What’s important to Google this year
So it’s been a while, thanks for Tooning back in.
As I mentioned in the kick-off episode for the year, I took a little break to deal with some personal stuff, but now I’m back and ready to face everything SEO has to throw at us in 2025.
But what do we think is coming down the tube?
How much will Chat GPT influence SEO?
Do the old methods still work?
Today I’m joined by one of my favourite SEO’s to talk through our predictions for the coming year.
Tune in to learn:
- Why it’s important to focus on UX (user experience) friendly sites
- Why Google AI summaries are here to stay
- Why SEO needs to become a multi-channel approach
- Why we need to move beyond keywords and focus on user intent behind queries
- Why everyone (including SEO pros) needs to work on building up their EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
- Why video content is so important
- Why we should focus on collaboration instead of creation
- Why AI content is going to increase
- How building communities can lead to potential customers
- How you can use AI agents to streamline SEO processes
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And big thanks to Lia Weston for their lovely review:
“Expertise with a sense of humour. This podcast is a goldmine, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a complete SEO newbie or experienced professional. Not content with being a wealth of information herself, Kate also interviews a staggering array of experts, and also explains jargon and technical terms in a way that’s understandable but never patronising. She’s also sparklier than a caffeinated comet. Highly recommended!”
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Connect with Brogan Renshaw
- Firewire Digital
- Edge of Search Conference
- Katsuo – Automation agency and AI agents
Useful Resources
About Brogan Renshaw
Brogan Renshaw is the Director of Firewire Digital, a specialty Search Agency he founded in 2017. Brogan leverages over 20 years experience in SEO, PPC, and eCommerce to help businesses of all sizes increase their digital presence and revenue through targeted search marketing strategies.
Transcript
Kate Toon: So, it’s been a while. Thanks for tuning back in. As I mentioned in the kickoff episode for the year, I took a little break to deal with some personal stuff, but now I’m back and ready to face everything SEO has to throw at us in 2025. But what do we think is coming down the tube? How much will Chat GPT influence SEO?
Do the old methods still work? Still work today. I’m joined by one of my favorite SEOs to talk through our predictions for the coming year.
Hello, my name is Kate Toon. I’m the head chef at the recipe for SEO success and online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and to do. digital marketing. And today I’m talking with Brogan Renshaw. Hello, Brogan.
Brogan Renshaw: Hello.
Kate Toon: Hello. Now Brogan and I are both a bit rusty, a bit dusty.
This is our first Zoom after the Christmas holidays. It’s my first podcast in many months. So if I stumble and fumble over my words, please forgive me. But I’m sure Brogan won’t do that. Let me introduce you to Brogan. He is the director of Firewire Digital, a speciality search agency he founded in 2017.
Brogan leverages over 20 years experience in SEO, PPC, and ecommerce to help businesses of all sizes, increase their digital presence and revenue through targeted search marketing strategies. And we were lucky enough to meet at your recent conference, which feels like a hundred years ago.
Brogan Renshaw: A lot has happened since then. So yes, and it was lovely to have you there and, everyone loved you there. So that was fantastic.
Kate Toon: Well, that was nice, wasn’t it? Well, how cool isn’t it? I mean, it was based in Newcastle and it was focused on Aussie SEOs and that actually has inspired this first beginning few episodes of the podcast that I’m actually going to work through all the speakers who are at that wonderful conference and have each of them on the podcast.
So we’ve got Daniel Cheung coming up next week, hopefully Sally Mills and a few others. And the conference is running again next year.
Brogan Renshaw: is certainly running again. It was a massive, massive hit, so we feel obliged to put it back on. And yeah, we’re going to stick to our principles of focusing on Australian SEOs, giving Australian SEOs opportunity.
It’s about collaborative SEO. So how does SEO engage with each of the different channels? How does it work with all the digital marketing channels? How can SEO help the You know, social media team. How can it help with the PPC team? How to help with the UX? All these, how do all these different parts play a role in it all?
So yes, it will be on next September. We haven’t locked in a date yet, but it will certainly be on and tickets are on sales very soon.
Kate Toon: Fabulous. Well, we’ll check that out and we’ll include a link in the show notes to where you can get on the wait list for the conference. And I think that’s such a good segue.
I don’t know if you did that deliberately, but really it’s kind of the overarching theme of this podcast today, um, about, you know, where SEO is going and how it integrates. Uh, one thing I, you know, I loved about your conference and I will stop talking about it in a minute was that it was actually real SEOs, you know, I love going and seeing the big celebs.
But I feel many of them are quite distant from the day-to-day activities of helping, especially small businesses, do the do. You know, a lot of the things that they espouse are either big budget things that most people can’t afford to execute, or they’re almost too technical and too advanced for the day to day.
Like, you know, many of the people I work haven’t even got the basics sorted or the mid level sorted. They’re not ready for these super duper advanced tactics-
Brogan Renshaw: Hugely data led studies. And it’s, we, we really tried to bring, you know, a huge spread of different people to the conference. So from, you know, business owners to marketing managers to SEOs, so they all could take something from it.
Kate Toon: Yeah, there were a lot of women in the room as well. And one of the things that was super depressing for me was how many of those women came up and said, yeah, when I started out in SEO about 20 years ago, you were the first person I listened to. And I’m like, I am 100 years old. But anyway, it was great. So look, let’s dive into the episode.
So, because I wrote in the intro that I hate, uh, a waffly podcast, but we’ve just waffled anyway. 2024 was a funny old year for SEO with huge developments in AI. At first, we were all like, oh, how can we use these tools to improve our SEO? And then we started panicking when we realized that Google’s AI overviews were destroying organic traffic.
The good news is the SEO is becoming more and more about marketing and branding, which both Brogan and I know a thing or 100 about. Gone are the days of tech SEOs pompously dominating the space. Now it’s time for the fabulous content marketers, brand experts, copywriters, and holistic digital experts to take the stage.
What do you think, Brogan?
Brogan Renshaw: I fundamentally agree. I think that brand has, is becoming increasingly important to drive SERP traffic. You know, there’s been sites that have been absolutely wiped off because they’ve had no brand volume. No, there’s no one actually searching for the brand. So, Google’s kind of punished those pure content led sites the past couple of updates.
But, yeah, I do think that brand has become increasingly important, which opens up the door to lots of people to take advantage.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I mean, and on the tech side, I’m not saying tech isn’t important. Of course it is, but I think a lot of the platforms have done a lot of the work for us. You know, if you’d have asked me 10 years ago how to optimize a WordPress site, whatever, there would have been a lot involved, but WordPress has covered a lot off.
Squarespace has got better. Shopify has got better. Wix has got better. So the tech sort of onus is less on the business owner a little bit these days. Um, brand though, I mean, brand has always been important. And I, I feel like now the recent report that came out with the 22 experts, which I saw Ran Fishkin talking about on LinkedIn.
They’re like, Oh, no, it’s super important. People have been banging on a brand forever. Jason Barnard has been on our podcast. He’s like the brand guru. I feel like some of these SEOs are a bit late to the party. Like many, most of us have been working on building our personal brand or building our business brand for a long time.
It’s not, this is not new news. Do you agree? I mean.
Brogan Renshaw: You’re right. It isn’t new news, but I think when SEOs start to see more data led that it has become important in Google’s eyes to the algorithms. That’s when it becomes more prominent.
Kate Toon: Yes, I think you’re right. I mean, I think intuitively as a human, I know that human connection is important and building a brand is important.
And, you know, I always talk about trying to be the Madonna of your business so that no matter what your musical style, whether you move from disco to, you know, go to country to whatever people like Madonna. It doesn’t really matter their style. They’ll follow her through whatever she chooses to do. I mean, these days, obviously she’s just a little bit different, but you know what I mean?
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah.
Kate Toon: People are attached to you, your values, your personality, not necessarily the products you sell, but I am a human led SEO. And I think as you said, a lot of SEO is very data driven, very algorithmically led, you know, they’re looking at the patents, they’re in the back rooms trying to work out the technicalities of it, rather than using their hearts and their souls.
Anyway, I’m not saying that all SEOs are cold robots, or am I? But let’s start with our predictions. And I’m going first. So this is my podcast Brogan, I hope you don’t mind.
Brogan Renshaw: It’s fine.
Kate Toon: So my first prediction, and again, this is not new news is that I think it’s a really important to focus on UX in 2025. You know, we’ve had algorithmic updates that made us, you know, look at our sites being really mobile friendly, you know, that were easy to use on our mobiles.
Obviously we had the whole core web vitals that really important to make sure that your site loads. Well, not just quickly, uh, but in a sensible way. And then it’s quick to be able to access elements on it and fill out forms. But I also think it’s kind of UX kind of accessibility that, you know, if people don’t have a great user experience on your site, they’re going to bounce out very quickly, Google’s going to notice that possibly de rank you.
Um, but again, even if we take SEO out of the picture, having a site that’s usable with nice big clickable buttons with space around them and clear text and forms that don’t have. 70, 000 fiddly little fields is super important. What are your thoughts on UX, Brogan?
Brogan Renshaw: I agree 100%. You want to create a site that gives a user, and this is for SEO as well, right?
Like you want to create a site that gives the user the answer as quickly as possible. So you don’t need You know, if I’m looking from like a perspective 10, 000 pieces of word on a page, telling you everything you’ve ever done, you know, if someone’s coming to your site, they’re coming to your site for either answer questions, service, product, whatever, give them the answer they’re looking for quickly, you know, and that all plays into. creating a clean UX friendly site.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I think we’ll dig more into the quick answers and slow answers as we get into content, but your next prediction is around AI summaries. Talk us through that.
Brogan Renshaw: I think that Google’s already rolled out AI summaries quite significantly in the US and they’ve started to roll them out in Australia, not as, not as heavy as the US, but I feel like what’s going to happen over the next kind of 12 months is that as they get more confident in it, as they invest more in it, that’s going to change.
There’s going to be more AI summaries roll out across the board, which will send, which will limit certain types of queries traffic going to sites. So we’ll see a traffic drop off, but you know that. Like anything, there’s always opportunities, but I expect that Google AI summaries will roll out further.
[00:09:58] Kate Toon: Yeah. And I think this is something I talked with Jono Alderson about last year, that there are some, I think it changes your content strategy because there are some posts and pieces of content that just don’t need to be written. Like if you’re writing a post about how to boil an egg, unless you have a new laser egg boiler that is revolutionary, there is enough content on the internet about that topic that Google could write a summary perfectly.That ChatGPT could write a perfect blog post. And unless you can bring new experience or new authority to that topic, these topics don’t need to be covered anymore.
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah, it’s that consensus thing, right? When there’s like a hundred percent consensus on a topic.
Kate Toon: Yes.
Brogan Renshaw: Google can go, well, there’s no different opinions here, right? This is the consensus on a topic. So we can take that summary and roll it out, you know, with-
Kate Toon: With confidence.
Brogan Renshaw: With confidence, yes.
Kate Toon: If there’s a definitive, as you said, definitive consensus, that piece of content no longer needs to be created. So unless you can bring a new argument, a new perspective or a new experience, leave it alone.
I think that’s the, so I do think there is, I think it’s a joyful thing because I think we’ll see less. shitty content about the same things pumped out again and again. It’s going to force people to try and find an angle, to try and find a different approach to that, to that definitive topic. Okay, my next prediction is, again, I don’t think this is a new thing, but it’s a really-
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Many SEO is going to start taking much more of a multi-platform approach.
You touched on this in your intro that SEO doesn’t live in its own little universe. It never did. Uh, but I think, you know, there’s this pomposity that, you know, SEO is the most important and it’s the biggest driver of traffic and that you need to get that right before you do anything else. And of course, You know, I’ve always believed that SEO might get people to your door, but you have to drag them through.
You have to have that funnel, you know, that email sign up, you then have to follow up and you have to ask, approach all levels of the funnel. I’m going to talk about the funnel in a minute, but it’s a multi-channel approach, building your brand on social media channels, in person, via your email list, on your website.
I think SEO’s are cottoning on to that more. Now you’re a working SEO day-to-day. Do you think that’s true? Have you seen that shift?
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah, definitely. But I think it’s, it’s led, it’s been led by Google changing the search results. So they’re bringing in. More social media content, they’re bringing in Reddit threads, you know, and other forums.
But so I think that’s where SEOs see that and then start pushing that message.
Kate Toon: Yeah, yeah.
Brogan Renshaw: So 100 percent it’s, it’s always been important, but from an SEO perspective, when you’re seeing. Reddit come up in the first two, three search results, like all of a sudden, oh, it’s important to rank there now. It’s important to be mentioned there.
Kate Toon: Yeah. There’s visible data. There’s visible evidence rather than just kind of intuitive evidence. Yeah. Um, okay. What’s your next prediction?
Brogan Renshaw: I think we need to move beyond keywords and focus on user intent behind queries. So the big thing around this is that this, you know, we get this, we still get this day to day in the business, in our business, but you know, we get a company going, I want to rank for this keyword, whatever it be, ‘plumber Newcastle’, ‘electrician Sydney’, right?
Okay, that’s fine. But that’s, that’s one search term in, you know, maybe 20 or 30 search terms that. Bundle together that topic. So we need to go beyond the query, individual query and go. What’s the intent behind it? So the intent in those queries is that someone’s trying to find electrician or someone trying to find a plumber, right?
There’s 100 different ways that can be phrased worded, right? So you need to move beyond it. Am I ranking first for that one keyword? And what am I ranking for the topic? The whole cluster of content, but then that moves into, you know, your service pages, your product pages, your blog pages, like you’re trying to serve the user in a holistic way.
Right. So I think that’s just going to increase. That’s been really important. The last 12, last few years. But again, I think with I always implementation and my summaries, it’s just going to become more important.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I mean, I think this is, you know, I talk about this in the course, you know, this idea, there’s a golden keyword.
My son’s dad used to be obsessed with ranking for ‘French lessons Sydney’ and, you know, I always use that as example, because there’s a myriad of ways to search for that. And actually, if you type that in. You actually don’t get that great results because they’re not that qualified. And it’s the modifiers, the words around the keyword that really, you know, drive conversion.
Because as soon as you add ‘affordable’, or you add ‘for kids’, or you add ‘for business’, and then you add a location, yes, you narrow the volume, but you massively increase the chance of conversion. And we’re not just trying to rank for vanity’s sake. We’re not just trying to rank to just, you know, get eyeballs. We want eyeballs attached to credit cards who actually want what we sell.
Brogan Renshaw: I love that. Attached to credit cards. Yeah, yeah.
Kate Toon: Not a very nice visual image.
Brogan Renshaw: But yeah, something that’s actually going to drive revenue.
Kate Toon: Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, if, you know, often I get asked, you know, how do I judge if an SEO agency is a good agency?
And it’s really an agency that understands your revenue goals. and how you’re currently getting those in and talks about how they can increase your revenue goals, not just your ranking, not just your traffic. You can actually reduce the amount of traffic and increase the revenue. It’s all, I mean, it’s about the money at the end.
It’s all about the money. Um, and SEO is a money game. Uh, so yeah, anyway. Prediction 5. So that was prediction 4. Prediction 5, you know, I still think that E E A T, we added the E a couple of years ago, um, you know, they need to work, everyone needs to work on building your authority as an entity in Google’s eye.
And I think that SEO pros, this is advice to you, SEO people who are listening, you can, and Brogan will hate me saying this because he’s one of these people. You can’t hide behind your brand. You can’t hide behind your team. It’s not that you need to be a celebrity. You don’t need to be the Kim Kardashian of SEO, but I need to know the cut of your jib.
Like if you are. selling me whether you’re an accountant, a dentist, a gardener, or an electrician in Sydney. These days people buy from people. They want to know that you have strong values. They want to know how you’re aligned with them. I don’t want to buy from someone and find out later that they’re donating money to the Ku Klux Klan.
You know, I want to know who you are as an entity. I want to see that you have some kind of digital and social footprint. I want to know you’ve got credentials that go beyond qualifications, but they go into deep experience. And I want to know that you service my niche, you know, that if you’re an accountant, that you work.
Particularly with freelancers. If you’re an electrician that you work more with commercial people than residential, that, that specificity and that detail of knowing who you are is important to me and it’s important to Google. What are your thoughts, Brogan?
Brogan Renshaw: Agreed. I think it, it also links back to what we’re first recommend, first recommendation UX, right? Like you need to display this on your site. There’s no direct. Correlation between adding a, you know, a profile picture at the end of a blog post to improving rankings, right? But what it does do, it does build that trustworthiness. And then if you link that out to a LinkedIn profile, your social media channels, something where people can see who you are, like you’ve said, you know, it does build that trust. So, yes, it is very important to have those signals.
Kate Toon: And I think, you know, often, you know, SEOs and marketers and, you know, people in marketing struggle and feel that we’re competing with people overseas on these, you know, freelancer platforms and whatever.
If you build a reputation and build authority, then it’s clear that you have a reputation that you need to protect. Because the thing with a lot of these freelancer sites is, you know, you can delete the profile and come back the next day as a different person. Whereas if you are putting your face and name to your brand and saying, here I am, this is what I do.
I stand by my company. Then that imbues trust because I’m like, well, they have a reputation to uphold, you know, and, and, and they’re not going to want to sacrifice that easily. So they’re going to service me better than some fly by night. Who has a gray faced avatar on some freelancer platform.
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah. We, we picked up a whole bunch of work last year, purely from company, from other, from like a general market agencies outsourcing to us purely because they’re like, well, we know you, we can see you.
But we know you, like literally one of them said to me, you have a brand to protect.
Kate Toon: Yes, it’s so important. And you know, I have sent a few people your way and that’s because I have met you. So you physically turned up to an event. I heard you speak and talk about your business and your brand. I saw that you cared.
You put your name out there in such a big way, which I know you’re super uncomfortable with, that it made me go, well, look, there’s so many agencies I could refer to, but Brogan feels like a good dude. Don’t underestimate the power of someone thinking you’re a good dude or dudettes. It’s super important.
Brogan Renshaw: Just turning up.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Brogan Renshaw: Just turning up. It’s turning up and like, and that can be, and that that can be incredibly scary for people.
Kate Toon: Yeah, yeah.
Brogan Renshaw: And I’m certainly in that camp.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Brogan Renshaw: But it is, it is so important to be present and put a face to name.
Kate Toon: It’s a learned skill. If you went back and listened to my early pod podcast, especially one with Neil Patel, which is quite literally the worst podcast I’ve ever done.
He was in bed during the podcast and just gave monosyllabic answers. And I’d never done a podcast really, so I didn’t know how to respond. You know, you listen to those early episodes, they’re appalling. I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t confident. I wasn’t confident in how I looked, how I sounded, what I knew.
And that’s improved over time. It is a skill you can learn. You can get better at it. All right, so that was prediction 5. Prediction 6, please, Brogan.
Brogan Renshaw: Video first content. So we as an agency have been big on this for the past probably 18 months, but we only see it getting more important as time goes on. So video content is, you know, everywhere, right?
Like it’s TikTok, YouTube, and they’re all being pulled into the search results. So one of the things that we look at doing when we do security research is pulling in that information is when is there a YouTube result showing? Because that says to us is that Google’s showing this video content. First, above your blog content, above whatever you’re trying to sell.
So, it becomes more important to go, all right, we’re going to record a video before we do the blog. So, the video gets placed on the blog, or the service page, whatever. And it just gives you more opportunity to rank, more opportunities to repurpose. So, video first, content second. is hugely important.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, we’re talking about search for intent, I generally find, you know, for the people who don’t know much about SEO, the informational content is generally where Google likes to show a video, you know, how to bake a cake.
Do I really want to read a 500 word article or do I want to watch a three minute video? Probably want to watch the video. So that informational content, what I used to do to make life easier, because I am a writer first and a video creator second, is I would write the blog post. I would write it all out.
I’d work it out. Then I’d try and make a three minute summary of the blog post, record that, put it on YouTube. Used to be the second biggest search engine, maybe chat spheres now it’s Google’s property. So I’d make that video, put it on YouTube publicly, and then embed it back in my post. But then further than that, I would then make a quick three minute, a one and a half minute video on my phone, upload it to TikTok reels, LinkedIn and YouTube shorts. Therefore I’ve taken that one piece of content, spread it across multiple platforms, all leading back to my blog, which is where people can join my funnel and have that real engagement. So fantastic. All right. Well, my prediction seven is about relationship building again, not new, but I think you know, this is small businesses really still believe, believe me, that Google likes fresh content that Google wants you to blog every week. And if you blog every week, 300 word blog posts every week, you’re going to be fine. And of course that hasn’t been the case really ever, maybe when I started about 15 years ago. But also producing content takes time. time. You know, I just talked about how there I, you know, make, write a post, I create all this video.
That’s a great deal of time. Um, so my advice this year is collaborate, don’t create, try to form relationships with other businesses, try and piggyback off existing content. If you see a YouTube video is ranking number one and you really don’t have the wherewithal to make a competitive YouTube video, comment on that video in an engaging way.
Try to get involved in guides. Maybe there’s a school, return to school guide that you can feature your ecommerce brand in, um, do interviews with lovely people like Brogan so that he shares it to his network and I share it to mine. Try to build a relationship with similar but noncompeting brands. You sell shoes, make friends with a sock company. You sell bread, find a cheese company, you know, try and find partnership opportunities so you can leverage each other’s audiences. And my big advice here, which I talk about a lot in my digital marketing group is don’t always reach upwards. Don’t go to that big brand that’s famous and try to form a relationship with them.
I think it’s always a good idea to go sideways. So someone who gets as much out of the relationship as you do, rather than trying to go after the big thing, you know. Of course I could spend hours trying to get on Amy Porterfield’s podcast and I could think that’s going to change my life. In reality, I’d probably be better off getting on 20 smaller podcasts who have a smaller audience than trying to leap after someone unattainable. So building relationships is my prediction.
Brogan Renshaw: I think they’re more engaged, right? Like a smaller audience is Always more engaged. I mean, um, you know, not my particular world, but like, you know, Instagram and you see, you know, people with a hundred thousand or a million followers and I post a photo and it gets like three likes or six comments and it’s like audience size does not equate to engagement
Kate Toon: Size isn’t everything, it’s what you do with it. So moving on from that, what’s your prediction eight?
[00:24:21] Brogan Renshaw: Um, AI content thrives, which is going to hurt a number of people to hear that, but I think it’s about how it’s done there. There is no turning back now on AI content, um, but it’s about how it’s utilized. And I think from, you know, a content creator perspective, um.
It’s just like any tool, right? Like you get out what you put in, um, but it becomes about, you know, the editing process, how are you going to get the best out of it? So we, we’ve got a process where we, you know, pull all the content in of the existing sites. So it’s all the reference material, their structure, tone of voice, all this stuff.
And then, you know, we get an outline and it’s a human that’s reviewing each of those processes to get the output. So I think our content is going to thrive. I think there’s going to be a lot of crap AI content that people, I mean, just last year, end of last year, we had, um, someone contact us going, Oh, I want to, I want to publish 50 posts from Chat GPT and I’m just like, don’t, it’s going to do absolutely nothing for your business at all.
So I think there’s going to be a lot of that happening. Um, but yeah, AI content, good, our content is going to increase.
Kate Toon: Yeah, we can’t shy away from it. And I think, you know, I think we’re pretty, most SEOs categorically agree that Google doesn’t penalize AI content. It doesn’t care. It penalizes poor content.
The truth is a bargain, you know, a year ago, you’d be contacting someone on Fiverr and saying, can you write me 20 fun, crappy articles, you know, they do. We’ve just replaced cheap freelancers with cheaper AI, um, and the result is the same. So as you’ve mentioned that human oversight, getting someone to review it, um, and then you also touched on, we were talking about ethical considerations with AI content.
What did you want to talk about with that?
Brogan Renshaw: It becomes a question of if you’re, if you’re purely just spinning up, you know, you’re asking ChatGPT or Claude or whatever element you’re using to spin up a blog post, right? All it’s doing is summarizing the existing data. That’s all it’s doing existing information it’s got, which as an ethical question, ethical viewpoint, well, you know, what is, how do you sit on that? Because all you’re doing is taking other people’s work, which is what people have done forever, right? But if you’re not adding any extra value to that, any extra insight, any extra, you know, input or your own experience, it becomes a question of, is it an ethical thing to do to copy other people’s work?
Kate Toon: Yeah, I mean, AI has just made copycatting a lot easier.
Brogan Renshaw: Faster and easier.
Kate Toon: Yeah, my kind of. statement here, and I, I think this is a good one, is if, if it’s really easy for AI to write the article, don’t write it. Like, it should be hard, like you could maybe get the bare bones, the bullet points, some paragraphs, but then it should be a real process of injecting newness into it.
And if you don’t take that step, don’t bother publishing it, because you literally are just regurgitating other people’s data.
Brogan Renshaw: So if you’re not going to get your, your brand, your voice, your call to actions, your experience in that, what you’re doing is you’ve just got the same thing as 10, 000 other companies.
Kate Toon: Yeah. And it won’t rank and it won’t resonate. So, you know, we talk about ranking all the time, but it won’t resonate with the audience. Cause as soon as I get a paragraph in, I’m going to be like, I feel like I’ve read this before. Because I have.
Brogan Renshaw: I have.
Kate Toon: You’re just rearranging it.
Brogan Renshaw: All the same queries. All the same words that AI spits out at us over and over again.
Kate Toon: Yeah, totally. So, I mean, this follows on with the whole resonance thing, which I think is, we talked about relationships, but I think resonance is really important as well, which is building communities. This is my big prediction nine. So communities have been everything for my business since the day I started. I started at Google group. I think it was called Google Plus back then. We’re talking about 1942. And there’s sort of 15 or so copywriters I had in that group were fundamental. I then moved that into Facebook groups, which love or hate still work really, really well. And everyone’s like, don’t do it. They’re going to monetize it. I would pay for them. It’s fine. I’ve tried every other platform, tried to take people off Facebook to other, independent platforms, they don’t like it. But wherever you choose to build your community, whether it’s on Reddit, whether it’s on Snapchat, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, building a gang of people who support you, not in some kind of weird link comment bullshit that you see on LinkedIn. Do you see that?
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah, all the time.
Kate Toon: There’s one guy who posts and everyone after it’s like goes, Hey, name, great post. Hey, great. And I’m like, what are you, what? Why do people do that?
Brogan Renshaw: But they don’t work in the long term because it’s just going to delete the algorithm on LinkedIn. It’s just going to keep showing to those people.
Kate Toon: Yeah, it’s not going to show you more chamber of you and your mates, but building a community in a meaningful way, whether it’s the community of your peers, or for me, what’s worked really well is a community of my potential customers. And, you know, giving and helping in a, in a way that yes, I mean, of course, I don’t just run the communities out of the love of my heart.
I do for the bookshop, but not for my business, but that you give without necessarily expecting the return from the exact thing that you give. Does that make sense? The spirit of reciprocity is there, but you’re not sitting there going, well, I helped Sue last week and she hasn’t bought anything.
Brogan Renshaw: Where’s Sue?
Kate Toon: Where’s Sue? So I’m going to get rid of Sue. Bloody Sue. Just generally trying to help and share and value, offer value in a community area. Holding a space, which sounds really wanky, but creating an environment where people can talk about you, your products, because if you don’t hold that space, they’re talking about your brand somewhere, maybe in the back room of a Reddit forum, rather have those discussions upfront together with your customers and build community, which then builds advocacy and builds trust. So that’s my prediction nine.
Brogan Renshaw: I really like this one, because it’s, you know, not an SEO thing, right. But it’s actually, it comes back to, you can own a topic. You can, gives you something to talk about, you know, for, for the conference, you know, for 12, you know, nine months, we got to talk about and promote an SEO conference.
If we did not have that to do, we wouldn’t have necessarily have an item to talk about on social media.
Kate Toon: Yeah, it’s something to talk about, but I do think it is SEO. The reason I think it’s SEO, because I’ve used my communities for SEO for years, number one, you get absolute insight into the problems and issues that your audience has.
Not from some bullshit AI tool, but from the people who are there. So I can literally go into a group and say, what would you like me to post about? People post, I’ve then built pre audience for that group. I can then share that content and you know, the whole thing of the initial reaction to that content kind of dictates how it’s gonna go.
So I get a lot of likes. and shares and love in those first stages because people asked for that, but also it builds me as a brand. If I’m showing up day in day out in a community, it’s very hard to hide your flaws, right? People either love you or they hate you so that people don’t go out there searching for SEO course.
They do go out there searching for Kate Toon SEO. I’ll never win the ad words with SEO course. There’s people with bigger budgets than me. It’s hard to even win the organic battle because there’s people with more authority and again, more money to spend. But I can win the brand battle and how do I build my brands? Through communities. So I think it is SEO, but just a subtle
Brogan Renshaw: Subtle difference.
Kate Toon: Yeah. All right. Last prediction. Number 10. You get the last one.
Brogan Renshaw: Yay.
Kate Toon: And I can’t believe it’s about AI again.
Brogan Renshaw: It’s about AI again. Even though we’ve just bagged some of it out, we are going to hear about AI agents increasingly over the next 12 months. There is going to be –
Kate Toon: Can you define what an AI agent is?
Brogan Renshaw: An AI agent is essentially, they’re marketed at the moment, they’re marketed as essentially like an AI coworker. So they’re the next step beyond Claude or ChatGPT. Think about giving ChatGPT Um, access to a whole bunch of tools that it can go do research, you know, and it might be a tool that we’ve got one that goes and looks at Google search results for a certain topic, pulls the results back, scrapes all those search results, gives us a summary of the topic, and that can do that within, you know, two minutes, whereas previously I would have given that to a team member, and that would take a few hours.
So AI Agents are going to become increasingly advertised, marketed, important over the next 12 months. You can even go to the step of creating little AI agent teams. So you can give someone a role as, for example, SEO director, and then under them as a content manager sits under them is You know, a content researcher, a keyword researcher, a competitor researcher, and they all do their specific role with access to their specific tools. So it’s just going to speed up a whole bunch of this process.
Kate Toon: Well, I think we might have to get you back to do an episode about AI agents. You see, for me, that was joyful. I was a copywriter, a content creator for a long time, and I never liked that bit. You know, I’m not someone who enjoys research or fact-checking or gathering the bits, right?
Someone else, even with clients, I’d be like, gather all your bits and then I’ll start. I don’t want to be gathering bits. Do you know what I mean?
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah.
Kate Toon: I want to write. I want to take the data. I want to take the information and turn it into an amazing piece of conversational conversion content that drives people crazy, right?
But I don’t want to do the grunt work. So I’m delighted by that. If I can get an agent to do the grunt work and then I can do the glory, that’s fantastic.
Brogan Renshaw: And that’s exactly what they can do. Um, we we’ve, one of the processes we’ve built is to do research on the brand itself. Go and scrape the brand’s page.
What are their call to actions? What’s their tone of voice? Who is this piece of content targeted? Where are they at in the user journey? All this stuff can just be pulled in, you know, within 5-10 minutes of these AI agents doing that work. Then we can take that and write the content.
Kate Toon: I love it. It’s great. So, are you feeling hopeful about 2025? You don’t think SEO is dead? Everyone’s always dragging their SEO is dead flag out and waving it.
Brogan Renshaw: For the last 20 years, SEO is dead.
Kate Toon: For the last 20 years, yeah.
Brogan Renshaw: I don’t, I don’t think it’s dead at all. I think it’s certainly changing. I think the fundamentals remain the same, but there’s certainly an element of evolution with AI.
Kate Toon: Yeah, and I think the thing is, and again, I saw Daniel, who’s coming on the pod post, you know, that we can break a lot of the rules now, you know, that things that we used to do, you know, we can change them now. Um, but I think in many ways you have to understand the origins and the rules to be able to understand what you can break.
Like, yes, using single keyword terms doesn’t work, it never has worked, but you need to understand what keyword is and how it works and how it functions to then manipulate it into a conversion. Do you see what I mean?
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah, correct.
Kate Toon: You have to have that foundational stuff to be able to go, oh, this is what I can play with, you know?
Brogan Renshaw: Yeah, you still got to have. You know, talking on, you know, talk, going back to keywords, right? Like you’ve still got to be discussing the keyword in your page title, your H1 in the content. You can’t expect to rank for a topic if you’re not mentioning those fundamentals.
Kate Toon: That’s it. That’s it. Well, talking about fundamentals, a little shout out for me.
We are kicking off our SEO SOS free challenge in a couple of weeks, so you can join that for free if you want to get to grips with the basics, we also have an educational workshop coming up in January and the big SEO course we’ll be launching again at the end of January. If you want to master your own SEO and fire your SEO agent, I’m joking.
They have a place. You know what I do? I make really great customers for people like Brogan, people who understand SEO and appreciate how much work he does. All right, let’s do a recap. So prediction one was UX, prediction two was understanding AI-generated summaries and how important they are. Prediction three, or not prediction, but it’s not predictions really, they’re like, uh, focuses.
Focus three was about multi-platform approach. Uh, focus four was understanding search intent. Focus five, EEAT. Focus six, uh, video content, focus 7, relationships, focus 8, AI for content generation, focus 9, building communities, and focus 10, thinking about using AI agents. And as I said, I might drag Brogan back.
Well, thank you so much, Brogan. Uh, that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have any questions about any of these ideas, you can head to my I Love SEO group on Facebook. I wanted to tell you as well about the SEO challenge, which I’ve already done. If you’re listening to this after May, we’ll have more rounds of the challenge, so stay in the loop.
As you know, I like to end the show with a shout out to one of my lovely listeners, and today it’s Lia Weston from Australia. She writes expertise with a sense of humor. It’s so funny, me and Brogan. The podcast is a goldmine. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete newbie or an experienced professional, not content with being a wealth of information,Kate also interviews a staggering array of experts. You are one of those and also explains jargon and technical terms in a way that’s understandable and never patronizing. She’s also sparkly of a caffeinated comet. I love that caffeinated comet. So thank you Brogan for being on the show. When is the conference again? Remind us.
Brogan Renshaw: September 2025.
Kate Toon: Okay, we’ll include a link where you can join the waitlist for the conference and get your tickets. I will be there. Uh, so thanks to Lia. Thanks to Brogan. Thanks to you for listening. If you like the show, please don’t forget to leave a five star review or rating wherever you heard the podcast. You’ll help other people find the show and learn more about the lovely world of search engine optimization. And don’t forget to check out the show notes for this episode at the recipe for SEO success. com, where you can learn more about our predictions and our recommendations, more about Brogan, and also find some useful links and leave a comment about the show. So until next time, happy SEOing. Bye.
