The Hottest in SEO This Week from SEOFOMO - Jan 27, 2025

Let's go through the top hottest SEO news from the latest edition of SEO FOMO in case you haven't had the chance to go through it yet. So pretty much an SEO FOMO too long, didn't read. Last week was a packed week for the SEO world. So let's review those top stories that have gotten the highest engagements and clicks. The first one are quotes from John Mueller sharing insights on the importance of SEO for AI overviews. This actually comes from a conversation in which I took also part along with other SEOs that Roger Monte is covering for Search Engine Journal. In this conversation, at some point, Mike Ryan, who hosted it, asked John about the future of SEO, if SEO will still be needed in a search world driven by AI. And as we can see covered here, John Mueller affirmed the necessity of SEO. He highlighted the importance that technical SEO will We'll still have independently of the layer that we obtain information. Content needs to be crawlable and indexable for any bots out there to get access to them. So he mentioned how he thinks a lot of that continues to make sense also in regards to all of the AI things that are happening, all of the different kinds of language models that are trying to train off the internet. They need that foundation of technical SEO. Then I will also add that it's not only that, it's not only about crawlability and indexability of content, but also making sure to have the right policies. Of what is the type of content that your organization is interested to provide to external platforms, search platforms, LLMs to get access to and train from too. So from a more strategical standpoint, it's also even more important to make sure that it's profitable. Also last week during the SEO FOMO meetup in London, in which we had the great opportunity to hold a few roundtables, one of which had the participation of Gary Illyes from Google, he mentioned something that is so so obvious but so often overlooked. AI tools, LLMs need quality content, need relevant content, human content, original content to learn from. So I will say that SEO will still be very relevant to establish that strategy, making sure that those human content efforts are still aligned again with what the company, the business, the website wants to offer. The 2nd most popular resource of the week is this guide from Rich Sanger about measuring the impact of AI overviews on SEO performance. Rich has been sharing already for a long time a wealth of resources regarding Google AI overviews generations, optimization, and now also tracking. As we can see, he goes through a variety of methods that we can use to obtain visibility and clicks data from AI overviews, trying to match the information that we can get from tracking tools or specialized tools that already provide this functionality on one hand, and also estimating the performance by overlaying the information with the one from the Google Search Console. I have to say, it will be amazing to have this filter directly in the Google Search Console. So if you are watching me, this might be a good time, a reminder to ask again the Google team for it, because this will highly, highly facilitate our lives. And last but certainly not least, because I imagine that you have seen through all of your social media about it. It's HubSpot blog organic search traffic drop. What happened? Is it really that bad? What does it mean for SEO? So I decided to do this analysis after seeing so many crazy takes, many of them even claiming that SEO was dead just because of this. So what I did was to dig a little bit deeper, providing a little bit of more context of what actually happened, understanding of course the constraints that at the end of the day we don't have internal information. So realistically, we don't know how much this organic search traffic drop could have hurt the real business, which at the end of the day is what counts. But as you can see, I go through the data showing how HubSpot had been dropping already since the March 2024 Google core update. And yes, even if their blog was a very important driver of traffic overall, the decreases of rankings came from not very relevant topics that they were targeting with blog posts like the most famous quotes of all time or how to type the shrug emoji that realistically, if compared with their more commercially focused transactional queries, software-related queries that they actually target with their www subdomain, have likely a trivial impact to their business. So as you can see, I go through all of this data, not only focusing on what dropped, but what also improved. And we can see that during this time, at the end of last year, they also gained rankings for quite a few resources that are much more aligned with their business model and their offering. And those players that actually won in rankings for these terms for which they dropped were actually providing much more authoritative and specialized information. And therefore Google decided that they deserve these rankings better. I share also the methodology, the questions with a flowchart that I use to assess what to do when being hit by a Google core update, depending if these are queries that are relevant or not, that I'm actually targeting or not. And if I already have content that is very well optimized for them or not, the outcome can be from not doing anything to optimize the drop pages, to just prune them because you were never meant to target these topics. As this was the case, we can see how HubSpot is already 302 redirecting the non-relevant articles that drop to this blog content audit guide that they have. Surprise, surprise. Finally, I put this also in context by going through their www rankings, which are actually ranking for their more commercially focused transactional queries, branded and unbranded, that continue to be pretty strong, haven't been affected, and I use then SimilarWeb, which is actually our today's sponsor. So thank you very much, SimilarWeb, to also assess how this hit the overall traffic trend beyond organic. Realistically, again, even if there was a decrease, we can still see how they have a pretty strong traffic coming from direct and organic. I also share a quote from David Le Kim, who used to work in there, who provides a few insights based on his own experience, clarifying how that approach at some point used to be working for them because of the size and scale of HubSpot, although that approach might not necessarily be the best way moving forward, even for bigger brands, because it's obvious that Google is much better enforcing their creating helpful, reliable, people-first content now. I want to take the opportunity to give a big thank you to Similarweb, which is today's sponsor. And as you can see, I use it to go through a lot of the data of this analysis, and it can be actually very, very helpful to understand not only the organic search performance, but how it plays an impact along the other marketing channels. So if you haven't taken a look at it, go and check it out. Finally, I want to thank all of those who attended last week SEO FOMO Meetup in London and to invite you in case you're based in Australia or nearby to the SEO FOMO Meetup Melbourne with the SEO Collective that will happen on March 13th at 6 PM. It's completely free. There will be a couple of roundtables with some of the most prominent SEOs in Australia, lots of networking, Free drinks and snacks. You cannot miss it. So hopefully I will see you there. And also stay tuned for even the next edition of SEO FOMO that will be also announced next month. That will happen in April. It is going so fast. So many SEO FOMO meetups. I cannot wait for it and make the most out of the opportunity to see you all somewhere over the world. Thank you very much for watching. If you haven't subscribed to SEO FOMO, go and do it now to the SEO FOMO newsletter. And if you want to keep up with the latest news in SEO in real time at any time. Wanna take a look at the SEO FOMO News? 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