Aleyda Solis rounds up the week's top SEO stories: Marie Haynes on Google's shift toward expertise and away from AI fluff, Ivan Pali on why large companies need SEO product managers, and Dan Taylor on controlling your brand's search results. Plus a SimilarWeb benchmark report covering ten industries.
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The top hottest SEO news from the latest edition of SEO FOMO. In case you haven't read the latest newsletter, or if you want to know which have been the most clicked stories. This Too Long Didn't Read is again sponsored by SimilarWeb. Thank you very much for your sponsorships. Now let's go through the top SEO news of the week. The first one is how Google determines relevancy and helpfulness by Marie Haynes. Marie digs deep going through all of those signals, areas that Google might take into consideration to determine relevancy and helpfulness, which we know is something that Google wants to highlight, endorse in search results with people-first content. And Mary goes through it in this insightful post. I'm not surprised that people is looking to read more into it. Mary is known for her very in-depth and amazing analysis. So this is certainly a piece that I highly recommend you to take a look at if you want to understand better how Google might be assessing here beyond the questions that they have already shared with all of us. It is absolutely essential that we start taking those criteria and signals into account when creating our own content. Unlike of what I have heard around, it is not a time in which we need to stop Creating content or informational content in particular, I have heard about, or informational content is dead with AI overviews and LLMs. No, fluff informational content disconnected from real brand and subject matter expertise that doesn't connect with the potential customer needs and/or doesn't add anything new and useful for your users is the one that is dead, right? So creating informational content that is user-first, that takes into account what matters in her guide. It's fundamental now and it's only becoming more and more important in an era that is full of fluff AI-generated content out there. The second most popular guide is the one by Ivan Pali going through how SEO product manager is a key role for the future of SEO, and I couldn't agree more. It's true that this becomes more evident when you work enterprise level, when you work with bigger very bureaucratic organizations. Remember that I shared not so long ago a presentation and I have shared also even a graphic showing how when companies and websites are small, SEO is more of a brand problem, content popularity, authority. And when the organization and the website is big, SEO becomes more of a product problem, which has to do with technical implementation and the alignment of the already existing ongoing processes and actions in the company, right? And even does a great job here going through products are built to fit with channels. And indeed, SEO, we know that is multidisciplinary too and needs to leverage and align to what already exists in all the digital marketing, brand design, development, and explain this in a really, really insightful way and how also becoming an SEO product manager gives a competitive advantage. which I completely agree. So definitely go and take a look at his article. And if you want to learn even more about it, go and take a look at this presentation that I did a few months ago last year about how to align SEO within the product triangle to get buy-in and support. The other most popular article this week is the one that covers the other side about the big SEO challenge. One is product, remember, the other is brand, controlling your brand position online with SEO. And again, this is a A topic that I have started to talk and share a lot about this year. You can go and take a look at the first edition of Crawling Mondays in which I invited all the SEOs to go through this particular topic too. And in this guide, Dan Taylor does an amazing job explaining why it is so important to understand your brand positioning first, the risk of losing control of your branded search results, which is great to clarify because a lot of people think that they own already branded searches and that's not necessarily true and you need to be proactive about it, and then the key areas of branded search to take into account and steps to literally take control of your SERP visibility for those queries that are key for your company through the customer journey. So he goes through monitoring and improving third-party listings, handling negative press and search results, measuring and monitoring brand search performance, brand sentiment analysis, among many others. This is definitely a guide that you shouldn't miss out. Last but not least, it is a resource from Similarweb that is our today's sponsor too, which is a 2025 SEO benchmark report going through the top 10K websites in 10 different industries in order to understand what is going on, what does it take to win, what are the patterns among the most successful websites, and what are the particularities of what Google is endorsing and giving more visibility. For certain industries. I had the chance to take a look at the e-commerce industry data and provide a little bit of feedback and insights about it. And this is a little bit of a sneak peek of what you can get access to with this report. So definitely go and take a look too. Finally, I want to finish today's episode with 2 SEO FOMO initiatives. The SEO FOMO e-commerce SEO in 2025 survey. If you're an SEO who works with e-commerce sites, then this survey and giveaway are for you. You just need to take this anonymized survey where I ask very easy to answer questions about your e-commerce SEO processes. I will be sharing the outcome of this survey in here in the SEO FOMO website as well as the newsletter, and I will be presenting about it along with a major research that I am also doing. And the best is when you take the survey, you can obtain to participate in this massive giveaway of 15 different tools, many of them among the top tools in SEO, along with an SEO FOMO mug and hoodie for a very lucky winner. So here's a great opportunity to contribute with the community and get the chance to get this major package of 15 SEO tools. And last but not least is the SEO FOMO SEO Week The SEO Week is happening at the end of April in New York City. It's going to be a one-of-a-kind SEO conference that you cannot miss, in which I will have the amazing opportunity to speak. And we are running a free general admission ticket raffle to the SEO Week. Just, just need to be an SEO Former free newsletter subscriber and then publish a post on LinkedIn saying that you want to go there. That's it. Pretty easy, isn't it? So go and participate and very looking forward hopefully to see you in the SEO Week at the end of April. And that was it for today's top SEO news stories from SEO FOMO. If you don't want to wait until the next week, go and take a look at the SEO FOMO News where the top stories are submitted and voted and you can pretty much monitor in real time what is going on in SEO and you don't miss out. Until the next week, bye-bye.
