GEO. And again, I’m using this term GEO, but anyway, that’s another conversation. I’m kind of used to it now. I wasn’t friends with it.
David Bain
So Tom, you talked a little bit about targeting a very specific niche and becoming that authority, that expert in that particular niche. And I was going to ask a follow up question in relation to actually, how do you rapidly make search engines and LLMs aware of the fact that your brand is the expert in that particular niche?
And I was going to ask for one or two tips in terms of actually speeding up that process. What do you optimize on your site? Is the schema part of it? Are there other elements that you’d like to suggest?
Laura, you brought in Google Business profile as well. Are there other elements of speeding up that recognition in terms of what your brand actually represents, and what you can do with search engines?
Tom gave a little nod there. So I’m going to go to you first for that one.
Tom Winter
Sure thing. So first of all, it doesn’t always go the way we want. So this is the big problem, the authority where we are the authority doesn’t have to align with what we think we are in an authority in.
So first of all, I would start with Google Search Console to ask myself a question using the Google Search Console data, what is my authority? Because the authority is hidden there, like these are the keywords that we rank for, especially if we can cluster them into some groups, then we will see exactly what Google at least thinks, and this is like 90% of organic traffic.
So when it comes to compares to other types of traffic, let’s focus on that, because they give us the most of organic traffic. Then we can see what is our authority, even if we think that we want to go broader, like, let’s start from that, and let’s think about like, what kind of things we can branch out, then, creating content that is valuable, full of authority signals like value, opinions, data, putting things together. So it’s kind of like Skyscraper Technique combined with your own knowledge. I would go about after search intent, because changing the mind of Google is extremely hard. They have it defined for the specific keyword. But I would add on top of that.
When it comes to some tricks that you can use and do it straight away. Laura already said about llms.txt, no harm in doing that. For me, I understand it as kind of like a schema for LLMs To better understand your page when it comes to robots.txt file, this is a way how to crawl your page so they are totally different. They’re both needed, and we have to look at them from a different perspective.
When it comes to robots.txt, which you can add straight away, it just allow LLMs to crawl your page. So like, just add a snippet there with information that you allow people, allow LLMs to crawl your page and get your data as the training data. So this is the thing that you can do, straight away, put it there, no harm in that. You will become like a part of search, because you will allow LLMs to use your data for search. You will also add it to training data. Did they use your data before for training data? I don’t know. Is there any harm for letting them? I don’t think so.
I would say at the moment, it’s better to allow them to use it as training data than not, but that’s my opinion. You can do it however you want, but focus on the value and then use something that I call critique stage, using LLMs to understand what you’re doing good, what you’re doing bad, and what are the action points to resolve it and make it better. You can use it with everything, either content that you’re creating, so just like, use it as an editor, telling you these are the things that are good, these are bad, these are action points to resolve it, or other things.
If you’re doing a prompt, you can do a critique stage with the same way use LLMs to help you to understand and work with them as buddies, like teammates, that will help you to excel with whatever you’re doing to create better value.
David Bain
Let’s finish up by asking our panelists one more question and just confirming who they are and where people can find them. So the last question is, what’s one action SEOs need to take to prepare for the future of SEO? Irina, should we start with you on that one?
Irina Papuc
Sure. Going back to entity based SEO, I want to round it up with some things you can do already, starting today.
One, use schema markup for all the key entities that make up your brand. So people, places, organizations, products, events, whatever they are, make sure that those are properly marked up with schema on your site, create very clear entity relationships within your content. So try to show how entities connect to each other to help guide that along.
Also make sure that your entities align with search intent and with user journeys. I can’t emphasize that one enough.
Try to build authoritative associations through internal linking on your site between entities. I think all of these are just part of best practices, good hygiene, in terms of thinking about entity based search.
And finally, try to develop content that positions your brand as an entity authority. This is again, something that’s been true north for since the dawn of the internet. But I need to end with emphasizing that.
David Bain
Thank you, Irina. And where can people find you online?
Irina Papuc
They can find me on galacticfed.com, and they can also hit me up anytime they want with any 3am SEO question on LinkedIn.
David Bain
Lovely, Irina. And Tom, what’s one action SEOs need to take to prepare for the future of SEO?
Tom Winter
So although that I’m a developer on a daily basis, I will say, stop thinking about technical SEO, that it can solve every issue that you have and will bring you tremendous amounts of traffic. No, it will not, like, maybe it will give you additional, like, 5%, focus on the value.
So, basically, focus on the thing that bring value. And that’s data, original research, your own opinions, anything that can bring additional value to the table when somebody is reading, because right now, people are using Google and LLMs in the same way they are using it in a conversational way. They want to have a solution. They want to see if something solved their problem, and they want to trust it. So they want to see that there is data to back it up. This is if you focus on that, I think you’re golden.
You can find me on LinkedIn, as I said in the beginning, or seowind.io.
David Bain
Super, thank you, Tom. And Laura, what’s your answer to that question? What’s one action SEOs need to take to prepare for the future of SEO?
Laura Iancu
I think you need to start by being present everywhere, if possible, especially where Google gets the data from, like make sure you’re on Reddit, make sure you’re on Wiki and so on first of all.
Second of all, I’m going to go back to LLM and everything we were talking about previously, and say, start playing with a couple of tools to start measuring the impact. There are a couple of free resources out there nowadays, there are also paid more, I suppose, advanced models where you can actually measure, you can track your brand mentions in LLMs and so on, and the keywords you’re targeting and so on. So have a play with that.
And lastly, to tie it back to the LLMs text, I think it’d be important to create markdowns of basically every page on your website that you think needs LLM attention. And because the advantage there is that it’s a nice full content flattening. So chances are it’s going to get seen and crawled. So why not? Like it can’t hurt as I think Alan, what’s his name, said, so, yeah, just be open and test and try and, you know, trial and error. Because at the end of the day, no one’s perfect.
David Bain
And where can people find you, Laura?
Laura Iancu
Well, I’m on LinkedIn. Again, you can text me anytime. I’m also a night bird, so yeah, 3 o’clock SEO questions, I’m there for. Bluesky and searchpedia.co.uk.
David Bain
Superb. 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 SEOin2025.com too. Until then, see you later.
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