Many businesses focus solely on keywords, overlooking a powerful strategy that can unlock long-term SEO success: thought leadership. By consistently sharing valuable insights and establishing yourself as an expert, you can attract a loyal audience, earn high-quality backlinks, and boost your search rankings.
In this webinar, we’ll show you how to identify your unique expertise, create compelling content that resonates with your target audience, and amplify your message to reach a wider audience.
Joining our host David Bain for this podcast about thought leadership and SEO was Ashley Segura, Christian Rigg, Jasper Hamill, and Joe Terry.
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Transcript
David Bain
What is Thought Leadership SEO?
Hello and welcome to the October 2025 edition of the Majestic SEO panel on what is Thought Leadership SEO.
I’m your host, David Bain, and joining me today are four great guests, so let’s meet them. Starting off with Ashley.
Ashley Segura
Hi, how’s it going? My name is Ashley Segura. I’m the Director of Marketing at SearchLab, and it is 6am my time. I’m in Oregon, in the state, so I’m here, and I’m excited to do this.
David Bain
That is very, very impressive. We didn’t cover that beforehand as well. I forgot about that, so apologies again, but thank you again for coming on at that horrendous hour. Also joining us today is Christian, pleased to meet you, and thank you for coming on the panel as well.
Christian Rigg
Absolutely, my pleasure. My name is Christian Rigg, and I’m the head of operations at Eleven Writing, and I’m based in the south of France. So it’s 25 and sunny here, so I can’t really complain on that end.
David Bain
Thanks so much for joining us and also with us. Today is Joe.
Joe Terry
Hi everyone. I’m Joe Terry. I’m from Ledgy, which is an equity management platform. I have worked in content marketing for about eight or nine years now, as well as at various tech startups, and notably at Samsung for the B2C side. I’m based in London, which isn’t as sunny, and it’s also too late for caffeine. So yeah, a bit different to you guys, but I’m looking forward to the chat. Thanks for having me on.
David Bain
Never too late for caffeine, Joe. Thanks so much for coming on. Also with us today is Jasper.
Jasper Hamill
Hi, I’m Jasper Hamill. I’m in Glasgow, Scotland, which is really brutally awful weather. So I feel very jealous of you all. I’m a PR consultant and journalist. I’ve been a journalist for 20 years, and I now run my own website, machine.news, and I also work as a PR consultant and copywriter for clients worldwide, including in the United States.
David Bain
So, shall we start with the question, “What exactly do we mean by thought leadership in 2025?”. Shall we go back to Ashley? What are your thoughts on that?
Ashley Segura
Thought leadership has not changed that drastically from what it was a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, even five-plus years ago. It has become more defined and strategic as SEO evolves into a multitude of acronyms that I won’t mention, as they just make my eyes twitch.
However, as it’s changing quite a lot, we’re having to revisit some of the old-fashioned strategies, which include classic PR, and thought leadership is a significant strategy within that PR bucket.
David Bain
Thanks. Should we move on to Joe? Do your eyes twitch by acronyms?
Joe Terry
Every single one, yes, each letter. I completely agree with this sort of PR angle. And we live in a more polluted world now, obviously, than we did at the start of my marketing journey, let alone before that. There are now many more thought leaders in the world than there have probably ever been. But whether they’re listened to is something different, right?
And that, for me, is what makes a difference in the whole thought leadership SEO part: where your audience classifies you as a thought leader and how to reach them most effectively. So you know, for me, it’s all about points of difference and experience that sort of produces that top-level thought leadership SEO content.
David Bain
Okay, thanks, Joe and Christian, what does thought leadership in 2025 mean to you?
Christian Rigg
I agree with Ashley. It hasn’t changed significantly in recent years. And the best way to understand thought leadership is to consider what it means to be a thought leader, which is someone who has recognised authority in their field through significant contributions to that field. So the keywords they bring, like recognised authority and significant contributions.
For me, thought leadership is about creating and publishing content that genuinely contributes to a field and its discourse in a way that’s significant. So, it adds value, changes the status quo, and then you get recognition for that and are seen as an authority, which you achieve through publishing content and having it seen and ingested.
David Bain
Thank you, Christian. Jasper, what are your opening thoughts?
Jasper Hamill
With thought leadership, it’s a way of being heard, and SEO is a way of being seen. Together, they’re an unparalleled way to share your authority, add something to the conversation and hopefully bring something new. And I share the previously mentioned concerns about the level of AI-generated content on the internet drowning out real human voices.
The challenge these days is to be as original as possible. But there was always the challenge for us to be as original as possible. You know, maybe it was easier to gain attention and place for SEO before the kind of tsunami of thought leadership, before the tsunami of AI-slop, but there was still a lack of originality, and it still sank. Originality is still the keyword there, and it always was.
David Bain
We can have a bit of a conversation towards the end about how AI is impacting thought leadership, and how to differentiate yourself against that and demonstrate that originality.
Let’s talk a little bit about the type of content that tends to work best at the moment. Ashley, are you seeing any trend in terms of the style of thought leadership content that tends to be more effective at the moment?
Ashley Segura
So, naturally, video is the main content source that works the best, and has been for a long time. Whether you’re a thought leader or a brand, it’s working really well.
But specifically, the thought leaders that I follow are within the marketing industry, and the biggest trends that I’m noticing right now on LinkedIn is data. So, thought leaders are taking this approach of establishing their authority in a very specific niche, and they’re conducting numerous studies, publishing micro statistics from these overall studies, or highlighting overall trends and patterns that they’re observing.
Before, you could be a thought leader by recording a video and spending anywhere from two minutes to fifteen minutes talking about one very niche topic and just covering it, but now I feel like you have to do so much more to be a thought leader and really back that up with data.
If you’re a marketer these days and you want to be a thought leader within marketing, let alone SEO, you need to be doing a bunch of studies on AI and sharing that data. People are responding more to that kind of content, and the engagement metrics are so much better between that kind of content versus the typical “video style” where I’m going to ramble off about thought leadership.
David Bain
Joe, is that something you’d agree with?
Joe Terry
Absolutely. We share so much data these days, the transparency around not just anonymised customer data, but also industry trends.
I think that that kind of thought leadership is diluting that into tangibles for the audience, right? And I think that’s something that we really try to do as a business now, our customers are ultimately managing equity for large businesses, so they have an audience within their own company that we’re trying to enable them to benefit as much as possible, and that’s what our platform does.
So being able to break down the trends, share the data, and give them something that they can take away and action, that will actually help them with their role, is really what our goal is for thought leadership.
And as Ashley’s mentioned, the results on content such as that, five, six times the results that we see on that sort of generic, more high-level content, so definitely niche, definitely data-led, and we run lots of surveys and share anonymised data to try and get ahead of that.
David Bain
What’s the difference between good, effective data that just moves the needle in terms of actually getting that piece seen by more eyeballs and data that’s run of the mill and not as likely to be consumed?
Joe Terry
It’s a very good question, and that’s something that we battle with. I think, from my perspective, it’s something that disagrees with the status quo. I hate seeing stats that back up what everyone is saying, because everyone’s saying it for a reason. I love to see something that breaks down that trend and goes completely against it.
Recently, we’ve been trying to do that in the public space. I think we’ve seen a better response with things like that when you attend conferences and hear other thought leaders speak on something that disagrees with the trend. It’s really what cuts through the noise and brings a lot more reaction, but you also have to deal with the negative side of that. But equally, you know, any PR is good. PR, right?
David Bain
So, Christian, would you like to add something there?
Christian Rigg
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right about the idea that you have to be able to present something that’s new, something that cuts through, and something that’s innovative. Thought leadership is all about innovation, and it’s all about doing something different from the status quo.
The only thing I would like to caveat is that you must do your homework. Thought leadership is one of those things where you really can’t fake it. You have to conduct the research, complete the studies, and go out to talk to people. You have to conduct proper, rigorous science, just as you would in the world of academia or research, because it’s not enough to simply have a counter-cultural voice.
You have to be able to back up what you’re saying, because otherwise, the real experts in the field are going to come after you. And if you can’t hold your own against them, then you’ve just lost all the effort that you were trying to do through this thought leadership.
David Bain
Jasper, would you like to add something there?
Jasper Hamill
The keyword there is storytelling. I’m seeing an increasing demand for human content – content that feels human, looks human – and storytelling is always the best way to convey a point. This is something that you’ve seen all the way back to the beginnings of religions. How do people start religions? They told stories. They told parables. This is the best way to make a point.
I would like to say something quite controversial here. I spent years examining the readership statistics for national newspapers. I call it my PhD in clickbait. I became completely obsessed. What we found in the media is that people tend not to click on stories that include numbers. It’s a secret from the media, and that’s something you’ll hear said behind the scenes.
What they do click on is stories. Particularly, a story that feels engaging and has something missing from the beginning of it, so you want to read more and find the ending, that’s a kind of classic curiosity gap, click, great tactic, which is probably the only one that works in almost all cases when used, you know, thoughtfully and not too obviously.
Again, for me, it’s storytelling. If you can back up your thoughts with compelling stories, then you add something new, and that brings a new value to what you’re saying as well. If you’re revealing something genuine, that’s a news story, and it becomes highly valuable from both a PR perspective and in terms of simply generating traffic and attention.
David Bain
This is probably a good point to bring AI into the discussion as well, because when you said that people don’t necessarily want the full picture to begin with, they want an excuse to keep reading, which seems to be the opposite of what we’re told to do to optimise for AI search nowadays.
Because AI search wanted the conclusion to begin with, and then relatively short form paragraphs to actually break down the solution as soon as possible, and almost doing the opposite of what you suggest there as well.
Is that something you’ve considered for optimising for AI search? Should thought leadership content be primarily focused on being published elsewhere?
Jasper Hamill
That’s a really interesting question. Traditionally, that was how news articles were written. It was called an inverted pyramid structure. You put the story at the top in a very general way, and then you go down to specifics. We did seek experiments on this at the nationals. To get engagement, you fudged it a bit for humans. You removed facts, and that kept people reading.
But absolutely, if that is how we’re going to have to change to get the attention of AI models, then I guess we’re going to have to do it. I’m always a little bit sad to have to change our techniques to appeal to machines.
So we should follow some best practices. I think we should be careful to preserve our humanity, and I suspect that front-loading information within a model that can process it all in seconds is probably a tactic that works.
David Bain
It’s certainly a tactic that is recommended by a significant number of SEOs at the moment, whether or not it’s a lot of long-term tactic that should be stuck to, because obviously, being original, being different with how you go about things, is surely more likely to get clicks and more likely to get retention as well. So, it’s certainly not a black-and-white situation.
Christian, you’re looking thoughtful there.
Christian Rigg
I think many interesting things are happening in the conversation right now. One of the things that came to mind as you described how things had changed over time was people’s expectations, Jasper. I’d like to see how people’s expectations about the content that they consume are going to be driven by what they’re presented with by AI.
One of the reasons we inverted that pyramid has to do with attention span and people wanting to get really important information up front so they can scroll on to the next thing. And it has had an undeniable impact on the way we approach SEO and content.
And I’m curious for the future to see how the content that we produce influences what LLMs produce and what they put out, but that, in turn, is also going to be influenced by what the public gets used to and what the public wants to ingest, and how they want to ingest it. I think it’s going to be a really interesting balancing act doing that.
One of the things we’ve tried to do at Eleven Writing is to create content that is not targeted at where people find their content, but rather to look at Google and others, such as OpenAI, and understand their goals. Their goal isn’t an LLM that surfaces basic, top-of-funnel informational content on the internet. Their goal is to create LLMs that will go out into the wild, find thought leadership content, and bring it back in a way that’s both interesting and useful.
So, even if today many SEOs are saying, ‘Oh, you should definitely do this, you should definitely do this, you should definitely do this,’ because that’s what’s working, etc. I suggest thinking about, hey, what do we know about what OpenAI and these others want to achieve? Let’s create content that’s going to serve in three years, seven years, fifteen years, and try to have kind of that long term vision, which I think is very different from what somebody might be doing, just for the way that ChatGPT kind of scrambles together a bunch of top of funnel information now from the top 20 Google hits and says, here’s something amazing.
David Bain
Great thoughts, there. The Wayne Gretzky quote springs to mind, “I skate to where the puck is going”.
Joe, do you tend to optimise for machines as well as humans? Or are you veering towards that?
Joe Terry
Absolutely not. I will stay away from it as far as I can, for as long as I can, until I’m forced to become a machine myself inevitably. Honestly, it’s very interesting to see thought leadership within the SEO community, particularly as we discuss the rise of AI and what we all need to do.
From an internal resource perspective, you view it quite differently than from an agency perspective, where you’re working with multiple brands and audiences. It’s a lot more general than someone like myself who works in quite a niche industry, and competition is lower. The audiences are generally older. They’re not the sort of people who are impacted as much as we see on a consumer basis with AI, and everyone needs to remember that and not get carried away with everyone using AI for everything. It’s not true. They still use all of the traditional sources, and AI is becoming something that we’re figuring out, but we haven’t figured it out yet. So it’s still developing.
The way people use it is going to change the generational gap between knowledge, and how they interact with technology is still going to exist. Older people are going to search differently from younger people, which will yield different results. And I’m sure they’re going to get smarter too, right? You know, like we have with Google over the years, with targeting and ads and, you know, look-alike audiences and everything that happened, and whether it’s within political spaces, consumer spaces, whatever. We can target individuals based on very specific characteristics. And AI will work that out over time as well. And that content, along with the results it provides, will be more specific.
So if you’re doing a good job at telling that story and bringing the right facts, the right insights, the right content, I’m sure, eventually, fingers crossed, if it does what it’s supposed to do, AI will also put that in front of the right people at the right time.
David Bain
Ashley, do you just trust AI to put your content in front of the right people at the right time? Or do you actually make some effort to try to enhance that or make it more likely for that to happen?
Ashley Segura
I love that you paired ‘trust’ and ‘AI’ right next to each other. That’s a really fun way to put it. No, I don’t trust AI for anything. And I always tell my friends and family, don’t trust AI overviews as it is factually incorrect a lot of the time. So no, I don’t trust AI to show my content to the right people.
However, we secured our first client at SearchLab Digital through ChatGPT, and as the Director of Marketing, I want to go back and ask, ‘How did that happen?’ What was their prompt? And we weren’t able to get the exact prompt info, because, of course, they’re like, Oh, I don’t remember. I was searching for good local SEO agencies. I don’t recall the exact prompt. You could go and ChatGPT and screenshot it, but that’s okay.
So, I want to try to figure out what made us stand out as the best local SEO agency. And those are the things, like, ‘Oh well, we’ve won a lot of awards.’ We’ve been featured in a lot of listicles. We have four thought leaders on the team.
And so this whole concept of optimising for AI with your content SEO, don’t even want to get into it, but with your content purposes, it’s just to do good thought leadership. Do good content. Do good PR and like literally, Joe, Christian, and Jasper have been echoing, if it’s supposed to get picked up, it will get picked up.
AI is getting better. LLMs are getting better. They will continue to get better. So, do more of that traditional content strategy: get a part in listicles, get some awards if you can, get PR, get good link placements in very relevant niche publications – things that make sense.
That’s what LLMs are reading on top, of course, including Reddit, social media, and our reviews, among other sources. That’s only going to continue. The better you can position either yourself or your brand and tailor content to support that messaging, the more effective you will be. LLMs are eventually going to learn that and be like, Oh, this is the top local SEO agency. I am going to show it to this person.
David Bain
You mentioned listicles, video, and digital PR. You’re talking a lot about getting your thought leaders to appear on other websites, publications, and videos.
Is that more effective for thought leadership nowadays to be featured on third-party websites, as opposed to actually trying and build your own authoritative, regular video show, for instance?
Ashley Segura
100% unfortunately, we have to start by getting published elsewhere, and then people start to recognise who you are. And if they want more of your content, they will go and find you, or they’ll go click the links in other publications.
Most thought leaders, especially within the marketing space, the first thing you get is a speaking opportunity. Once you start speaking on stages, people will want articles by you, and then they will want videos by you. And now there’s this whole thing in the SaaS world being a SaaS influencer, like there’s all of these other things that support that.
So, for your niche and for your industry, what is that very first step of recognition? Is it getting on stage? Is it that speaking environment do you need to go and publish a book? I know that’s really dramatic, but it takes something big for other publications to be like, Oh, you do have a voice worth publishing. Come write an article for us.
And the more opportunities that you get like that, the more that other publications and other brands are like, Oh, we want to hear from him. We want to hear from her. And it continues to multiply. Absolutely.
David Bain
I’ve got this book right in front of me here, so for audio listeners, this doesn’t make much sense, but I’ve got this SEOin2025 book that Majestic publishes on a regular basis. And it’s the fifth year in a row coming up. I’m just about to publish the next in the series. And it’s incredible.
The difference that having a physical copy book can have on that perceived thought leadership reputation, being able to give this book out people at different events is night and day compared with just bringing maybe some kind of coaster or some other branded item.
You’re shaping the content from an industry with your brand. And it’s funny, because we’re talking about digital marketing, we’re talking about SEO, but that authority building that you get from something traditional like that is hard to surpass.
Christian, I see you’re nodding away again there as well. Is that something that you’ve experimented with as well?
Christian Rigg
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, not to the extent that you have, but it was just making me think about how important a role that transfer of trust plays in thought leadership. As Ashley mentioned, speaking engagements, and you have this book, this physical thing being published. There’s authority behind ideas, like a published book, and there’s authority behind existing platforms where you’re going to present.
I have the pleasure of presenting a talk at brightonSEO in three weeks. And so all of the clout that comes with brightonSEO, which is pretty, pretty reputable and a recognized thing, if you get this chance to speak there, then there’s some of that transfer of trust. If brightonSEO has trusted me to give a talk, then maybe I have something worth saying. I certainly think I do.
It just comes back to this idea of there are so many things out there that can kind of springboard your thought leadership. And I think that finding ways to collaborate, finding ways to leverage that transfer of trust, is something that works really, really well for thought leadership, for brands, but especially for individuals.
David Bain
I love that phrase; it’s a transfer of trust. Joe, do you have any thoughts on what type of leadership and what type of content tend to be more effective nowadays? Maybe where that content should be published, and how you actually measure the success of that?
Joe Terry
Yeah it’s got to be honest and believable. I think, based on real experiences, it’s really the way I go with it. I’m quite traditional in the sense of I believe those, you know, pub-type conversations, where you’re quite honest with whoever your audience is, tend to, I guess, resonate more clearly with whoever’s listening.
Measurement is ultimately based on whatever it is that your goal is, right? If it’s followers, if it’s engagements, if it’s whatever platform you put it on, you can measure it in that way. But for me, the sort of one-to-one resonance that you get if someone hears your message and thinks, actually, yes, this is effective, and maybe they learn something from it is really what I get the benefit from as someone who speaks around marketing and SEO. I try to be more transparent with the lessons, whether that’s the harsh realities of things that we’ve done wrong, or whether it is the stats of something that went well.
That transparency just enables everyone to kind of lift their game a bit. I think that’s what we’ve seen in thought leadership, especially over the last five years, is that transparency around the successes and the lessons learned, and you know, how people can elevate their game, is really what resonates the most. So we’re trying to do that.
Our niche area is much harder than obviously, some some of you guys that I think maybe talk more broadly to a much wider audience than what we would, but ultimately, thought leadership SEO is measured by its engagement and and how you know how that resonates with the audience that you’re trying to target.
David Bain
Jasper, you’ve worked with a lot of traditional newspaper-type publications, is that still as effective as it was for a thought leader to be actually published within there? How easy is it to actually get included? And how do you measure the success of being included nowadays?
Jasper Hamill
It’s getting hard to get included, actually. And the reason for that is there are many fewer journalists, because there have been lots of redundancies, and there are many more pitches which are just being churned out by ChatGPT. It’s the same sort of thing that’s impacting the job market. It’s impossible to get a job now, because everyone’s flooding applications with ChatGPT.
I think the point Joe made about something in the pub is a good point, because that’s how to describe a news story. A news story, something that’s going to get clicks and get the front page, is something you can explain to someone simply. You’ll never guess what happened. And in publishing in general, you know, newspaper and magazine publishing, the news story is the most valuable piece of content. It’s the thing that people link to, because they say, you know, just as I’m saying, you’ll never guess what happened. They’re saying it on social media. You’ll never guess what happened. Look what they’ve revealed.
And so remembering the news values, I think, is very important. When that comes to thought leadership, the very best thought leadership, to me, is something that reveals new information that hasn’t been heard before. This can be low-hanging fruit, like an anonymous case study from a customer telling a story of how something changed, it would describe that as a case study. Ideally, you’d want to reveal even your information. I know data, I guess, can be part of that. Data can be part of that, but ideally it’s something that’s actually happened, an event, a trend, whatever it is, an actual thing that’s happened a news story.
So if you can reveal news stories within your thought leadership, you’ll get linked to. You’ll get attention. And that’s, after all, what SEO is all about. So revealing your information, getting the links, and getting the attention.
David Bain
And in terms of data, maybe, can we talk a little bit about attribution and how you can measure the impact of thought leadership? Ashley, how do you approach that?
Ashley Segura
It’s so difficult. Attribution for any content, let alone thought leadership, is hard. There are things that you can do, though, to do your absolute best to track that first touch point from speaking engagements. You can do things like putting a very unique QR code at the end of it with specific UTM parameters, so anyone who visits your site from that you can attribute to them seeing you at that presentation. This is where that’s from.
When you’re doing that with like blog content or even social content, that’s where UTM parameters are your absolute best friend to try and attribute what was that first single point of source? I’m actually working on this right now with our IT and operations department on building a marketing dashboard that can truly identify first touch point, from a thought leadership piece of content to how many other pieces of content did they didn’t then consume before they either called us or contacted or did a consult, and then what pieces of content did they consume after that, before they became a client?
So being able to attribute content has always been very challenging, but thankfully, there’s a lot more tools now that are available that are helping track that, but that leadership content is, I think, even more challenging, because usually it’s so many touch points where they saw us on a webinar, and then they went to our LinkedIn, and then they went to our website, and by the website, they finally clicked. So UTM parameters help, but it’s a rough attribution world out there.
David Bain
I love the QR code to a specific UTM parameter idea that you had there as well. What percentage, roughly, of people are comfortable using QR codes nowadays? Because I still get the sense that maybe an older generation would look at that and go, that’s a pretty pattern and not know what to do with it.
Ashley Segura
Maybe this is just the States, but I thought QR codes were dead because when they first came out, I hated them as a user. I said, ‘I’m not scanning your QR code.’ And when the big billboards of just a singular QR code were happening, I’m like, I’m not falling for this. And I was very against it.
I joined SearchLab in Spring of this year, and we one of my very first days, we had to order a notebook for an event that was happening in like, two days, and it was a very last-minute project. We had no time to get it designed. And I was like, You know what? Let’s just see. Let’s just slap a QR code on the front of the notebook, which was going to be a piece of swag to hand out at the booth. And let’s just see what happens.
We got so many QR code scans from that little, tiny notebook. So I was like, Okay, let’s start putting this on our case studies that we hand out. Let’s start putting it at the end of the presentations that our thought leaders are doing. And so I took something that I didn’t fully believe in and said, ‘ Let’s test it. ‘ Let’s test these QR codes. And it worked. People are literally scanning them and then filling out the contact form or inserting whatever action we have them doing there, but it’s working for our audience.
Does that mean it will work for Gen Z for years to come? Or insert your specific demographic, not 100% accurate, but find something similar, such as a unique piece of content, and test it out. Just because you don’t like it as a user doesn’t mean that you’re your demographic agree with you.
David Bain
That’s a great piece of advice there. In terms of call-to-action with the QR code, did you actually have an explanatory piece of text beside it, in terms of what people would get by scanning it, or was it just simply, just the code and the item?
Ashley Segura
It worked because they were expensive, and the sales team at the booth would only hand them out to people they were having a conversation with, not someone who just walked by the booth. So this was already someone who was just slightly warm. They weren’t necessarily a cold lead. So, they would hand them the QR code, or, excuse me, the notebook, and then they would go and sit down in a session. Then people would scan it because they are curious.
People weren’t scanning it at the booth. They were scanning it throughout the day, because we were able to track at literally what time people were scanning the QR code. It was later in the day when they were sitting in session or going back to their hotel room.
David Bain
That was a really specific and great answer to give. Joe, would you like to follow that one up? Any advice in terms of how to track that leadership?
Joe Terry
No, I’m glad QR codes came up. I think it’s it’s interesting, because I think there was one of those sort of myths, like headlines, that everyone was saying that QR codes would never be adopted. Everyone hated them. No one trusted them, that kind of stuff. And you tend to see that in certain environments, they work, you know, really well.
So at Samsung, we ran a project whereby people could scan a QR code, and obviously, it’s ultimately a hyperlink, right? It goes through to a URL, which then you can do multiple things at that point that are quite clever, whether that’s present with extra value or potentially filter them down to different sorts of, I guess, other websites or web pages.
And that’s what we did with a comparison tool that we created, whereby you’d scan the QR code on your phone. If we were able to, we would identify the device you were on, and then we would present you with specific content at the end of that, that journey that was, you know, a comparison between the phone that you were using to scan the QR code and the one that you might potentially buy from from us, which was Samsung at the time.
What we found was, obviously, adoption was a lot higher than we thought it would be when people are looking at a phone and trying to digest a lot of information. Sometimes, a nice QR code that simply said, ‘If you scan this, we can give it to you all digitally,’ was enough. That was their preference over speaking to a human, which is a shame, but also reading through a catalogue of information worked better for them. It meant that we could present a video or a web page that kind of diluted that into key messages, key points, they could take away, and something that was more tangible.
I don’t have the direct information on how many sales we had through the QR code system. However, in its first sort of week or two, in a couple of shops, we had 1000s and 1000s of people scanning these codes. So, in actual fact, I’m a big believer in QR codes, specifically because of that project. However, I think it’s the value that you offer on the back of it that really makes the difference in that journey.
Obviously, a warm lead helps, but even in some instances, a cold lead will also do it. And that enabled us to track what they engaged with and, over time, improve the content; however, we didn’t attribute sales to it, unfortunately.
David Bain
Christian, what are your thoughts on this one?
Christian Rigg
I think in certain audiences, as you said, they’ve become really ubiquitous. I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere else, but here in France, menus now at restaurants are literally just a QR code. They don’t come with the menu anymore, it’s literally just bring you a thing and you scan it. I think everybody 18+ has gotten into the habit of scanning them. So, I agree; it’s a really useful way, especially for the speaking engagements we discussed, and for any print materials you’re handing out.
In terms of other ways to get attribution for thought leadership, I’ve got two things that come to mind. The first is just making sure that you have, “where did you hear about us?” It’s shocking the number of times we’ve worked with partners or consulted, and they haven’t had this simple question at an intake form, or even in a sales conversation. But because thought leadership is a bit more esoteric than other types of content in terms of attributions, a little bit harder to follow than ads for example, or specific LinkedIn posts, especially when you’re thinking of thought leadership, is like a collection of a collection of things, and so that can help you kind of get into, like the dark connections that people have in, like Slack groups and these kinds of things.
The second one is just to make sure that you have a good way of pulling together all of the data from different sources. So, like, some of your engagement will happen on LinkedIn, and some might happen through like LLMs and through Google search, and you need to have a way to connect all of these thoughts. So the talk that I’m giving at brightonSEO is all about this idea, this framework that we came up with called multivariate attribution, and it’s all about how you bring all of those things together.
Make sure that the information that you have in your air table or your notion or whatever it is that you’re planning your content and you’re tagging it with like a specific like related to this thought leadership article or related to this piece of content or related to this talk. It’s really hard to get that kind of metadata into something like GA4 unless you go through the data layer, which, there’s tons of problems there.
We use BigQuery where we pull in a whole bunch of data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, and even speaking engagements through QR codes, for example, and then being able to combine and manipulate that data and something like BigQuery and then show it in Looker Studio, that has been really transformative for us and for our partners in terms of being able to see attribution at a scale that makes sense for strategy.
So not just attribution at like an individual article level or at like a full campaign level, but attribution at the level of like a vertical or a category or an audience or specific product or feature mentions related to a specific type of thought leadership or a specific concept or value that you’re trying to promote through thought leadership.
David Bain
Jasper, Christian mentioned attribution a few times there. What are your thoughts on how to attribute the value of thought leadership?
Jasper Hamill
You need to just think of what audience you want to reach and how well you’ve reached it. From a PR perspective, the best thing you can do is get a piece in one article in place, and if it’s ripped off by many others and linked to numerous social media posts, generating a lot of traffic, then you’re going to be winning something.
I will actually point out there’s a kind of an irony at the heart of journalism and public relation about op-eds, which is the kind of what we would call thought leadership. And it’s that they only tend to go very viral when people are upset by them. There will be rare occasions that people will share something they agree with that either shows their expertise or demonstrates that they’re part of a group that you know. Group identity is reflected in stuff you share, so that can be positive. But on the whole, when something gets a lot of traffic and a lot of attention on social, it’s going to be because people are not partly going to be because people are annoyed about it.
I remember, the last newspaper I worked at was the Herald newspaper in Scotland, and this piece was written, and it wasn’t it was by a rather objectionable soul, I’m going to say, I don’t want to criticise him too much, and people really didn’t like him. He was unfashionable in the extreme. I won’t spell out what that means. And his stories used to go super viral because everyone hated them, and I remember one of the comments written beneath it. This article annoyed me so much. I was sorry that it was a tweet. It was on Twitter. This article annoyed me so much, I’m not even going to click on it and read it, which was such a bizarre reaction.
There is an irony at the heart of PR and journalism: sometimes, making people angry is a way to garner an audience. And you have to ask yourself, if you’re willing to do that, because it’s stressful being criticised on social Yes, you get the big audience, but it’s a horrible experience being shamed and bullied by big mobs. I’ve been in many Twitter storms from left, right, middle, and everyone. It’s unpleasant no matter who’s doing it. So you want to avoid that.
David Bain
Let’s finish off by asking each panellist one quick way that you can start taking advantage of thought leadership today, and then just remind the listener where they can find you.
Ashley, what’s one quick thing an SEO can do to take advantage of thought leadership now, and where can people find you?
Ashley Segura
I think the quickest and most important thing is to find your niche. You can’t be a marketing thought leader. You can’t be an SEO thought leader anymore. Everyone has exhausted this conversation. There are so many of them. So are you a technical SEO thought leader? Find your niche.
And if you’re like, I have no idea, this is where I will recommend going to ChatGPT and be like, Hey, I am trying to establish my niche of what kind of content I want to write about, what do I want to be known for? Ask me some questions. Help get me there. And it will literally interview you, and you just continue through this conversation, and it might spark some ideas of, oh, I want to dive into this very, very technical, specific kind of topic. And this is what I want to be a thought leader in.
When you have a niche, you’re more likely to appear and show up. So definitely define what your niche is, and don’t just be a generalised thought leader, unless you love just being hidden by the algorithms.
You can find me on LinkedIn. That’s pretty much the best. I hate Twitter.
David Bain
Thank you, Ashley, Joe, what’s one quick tip that you can offer in terms of what an SEO can do to get involved with SEO, thought leadership a little bit more now? And where can people find you?
Joe Terry
I think following on from Ashley’s point there, is test your audience, right? So once you have found what it is that you want to do, test what works, write different things, share different stories, make sure it links to real experiences, real data, and try and be as transparent and honest as possible.
Even if it does, as Jasper mentioned, disagree with people or potentially rub people up the wrong way, if you’re confident enough to do so, or support a cause with a positive message, but link it back to real experiences, real data, test what works, and then just double down. I don’t think that’s the best way.
LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. But if you’re interested in B2B equity management, then ledgy.com.
David Bain
Thank you, Joe. Christian, where can people find you? And, of course, what’s your final tip that you’d like to leave people with?
Christian Rigg
I would say to start from a place of curiosity and ask questions from your audience, from stakeholders in your company, from users of your product, and just start, like, getting together information and see what insights pop out to you. You’re an expert in your industry, or at least you have some experience in your industry. So you’ll see things once you start having enough conversations, and then when you find those things, they’re like, oh, that’s actually interesting. I wasn’t expecting to see that.
Explore it, conduct research on it, and then publish the findings. Publish, publish, publish. So much. Great thought leadership doesn’t happen because conversations get left behind closed doors or in a Slack thread in your own company’s slack. Publish the ideas, publish the interesting things that you’re talking about within your own company. Because a lot of times, the thing that we’ve seen is the biggest barrier is just not reaching the finish line of getting that information out there.
You can find me on LinkedIn, Christian Rigg, or you can check out elevenwriting.com.
David Bain
Thank you, Christian. Jasper, what’s your tip and where can people find you?
Jasper Hamill
Well, I’m very inspired by just hitting publish. Actually, that wasn’t my tip, but I’m very inspired by that, so I second that, just get it done, say something new.
I think this is the most important thing: to reveal something that hasn’t been revealed before. That’s what a journalist does. That’s why they get attention. Reveal something that hasn’t been revealed before.
I often work with clients, and they don’t know what they know. Sometimes they’re so embedded in their area of expertise, and they’re so deep into it that they know this stuff that they just assume everybody knows it, but they don’t. Revealing new information can be educating a wider market, even if it comes under that rubric. So reveal something new.
You can find me at www.machine.news or LinkedIn, Jasper Hamill.
David Bain
Thank you, Jasper. Thank you so much for all of our panellists.
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 as well.
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- Thought Leadership and SEO – A Live Majestic SEO Podcast - September 25, 2025
- Reddit SEO (A Live Majestic SEO Podcast) - August 22, 2025
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