Valentina says: “I think we should consider all the organic channels and make them work in synergy. SEO is slowly turning in OSO.”

What is OSO?

“Organic Search Optimization is simply the horizontal version of SEO.”

The horizontal version of SEO. Do you want to explain that a little bit further?

“So, read the development of AI. This has been one of the major reasons SEO has been developing into a broader department because of the development of social media and the increase in the number of people using social media. OSO is a broad way to see Search Engine Optimization when we integrate multiple channels, and we make them work in synergy to make sure that our presence online organically is strong. And we build general authority over our brand in itself, as well as our website.”

What do you mean by all the organic channels? What are the key organic channels that you would focus on?

“One of the main organic channels would mainly be social media. Together with these, we can integrate, for example, newsletters and forums, and it is very important to work in synergy. But my focus is social media and search.”

And what about podcasts or YouTube?

“YouTube is included in social media. Podcasts are a kind of asset that we should include and the kind of content we should include in our strategies. And these podcasts are becoming more and more fundamental, an element we should add and integrate actively within our strategy.”

It's a bit of a morphed opportunity between an opportunity to publish content on other platforms and a distribution opportunity where people can discover your brand. So, it's a bit of a strange opportunity. But we're not focusing on that. I guess the key message is synergy. How do you make them all work together in synergy?

“It's not only about data. It’s been about looking around, trying to understand what's working for the people, and focusing mainly on our audience. I think Google has been, especially lately, slowly moving away from that range of keywords, which we wouldn't normally focus on, and trying to tell us to focus more on what the audience wants to see in terms of unique content and what we can provide to the audience to be seen as a more authentic and authoritative brand. This is started with the add-on of the second E in EEAT. But as well then develop the words, Google’s billion algorithm update. Also, how do you determine what your audience wants? What Google has been doing with the keyword volume in Keyword Planner has been grouping keywords differently and giving us different, more general volumes for less similar keywords. And I think with the addition of AI for us is fundamental to integrate social media within an organic strategy basically.”

How do you determine what your audience actually wants?

“This is quite a fun question to answer as various methods exist. We have the typical method, keyword volumes, and keyword research, and very in-depth and well-made keyword research where we can go and find those little niche keywords, which may be very few people are looking out, but that's how we get like the specific target audience that we want to get. This is one of the main things that SEOs have always been doing, but I think it's also about creating that niche research. And that comes as well from looking around on forums, for instance. I think one thing a very small number of people do is go on forums, for instance, Reddit or social media threads, and see what people talk about and are interested in. Look at your industry and what's happening within your industry hashtags or threads, and try to see what people talk about and are interested in. And that's something we struggled to get on keyword research because the volumes are so small that we cannot see them. But actually, people are talking about it. And it's good to have content covering that because we can show it.”

What are your thoughts on targeting zero-volume keyword phrases? You do your traditional keyword research and want to target keyword phrases that may have between 100 to 200 monthly search volumes, just a nice medium long tail keyword phrase. So that's what you do traditionally in SEO. But it's great advice to be specific about your target audience’s wants. But then you do your keyword research, which says zero search volume. So, is it a challenge to justify targeting those types of phrases?

“I think that's a very good question. I think a well-made content strategy covers all of it. Sometimes, and this is something that Google mentioned, keyword volumes are not accurate. Sometimes, we see zero searches. But actually, there is a starting trend, which we can jump on, like a conversation, for instance. And I think that we should not focus only on zero searches. I think that would be not the right decision to take. However, let’s consider them and that topicality is becoming more important than ever, where we mix our high and medium-volume keywords with the zero-volume keywords, which create that unique content that nobody else has and can show the expertise it is now developing. However, I think it is still often overlooked.”

A theory could be that Google doesn’t want you to discover all the long tail keyword phrases with little search volume to drive the user and advertiser towards using paid search a little more. Is that a conspiracy theory?

“I don't think it's a conspiracy theory. I think Google has a lot of secrets. And I think Google tends not to tell us everything. But I have experienced things that Google was saying are unimportant. Don't worry; do not consider these within your strategy because this is unimportant. And then, if you test it and try to apply more things within your strategy, they work in increasing your traffic. So, my theory is that Google has secrets. And it is fun to discover them and learn what they want to hide. But we should always focus on the user in the first place. So, I think Google wants to hide something from us because they want us to provide high-quality content.”

I also think SEO has developed from being inexperienced to more experienced. I think the more experienced SEOs are more comfortable with determining what they should be listening to and what they should be ignoring.

“Yes, I think that. I keep mentioning this, but we have had many algorithm updates lately. And I can see the community being overwhelmed by what Google says: if you do your job properly, they shouldn't matter to you. So yes, I think that, especially for us who just entered the industry, this is often more overwhelming than for more experienced SEOs, who are quite used to those mood swings. This has started recently, whereas before, we used to have a couple of big updates a year, whereas now they're happening almost every month or week.”

You also touched on AI. What role do you think AI should play in organic success?

“This is a tricky one. There has been a huge conversation about using AI for our content production. Especially I was reading recently that they have introduced this AI to help create videos. And many SEOs have been using AI to create the content on their website. AI is an incredible resource to simplify our jobs and help us produce amazing content in less time. But we should not rely on AI to produce our content because it doesn't give the same feeling as human-created content. My feeling about this is AI is amazing. I love it myself. I use it a lot in my work.”

What tools do you use?

“Well, ChatGPT is one of our main tools. But we're creating tools internally to support us with our work and make some of the processes quite manual. And it's a bit more automated. So, we also use it to support and find new ideas for our content. But obviously, we always use our own heart and ideas in our content because that will help us a lot in providing that unique content. AI is amazing, but it's still fed from different things you can find and learn. So, it's not unique in itself.”

Going back to thinking about different organic channels and their synergy, I guess that makes it more challenging to measure success. How do you measure whether or not what you're doing is successful? If you're integrating everything?

“Although the topic is tricky, I think it's about dividing data that can tell a story. When we look at the data, especially now, it isn’t easy to have fun with what worked and what didn't, as you said, with the synergy of different channels. So, what were the channels that helped us succeed in this? And I think, starting to set KPIs from the start, which are going to help us understand what helped what one firm step, which I think is incredibly massively helpful.”

What's an example of a KPI that's good to set?

“It depends on what you're doing. If I want to integrate my Instagram reel within my page, I want to see the traffic that enters my site from the moment I embed that specific piece of content within my page, but I also want to go and check what the reel is doing from the time I published that blog. So, that would be the views I had bought, the engagement rate. So, that would be the engagement rates, likes, shares, comments, etc. See, as they published, and it's hard to cross-sharing. So, that starts from the traffic on my site and the engagement rate on my reel. And then from there, once we have the dates of these things that have been published, I want to see how the conversion changed.”

You shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“Focus on the top of the funnel. As I was saying earlier, keyword research is amazing. And I think historically, we have been running keyword research to follow the overall funnel from the top to the end. And I think this is still fundamental. We should focus on the overall funnel. But I think with the implementation of AI within the search engine, superficial keywords on search are becoming more complicated for success. So, focusing only on superficial and top-of-the-funnel keywords is quite counterproductive without the complete research to go deep down in the funnel and provide that uniqueness.”

Valentina Stragliotto is an SEO Executive at Anything is Possible, and you can find her over at aip.media.