Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SU is Not that Hard. It's me, ed Dawson, as usual, and first thing I want to say is Happy New Year. Okay, this may come out at 6am UK time, so some of you might hear it in 2020. But it's actually. This is the first published episode, as far as I'm concerned, of 2025. So, happy New Year. Hope you've had a good new year's eve celebration. Um, hope that today isn't going to be too hungover for you. If you've never done it the night before or whatever, I mean here with me, it'll still be a day of holiday, essentially. Um, what we'll actually be doing is in my village we have a? Um.

The local pub has an event every new year's day that starts about lunchtime, where two groups of morris dancers come over from local Morris dancing groups. If you don't know what a Morris dancer is, then Google it because they're quite unusual, especially because we're quite reserved in England generally. They are not, you know, morris dancers. They dress up in funny clothes, they attach bells to themselves, they have sticks and they do these dances to music and bang these sticks and it's very, it's fun. Anyway, it's interesting. It's a very old English tradition, something. I don't know if we're embarrassed about it in England, but anyway it's fun. They come here every New Year's Day. They do this Morris dancing, all the village comes together, has quite a few drinks. Then they do this morris dancing, all the village comes together, has quite a few drinks. Then they do a little speech. That's every year the retelling of a story of taking a shara bank, which is a very early bus, in the sort of the early 20th century um trip to skegness, which is, I would like to say, local seaside tours, where we are here it's about three hour drive away because we're very far from the sea where I live um, and they do this in the pub, pubs packed and they this guy stands up and does this story every year and then there's a riposte from the village as well. One of the villages stands up and does a speech about what's happened in the village over the past year. Um, and, yeah, it's unusual because most places have big dues on New Year's Eve, whereas New Year's Day is where we do it in our village. So that's what I'll be up to later on today.

Anyway, this episode is about taking a look back at 2024 in the SEO world and looking forward to 2025 and thinking about what 2025 might bring and if I've got any resolutions that I'm going to take forward into the new year. So let's start by looking back at 2024. And really it's been quite a big year at SEO for many reasons, because it's probably the biggest amount of shift of change that I've seen in a long time. It's the biggest amount of shift of change that I've seen in a long time. Like, obviously, ai touchy-to-toot appeared earlier in 2024, but 2024, I think, is when it really got a lot better compared to the early versions of chat gpt. What chat, gpt and claude and other ai tools can now do is absolutely incredible and it's changing the way that you know you can do content creation. I'm not just talking about it can churn it out, because that's not the best way of doing it, but it can certainly help, um sort of hugely. When it comes to ideation, um, the things that you should be talking about, come up with briefs, all those kind of things. It's really, really impressive. And when it comes to coding, incredible. You know, you can start to prototype stuff, you can code stuff, you can, you can get it, you can. You can learn how to do things so much quicker by questioning an AI than you can by searching or anything else, and it's definitely changing how we as an industry produce stuff.

It's still very early days when it comes to your everyday consumer searching for things. It's not mass market yet. It's not free. Will it ever become mass market? I don't know, and I've done episodes about this, about how much, how small it is. Yet it's definitely got Google in a panic, though We've now got AI overviews in so many search results. It is definitely changing the landscape when it comes to informational stuff. I think people are doing those basic searches for basic information. They're going to get served more and more AI, whether it's by ChatGPT or whether it's through AI overviews and things like that, directly in the more traditional search engines. People are still going to dive deeper, though. They're still going to go to video content. They're still going to go to deeper guides. I don't quite see yet the point where AI is going to enter everything. That's not to say it won't, but it hasn't yet in 2024.

Another thing that's happened in 2024 is I think Google lost control of its algorithm a bit. We've seen, you know, the amount of huge amount of uproar in the creative community about how many results are now leading people to places like Reddit and Quora, particularly Reddit, and Google kind of seemed to have lost control of that EEAT experience, expertise, authority and trust part of their algorithm, where it seemed to get so heavily skewed towards user generated content and places like reddit and sites with big authority. And so that's where we're getting forbes, we're getting all the traffic. So basically the smaller sites were getting hit because they were losing traffic to these. They're getting hit by helpful content update, which I think even google, if they were going to look at, look at, look back at it, might think they kind of screwed it up a bit there. I don't know how they're ever going to get it back because I think they've come, there's no one there anymore and that's exactly how their algorithm works. They can say create useful content. They can. They can say, create helpful content, but I don't think they actually know what the black box that is, the algorithm completely takes as being those things. I don't think they can just now say this is what you should do and they're finishing the year by trying to sort this out.

I think they have definitely um, obviously with the parasite se, where they are manually removing sites or directories of sites from the search engines, where you know they're literally just to parasite, suck the juice, that authority juice, out of the main sites to sort of put this highly commercialized, highly affiliate content on that isn't related to what the core content of the host site is. But they haven't managed to do it algorithmically yet. It's all manual. So, which again suggests they don't quite know how to make their algorithm work in a way that would do that algorithmically without it otherwise. So I think in a way it's a the behemoth that is now the google algorithm underneath. Google don't understand it themselves to make the desired changes they want to how it serves things. But these last few core updates do seem to be favoring more and more smaller creators. They do seem to be working towards that, so maybe they're going to pull that around. Let's see, but I think they definitely lost control this last year.

So, whether I see it going into 2025? As you know, we're now in 2025. What's going to be? Well, I think this change is going to accelerate the AIs. The capabilities are just going to accelerate. It's just getting better and better.

Now this could come at a cost. You know we've seen that. The latest versions of ChatGPT, their pro version, whatever they're calling it the $200 a month version it's not cheap, this AI. So this is the one thing that still might hold it back from mass adoption is the cost of it. And that's not just the physical cost people have to pay if they want to use it. It's the fact that if you're going to try and provide a free service, because most people are used to having a free search so that's why people like Google, I think, are still going to be strong, because most people aren't going to want to pay for it. So that means that there's going to be limits into how much computing power they can put towards it, although there's just this new chip, this new quantum chip that Google have just announced. I think it's called Willow. This was literally just a few days ago. As I'm recording this, obviously I'm not recording this on New Year's Day, everybody. Sorry, but it's pre-recorded, so you know this. Quantum computing power is that? How experimental Is that? How production-ready is it that what they have announced? That could change things, but if that doesn't change it, I think the cost of computing as it stands currently, with current technology, is still the issue around ai, I think.

Will we see google gain control of its algorithm? They have mentioned there's going to be big changes in 2025. Um, now, this is very up in the air, because that could mean anything. It could be just them talking to shareholders. It could just be them talking to the general public and what the general public sees big compared to what we in the industry see as big, it could be completely different. I'll wait to see. Things have changed a lot over the last year. We've seen these AI overviews. We've seen lots of other things like that. And how is that going to affect Onward click streams? Because that's what you've got to think about with Google.

Google makes its money from ads and ads only work if people click them to go further on, to leave Google and go somewhere. And the way Google has worked so brilliantly with ads is it's mixed the ads in with the organic, so that people always end up where they want and the people who are willing to pay more can seamlessly be in there want, and the people are willing to pay more can seem to be in there. If you look at like display ads, how you know the clicks that are on display ads on other websites? It's just it's so low okay, really really much lower than it is in google with the search results. So if they discourage people from clicking to visit other sites and it's going to discourage people from clicking their ads as well, so they're still going to have to work a way of if this is if their business model is going to survive. You know this, this. If it doesn't, then if they completely chose a business model, then all bets are off.

But I doubt they will in the first instance because so we're not. 90 percent of their revenue comes from ads, so they're still going to want this click this, this system where people click links to visit other sites. Next, that's what they expect to do, whether it's an ad or organic. A lot of people probably don't even realize the difference. So that's going to be the core thing how does that evolve? And that's going to be interesting to see.

It's also going to be incredibly interesting to see how ai moves forward, particularly ai agents. Going to be particularly interesting to see if we get ai in the browser and whether that becomes commonplace, because that could be more of a where a consumer can say I'm looking for flight, I want to go from, say, london to New York, I'm going to go this time period, then leave it to an AI agent to just browse the web and come back and find them all the answers. It could be the future becomes that we're actually, as web creators, creating content that we know the ai is going to be working with. You know our client could become ai as much as anything else less human people searching through our products. So it could be that you we end up optimizing for ai agents. That could be something that happened. So yeah, but whatever happens, I don't think there's going to be another year of business as usual.

As I said before, maybe three, four years ago, seo one year would be very much the same as the next. There wasn't much difference. Google was always dominant. The interface and the way people worked with Google and used Google didn't change much, but now it's definitely. There is a lot of change happening and there are a lot of new players in the field. So you know we've had, you know, search GPT has just appeared this last year, so you know we might see there might be more to come from them. It's still very basic at the moment. That could be a much more sophisticated product this time next year.

So really interesting times, tricky times. You know. Like I said, it's the Chinese proverb. I hope you live in interesting times, which is actually a curse rather than a blessing. But we can only work with what we've got. So the key thing is to stay positive, stay interested and keep on top of things.

So when it comes to New Year's resolutions I'm not a big New Year's resolutions guy because I see so many people make resolutions across all aspects of their life and not many people stick to them. I tend not to make resolutions at this time of year. If I resolve to do something, it's generally other times of the year when I've I've got a real reason to do it. But this for this year, if I was to have any resolution, that would be just to stay curious, to experiment and not to be rigid in the way I think. So that's what I would suggest you all do is to stay curious and to experiment as much as anything, because as new things come along, as new technologies come along, as new opportunities come along, experiment with them. Don't dismiss them just because they're new, but experiment and stay curious. So, yeah, I think that's it for me for today. I'm going to sign off with my usual sign off, which keeps that stay curious in there. So you know, until next time, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. And yeah, I'll see you next time. Happy new year. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson. On both.

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. The link is in the show notes. You can try our seo intelligence platform keywords people use at keywords people usecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your google search console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize continually refine your content, targeted personalized advice, keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo is not that hard.