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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Steven Van Vessem who is the Director of Organic Marketing at Conductor. Conductor specializes in helping companies realize their full potential of their website and transform their their website into a digital experience that helps people. Today, Steven and I are going to discuss the State of SEO report.
- [01:09]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no cost? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT okay.
- [02:28]
Jordan Cooney
Here'S my conversation with Stephen Van Vessem, Director of Organic Marketing at Conductor. Stephen, welcome to the Voices of Search podcast.
- [02:36]
Steven Van Vessem
Thanks Jordan.
- [02:37]
Jordan Cooney
So, looking forward to jumping in here. We're still in January as we're recording and we're diving into a State of SEO report that has been released by the team over at Conductor. So maybe we can Jump off by just giving our listeners a little background on yourself, Stephen, your role at Konductor, and then if you don't mind sharing a little bit about this report and what you all have produced.
- [03:01]
Steven Van Vessem
Yeah, sounds good. So as for a little bit about me, so obviously, Stephen, I've been with Conductor for three years. I became part of Conductor because my company was acquired. The company is called Content King. It became part of conductor three years ago. And I've actually been doing SEO for 15 or 16 years. So I've been around for a while. I'm based in the Netherlands. Yeah. And I'm super excited to dive into the State of SEO report with you, Jordan.
- [03:34]
Jordan Cooney
Great. And I mean, I'm really interested in understanding some background on this report, so a little background as to why you all have created it. And maybe give our listeners here, early in this episode, some direction on where they can find it so that they can get access to this report if they want to dive in further.
- [03:54]
Steven Van Vessem
Of course. So the State of SEO Survey is an annual survey that we run where we interview SEOs, content marketers, digital marketing folks about, like, what have they been up to? Like, when it comes to SEO, what's been working, what's not been working, what are they anticipating the next year is going to be? Like, what are they going to be focusing on? Sort of like what are challenges they're running into? So it's like, it's pretty broad study, but the focus really is on everything going on in SEO land and a.
- [04:28]
Jordan Cooney
Little bit about the respondents. So it seems like the survey isn't just geared towards SEOs, and I think this is important. It seems like it's a good collective of both influencers of SEO as well as practitioners.
- [04:42]
Steven Van Vessem
Correct? Yeah. So definitely. So if you look at sort of the job titles we actually have, like, one third of the respondents are folks from the C suite. Around 25% are director or VP, then we have around 25% managers, and the remainder are practitioners. So it really is a mix. And then if you look at sort of like team composition, it's a mix as well, which makes it super interesting because you can dive into things like collaboration, like how do teams function, how do they work together to achieve great SEO performance? So, yeah, it's a very diverse mix of respondents.
- [05:30]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. And I'm curious, as it pertains to the direction here, SEO is going through a lot of change right now. And we're a real crossroads where not only are the SERP experiences within Google changing, but unequivocally I think by all accounts everyone believes that search is evolving and the discovery of consumers is changing quite a lot. And so there's more channels, more to take into account as it pertains to respondents point of view on SEO people and the future of SEO. Was it generally positive or negative in how SEO is going to evolve in the next year?
- [06:16]
Steven Van Vessem
Great question. Generally very positive, I must say. And as we were kind of going into the study, I had this SGE AI overviews doomsday scenario in my mind. But the respondents were actually pretty chill. They were like, hey, change is a constant. It's a given if you're in the SEO space. And they're positive about basically all of the changes that we're going through. That's super interesting. I recall like over 60% of the respondents is either slightly positive or very positive about AIO in particular.
- [06:57]
Jordan Cooney
Interesting. And the reality is that AIO is certainly going to be one of those components that, that we all have to be thinking more about as we go into 2025. But does the survey also take into account how discovery is changing as a whole for consumers? So the reality that ChatGPT perplexity and many of these other LLM and AI experiences are becoming a source of discovery, becoming a source of search for consumers and how we all have to adapt to the reality that Google isn't in, at least for many Western countries, isn't the only search game in town anymore.
- [07:41]
Steven Van Vessem
Definitely. So we asked people about their SEO priorities for the year and they were like, the number one thing is continuously learning and adapting to the changing landscape. And we looked at last year's results. So the 2023 study that we did, so we did that towards the end of 2023 and the number one priority was improving user experience on the site. So if you look at 2024, like improving UX experience still very important, but by a lot, like the biggest thing that people have on their minds is like how do we adapt to all of the changes going on? But they're positive about the changes. So it's a fascinating time like in SEO and digital marketing in particular, because there's so much going on and people are positive about it changing and at all.
- [08:36]
Jordan Cooney
In your study and in this report, were you able to unpack a little bit about how the community or how leaders and organizations are thinking about adapting to these changes, both tactically, like what maybe they should be doing from a day to day standpoint, as well as maybe strategically so more broadly, like experimenting or trialing new things that help their businesses better understand this change in transformation.
- [09:10]
Steven Van Vessem
Yeah. So some of the things that we saw is like testing super important. But one of the things that stood out to us as well as we performed this study and I, I really need to give my colleague Shannon Weiss a shout out because she is a legend. She did all the heavy lifting. So we were going through the data and we saw that the leaders within the company are really focused on speed. This came through in various answers. So basically the time to implementation, making that as short as possible, is really key for leaders. So that's kind of the pattern that we saw there, which makes sense. I mean, if things are changing so fast and you're unable to keep up, that's just a recipe for disaster. So you need to also adapt to the speed with which things change.
- [10:03]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah. And I think 2025 is going to be a year of a lot of change. I think it's not just going to be what Google does, but in this chase for consumers search habits. It's going to become very interesting how we all change our tactics and behaviors collectively. I know that adapting to AI advancements is going to be the front and center part of many reports, including this one from Conductor. I'm curious as to other areas that you all identified in this report that are going to be challenges for 2024. Challenges in the positive sense that these are areas that as SEOs, as organizations that have a dependency on organic traffic. How should we be navigating 2025 based on this report? Are there any other priorities that came out of this report?
- [10:58]
Steven Van Vessem
Great question. One of the things we saw there is that a lot of enterprise businesses are looking to consolidate their tool stack. So basically less tools because especially with all the changes going on, I think they anticipate needing like extra software to kind of fill some holes that are starting to come up. So for instance, if you're thinking about like what's my brand visibility within ChatGPT look like? It's a good question. And what we're seeing is that businesses are consolidating their tech stack and they're moving towards like a fully integrated enterprise plan.
- [11:44]
Jordan Cooney
Interesting. And are there any connection points between the tech stack or the data and how your respondents are looking at things like Google updates, how they're thinking about the evolution of search practices in the evolving landscape of both Google updates changing, but also the fact that there's probably going to be a whole bunch of bunch of transformation inside of say generative AI as well as other AI experiences and how they attribute a brand, how they mention A brand. So fundamentally, anything that may have come out of the report around the tactics or strategies that businesses are utilizing to adapt to the changing landscape?
- [12:33]
Steven Van Vessem
Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind is a bit of education within the organization because like, with all of these developments going on, it's very easy for folks with less technical knowledge to get the wrong idea about expectations. Like how many high quality content assets can you produce? And I think like over time we'll need to look at different kind of metrics that we're tracking and reporting on. So we saw this as a big focus area. People are rethinking the metrics they're reporting on. So we basically classified all of the respondents in three buckets. We have low SEO maturity, medium maturity and high SEO maturity. And the high SEO maturity organizations are attracting pretty much everything they can, including things like revenue, SQLs, MQLs, leads, transactions, basically everything that has a dollar value assigned to it. So that's where a lot of work is being done right now.
- [13:38]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rates. None of those sound very good now, do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information, go to Previsible IO. That's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [15:06]
Jordan Cooney
So Stephen, you know, when we look at things like revenue, we look at things like reporting. There's this new frontier in terms of AI, AI traffic. Specifically how traffic is coming from say LLMs or generative AI experiences. And how are you all thinking about that at Conductor and using this report or even just other technology that you all have built to help consumers or marketers best approach the generative AI and AI traffic transition that's coming to many of their businesses?
- [15:42]
Steven Van Vessem
Yeah, great question. So let me start out by describing what we saw in the result from the study. 85% of the respondents were very positive about the impact of AI on SEO. So people are super excited about everything that's going on. Basically at this point AI isn't really replacing jobs. Right. It's just making our lives easier so we can do more within less time and produce higher quality work. One major addition to the conductor platform that we made, for example, is being able to track those AI overview boxes. We all have seen that they're massive, they have a big impact on CTRs and like overall organic traffic that you're getting. That's a huge help for our customers. And then if you zoom out a little bit, at the end of the day like people have problems they need to solve and if you have a product or service, people are still going to be in need of that. So the journey, the customer journey is going to be even less straightforward moving forward. But at the end of the day people need solutions, right? Yeah. So the way they find these solutions is just different and that is where we have to adapt.
- [17:03]
Jordan Cooney
One of the pieces that I think is really challenging to comprehend at this particular point is the notion of your brand footprint versus your non brand footprint as consumers evolve their discovery behavior towards generative AI and AI search. So what I mean by that is it's very different to build your brand footprint through a generative AI search experience like ChatGPT, let's say, or perplexity than it is from your conventional Google approach. And I mean part of it is that the ecosystems in and of themselves are very different. Right. I mean today there's very limited if any pay to play experiences. So paid as a channel doesn't necessarily exist. The way that results are provided is very different than in a traditional, you know, text heavy experience like Google. Search results are, as we think about brand versus non brand. How should you know our listeners be thinking about that and what is some of the advice or direction, whether it's from this report or just broadly from kind of conductors perspective. How are you all thinking about supporting brands and SEOs in those efforts?
- [18:19]
Steven Van Vessem
Yeah, great question. So I think like brand non brand, like increasing brand visibility. What kind of role does brand play within SEO? But Also like LLMs, super interesting. I think this is what like folks should really be thinking about. So if you take a couple steps back and you stop thinking about SEO and you just think about like how you run a business and sort of the reputation you want to have and the customer experience you want to give people, if you do good work, so either you provide like great services, if you're an amazing plumber, then like that's great, you're going to get good reviews. Right. If you create great products, people are going to be raving about your product. So I think now more than ever before, the need to be great at what you do and to deliver a stellar customer experience. Super important because it'll translate into organic traffic. But also and being mentioned in the LLMs because the LLMs like ChatGPT are just crawling the web, they're using knowledge bases and they're looking for sort of anchors. Like so if you're asking me about like an SEO agency like pre visible and you've like spoken at some conferences, you've been publishing and stuff like that, all of that really helps and in being visible. So basically do real business stuff and yeah, should be good.
- [19:52]
Jordan Cooney
I mean the interesting component to that and I think one of the challenges for especially for a lot of our listeners who are just generally their SEO operators, right. And, and have become really good at executing specific SEO related work. The big question, the big challenge that I think this industry has as we move into 2025 is contributing to that part of the conversation in your business is very hard. If you're a software company, you need to Talk to the PMMs and the software developers who are building the product and you understand why they built a certain feature, certain capability in a certain way to help customers solve their problems. If you're a product based company, you have to understand why we design the product that way, why consumers are interested in buying a tennis shoe that has that style or that look or that feel, right? And SEO conventionally really hasn't sat at many of those tables or those conversations. How are you all thinking about the data discovery or the data conversation or the journey by which you can unpack those conversations to better understand the business and business value that you are part of in order to then influence the way your brand is found, searched, discovered within all of these experiences.
- [21:09]
Steven Van Vessem
So like as SEOs, we may have gotten really caught up in our SEO playbooks and like very tactical approaches to stuff. But if you look at doing SEO in 2025, it really falls back to a lot of marketing and talking to other teams, digging into the data and breaking down silos. So if you are a strong collaborator, you work together with your paid team and your product team and your customer support team, et cetera, et cetera, you're going to be in a good position. So I think SEO will become technical. SEO is still going to be important, but I think like SEO in general is going to be more marketing and less, less technical and sort of your, your soft skills are going to become even more important. They've always been important because if you want to get stuff done within an organization, got to make sure you understand people and collaborate with them. But I think yeah, those, those soft skills are should be sharpened this year.
- [22:22]
Jordan Cooney
No question, no doubt. I fully agree with you too, Stephen. I think there's a huge amount of investment in those soft skills. As we look at 2025 and we have conversations with these different stakeholders about how consumers are coming about discovering our brands and our products differently. As we close out this episode, I know that this report that you all have put together has helped better understand both where trends are going for 2025, the general state of mind of SEO in 2025. I'm just curious, can you share with our listeners again where they can find this report and just give us a quick summary of some of the key data or knowledge that they will find from this report that conductors put together?
- [23:09]
Steven Van Vessem
Of course. So you can find the study at conductor.com academy/state auth organic marketing and as a like TLDR the report is we dove into all of the disruptions that we're currently seeing in space. So you'll learn what our respondents think about AI powered search experiences, what they're focusing on this year, how they intend to maintain market share, how they approach reporting, where they're going to be investing and so on. So it really dives into all of the trends in enterprise organizations as well.
- [24:02]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. And I think that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Big thank you to Steven Van Vessem from Conductor for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Steven, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can also visit his company website conductor.com We've also included a link to the report in our show notes.
- [24:25]
Podcast Announcer
Okay. Thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is jtkooney. That's J T K O E N e. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschab B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.
- [26:03]
Jordan Cooney
It.