How to build a future-ready SEO strategy

Crafting an SEO strategy requires more than just a focus on the present. To succeed, we must anticipate future changes and adapt accordingly. 

In this article, we’ll discuss: 

• The developing changes to the SEO industry.
• What those changes mean for our SEO strategies.
• How we can address and grow with those changes.

Note: When future-proofing an SEO strategy, consider that most businesses plan in 5-7 year horizons, not 20-30 years. While long-term goals matter, immediate relevance lies in shorter timeframes.

Strategy creation: Assumptions

Within this article, I’m making a few assumptions about how you created your strategy.

I recognize best practices end up being occasionally compromised for one reason or another, so I’ll lay these assumptions out for you:

• The SEO strategy created has already been lined up to the 1-3 year business plan and goals.
• You have a measurement plan in place for your tactical buckets.
• You know what the 5-7 year goals are for the business. (e.g., You’re at Netflix and know they want to dominate the video game space in seven years.)

If you have to compromise on any of these elements, address this before focusing on future-proofing your strategy. You must know the kind of future your business wants to walk into – and have a way to measure it – before getting too far down the road. 

If you’re compromising on measurement and are unsure when or how to get the perfect measure, find a solution that enables you to monitor progress and value effectively.

The first port of call I’d recommend would be to speak to your finance team. See how they’re measuring similar activities in channels that aren’t typically as directly measurable, like TV or radio and other forms of traditional media. 

If they don’t have an easily transferable metric, a few other ways to approach it include: 

• Getting a “faith-based” number from finance: If they don’t have a calculation you can use, they may just have a value they assign to that channel because someone somewhere made a calculation 20 years ago, and it’s now considered a gold standard internally.
• Use a relative value: Each action on the website has a relative value to each other – signing up for a newsletter probably isn’t as valuable as a sale, etc. Put your metrics in that list, speak to someone with decision-making power, and ask them where your goals sit in the hierarchy of value.
• Use a default value of $1 for everything: This is the worst-case scenario. The goal is to elicit conversation when you share this number and people ask where you got it from. 

If you’re having trouble even getting tracking for those goals implemented, I’d follow a similar process to at least start putting a number against it. 

Whether that’s an assumed conversion rate from lead to sale or an estimated number of organic newsletter signups based on the current channel split, you will find a way to put some easily explainable number against a goal that will at least start a conversation. This will hopefully lead to a conversation around how to measure it more precisely. 

For a more in-depth conversation about goal tracking, read this article by Avinash Kaushik. (Here, he’s specifically talking about measuring offline conversions, but it still applies when you’re having trouble getting visibility around value or perceived value.)

As we are moving into a more fractured world of measurement, I would also make sure you clearly document your sources and assumptions. As we’ll discuss later, measurement for SEO will be even more obtuse now than ever. One of those black boxes of measurement will probably be Search Generative Experience (SGE).

Generative search, surfaces and SEO

There are a few ways I think about generative search:

• As a manifestation of the “Experience” in E-E-A-T.
• A further extension of Knowledge Graphs and entities.
• When optimizing for it, I think of it like online reputation management (ORM)

These ways of thinking about generative search move beyond standard website optimization into brand building and collaboration with other marketing channels.  

So, what does this mean for you as an SEO professional? 

Get social. If you haven’t already, your job and the success of your work and strategy are starting to depend on much more than the development (or engineering) and content teams. 

Intrinsically, Perspectives (now Forums) within SGE is social media, but we know Google is pulling from much more than that. 

So you want to start talking to other teams, particularly social. Honestly, I’d start learning about how they’re optimizing the content on those platforms and if there’s an angle or level of expertise you can share. 

It’s also time for a perspective shift as a professional: it’s not just about the website anymore. It’s about your brand’s content, anywhere it happens to be published. 

Measurement

I don’t have a perfect solution for measurement now or in the future. However, I anticipate measurement will become increasingly nebulous and extrapolated.

We already know that SGE and other Google surfaces (News, Discover, etc.) are poorly and incorrectly measured by default through source/medium attribution in Google Analytics, often being attributed as (direct). 

As those surfaces fracture further and SGE develops, the measurement will likely continue to become less accurate. 

For anyone who doesn't already know, there is still no way to directly track Google Discover traffic in GA4.

I just took an article that received 363k clicks in Discover, 5k in search. Look at the GA4 data.

(If anyone thinks they've figured it out, by all means, plz share!) pic.twitter.com/WzXJMkCY22

— Lily Ray