Stop trying to game every minute change to the SERPs

Alex says: “Stop obsessing about – and experimenting too much with – how to game the way that new technology interacts with the SERPs.

I’m mostly referring to AIO (AI overviews) and the way that’s starting to take over search results pages.”

Why is it important not to obsess over these things?

“Sometimes people think too much about every minute change. Even though it’s nice to get 100 on whatever audits or measurements you’re trying to achieve, it’s not always healthy from a technical or strategic standpoint to yearn for that 100.

In terms of what’s being looked at by search engines and performance audits, being at 100 doesn’t necessarily make you the most helpful page or site. It depends on how you compare to your competitors.

Considering the differences in how HCU and parts of the core updates have been affecting sites negatively and positively this year, studies have shown some people do absolutely nothing to try and recover sites that were penalised, and they have recovered.

It begs different questions. Are you doing too much? Are you doing too little? That’s a massive grey area that people need to be cautious about. The SERPs are ever-changing and it’s more dramatic now than it has ever been. 12 months ago, not many people could have predicted how impactful things like AI overviews would be towards the typical search behaviour of an end user.”

Do people need to be aware of how they are being served on AI overviews?

“Whilst it is going towards mass adoption, and it does change the way that SERPs are displayed to the searcher, my advice is not to obsess about making changes or adapting too much.

People are now implementing AI overview strategies to ensure that they have as much exposure as they can within those overviews specifically.

You should consider them, because they’re having an impact, but don’t go into them too heavily. The technology and the way it’s displayed are changing, but the ethics of marketing and SEO are essentially the same. Don’t try to abuse it, otherwise, you may be penalised later on.”

How do you know that a change will actually impact SEO going forward, and you do need to change your strategy?

“Think backwards. Reverse engineer and think from a top-down perspective rather than bottom-up.

There’s a new way in which people are exposed to your brand, product, or service, but nothing has really changed in terms of SEO implementation. Nothing is too drastically different from the way it was 1, 2, or even 5 years ago. The ethics are still there. Make sure that your code is good and well-structured, and your UX is friendly to the end user. Write and produce content for the end user, not for the search engine.

Doing that will entice things like AI overviews, which are still going to return results on the page based on the search intent you’re covering and how helpful each site is. Whilst it’s a different way of showing results, it’s still going to choose the same variables that the old-school 10 links are searching for.

As some of 2024’s data has shown, there’s a significant correlation between what was in the first 10 pages of a search engine and what is in an AI overview – whether that’s on Google or Bing. It’s not pulling things that were on page 3 onto page 1, so people who were on page 1 in the native links don’t have to do anything dramatically different to appear there.”

Would it be better to sit down and review the changes in the SERP once a year, build your strategy based on what’s important, and try to maintain that?

“Perhaps you should review it more often than once a year but, from a content point of view at least, you should think more about search intent than SERP changes. For each page, what is the intent?

There are essentially 4 different search intents, and it seems that commercial and informational intent pages are attracting more visibility than those for navigational and transactional intent. That might be something to look at in a strategy. What are you losing out on and are your competitors winning on a certain piece of content? If so, what is that and what is the intent of it? Also, fundamentally, is your content helpful to the end user?

Build your brand and build what you’re known for. Then, when people search for products and services, your pages will surface. Informational pages, which are often earlier in the funnel, are the type of content that is more likely to be served by AI overviews.

From a brand marketing perspective, it’s really important that you’re doing that from an off-site point of view, not an on-site point of view.

It’s great to create a well-structured authority of you as a brand on your website, but things like AI overviews are taking information from multiple sites and bringing it in. If you search for a brand name and it brings up an AI overview, it won’t just be taking information from the brand’s site. It’ll be taking it from other sites as well. That makes the outreach element of SEO just as important as the content, if not more so. You need to ensure that it all correlates with your marketing strategy on-site.”

Is it possible and worthwhile to optimize for AI overviews?

“If you’re currently optimizing for AI overviews, take a step back and optimize for the intent that an AI overview interprets.

If you go back to brand marketing, you can cover informational intent, where users are trying to find out and discover about that brand and make sure they’re trustworthy. From a search experience perspective, when you’re looking at the brand, you don’t just want the brand’s name, you want to know more from a third person’s perspective, like UGC or an editorial side that isn’t them. Those things are really important to do.

With commercial intent, whenever you’re explaining something, you need to cover the intent of someone who is looking to buy something because AI overviews don’t do the commercial aspect. That’s for you to decide and carry on with.

That connection between the informational and the commercial is going to be important. You need to make sure that the information is there for AIO, but you also need to entice them to go to the website to try to remove this zero click that’s happening.”

Are there specific areas that don’t need to be as reactive to these technology changes?

“Any brick-and-mortar SEO shouldn’t need to be thinking too much about AIO.

It adopts really well, and it is a strategy you can do, but you should be going back to the native strategy of local SEO. That’s true for e-commerce as well because they’re the areas where users have more of a transactional or commercial intent – and they’re the winners.

The informational sites, like small publishers, are losing out. That’s where the war’s being lost for site owners a bit. If you are an informational site, that’s your primary focus. You need to mix it up with some other search intent to make people come into the site and make AIO understand that there’s more to the site than just information, to remove the zero click.”

How do SEOs answer questions from stakeholders about technology changes, and how much time should they allocate towards staying up to date?

“I would say at least half an hour a week. Read some articles. There are digests out there. If you’re strapped for time, there are places that are specific to AI updates. There are sites that will send you a weekly digest of things that are happening, or even bullet point it.

AI is a benefit here because you can use AI to summarise it. There are really good tools out there that do that. You do have to keep up with it.

When it comes to stakeholders, things are getting harder – and it’s been harder for an SEO as the years have gone on. If you look back a bit, there was the ‘not provided’ token. We were living the life before ‘not provided’ started because we could really connect our work with the bottom line. We had so much data, and it’s slowly been taken away. It gets harder and harder, and attribution gets harder and harder.

However, when I started in SEO, I still had to fight that fight – even though we had all that data. I used to think, another part of the marketing department was doing magazine ads that just said, ‘Go to our website: domain.com.’ It wouldn’t even have a forward slash or something to attribute it to. Yet, they never had to fight to get more budget to appear in more magazines.

It’s weird that we still have to answer these questions because it’s technology and that’s ever-changing. Even now, magazine and off-site budget is just warranted. Even after years of the internet’s growth and paper’s decline, it’s still valid. That’s very frustrating.

It’s also because some stakeholders just don’t understand the technology. They don’t understand it, so they’ll fight SEOs because the SEOs are trying to tell them something, and that doesn’t always go down well. They’re ‘only an SEO’, and yet you’re reliant on them.

SEOs don’t get the credit when credit’s due and they definitely have the pressure if something goes wrong. If a site gets a positive change from an HCU, stakeholders rarely go up to the SEO and double their pay. However, if the HCU hits them, their job’s at risk. It’s funny that.

It’s part of our job, annoyingly, and it won’t become easier as the years go on. It seems that this isn’t the end of data being taken away. Look at first-party and third-party cookie stuff. That didn’t happen, but it will, and it will ruin some companies.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop listening to me waffle so much and go and find very digestible information. I host the Yoast SEO Update every month. That’s just an hour a month, and it’s really useful to keep you up to date on current events whilst hearing commentary around it.

Obviously, I read a lot more. I read all the publications. I look at how all the products are doing. I find product releases very interesting. When a tool or provider releases something new, I like to ask why they made that, and why it’s going to be so interesting for the end user.

As for site, audit your own website again. Look at it from a technical perspective, a content perspective, and a UX perspective. Once you’ve got things to change in that queue, then spend more time doing competitor analysis, especially about who’s winning in areas where you want to win.

If your competitor is getting a lot of AI overview exposure, why? What have they done? Have a look in the tools and see what they’ve been up to over the last year.”

Alex Moss is Principal SEO at Yoast as well as Co-Founder and Director at FireCask, and you can find him over at Alex-Moss.co.uk.