What Jono Said – Newsletter Review 2024

The SISTRIX monthly newsletter is your chance to catch up on the most important SEO-related news items of the month, curated and commented by Jono Alderson. If you subscribe, you’ll also get an in-depth opinion-piece – inspiration, education and expertise all rolled-up into one.

Here, in a single post, are the 12 pieces from 2024. Join us in 2025.

Don’t Dismiss CWV

Do your Core Web Vitals scores really matter? And if so, how much? The SEO scene seems to be divided on the matter; some insist that they’re extremely important, and some dismiss them as irrelevant. To further confuse matters, Google representatives insist that they’re only used as a “tie-breaker” to decide between which of two equally good results should rank highest. So, should you care if you don’t score very well – especially if everyone else doesn’t, either?

Dismissing CWV performance because it’s ‘only a tie-breaker’ seems odd to me. In competitive niches, I imagine that many factors might be tie-breakers (individually, or collectively). The difference between winners and losers is often in the margins; a result might outrank another because it’s only slightly better on one or more otherwise not-enormous factors. Speed might be one of those, and as such, is worth paying attention to – even if it’s not the most important signal in isolation. You outrank your competitors by beating them on tie-breakers. That’s what competitive SERPs are/do, at a fundamental level.

SEO aside, there’s boundless research (like this great piece from ebay) to show that increasing the speed of your site can have a direct impact on conversion rates and revenue. Visitors who’re less frustrated, less distracted, and more engaged are more likely to complete tasks, and feel positive about their experiences. That could certainly be indirectly good for SEO, as those users exhibit positive behaviour signals, and are more likely to recommend, endorse, share, and so on. Unless you’re already blazing fast, making your site faster is almost certainly going to be a good investment.

And conversion aside, I think that it’s worthwhile focusing on improving your CVW scores for another, more insidious reason – it forces you to air your dirty laundry, and to address all of the technical, operational and personnel problems that are holding back your SEO.

Interrogating why your website is slow can highlight that your web developers don’t know what they don’t know (and perhaps nor as much as they think they do), but also gives them an educational roadmap. As they level-up, that speeds up development processes, reduces bugs, and improves the overall quality of the site.

Identifying fundamental flaws and limitations in your technology stacks can shine a spotlight on how your CTO might be prioritising their favourite technology stack over providing good user experiences, and begins to change the balance of power between them and marketing teams.

Highlighting the impact of third-party tracking and services identifies accessibility, legal and compliance risks that go otherwise unnoticed, and present opportunities to improve how data is collected, managed and analysed.

The list goes on and on – to make a site faster, you have to address all of the underlying organisational reasons that it was slow in the first place. That can have a direct impact on SEO – as you unlock previously wasted resources and make technical improvements – but it can also have a transformative impact on the wider business, as you address core weaknesses and deficiencies that would otherwise have held you back.

Even if it is only a ‘tie-breaker’, speeding up a slow website remains one of the best things that you can do for SEO.

(From Jan 2024. Subscribe here.)

Lateral Thinking on Ranking Factors

The SEO industry still loves to debate what is, or isn’t, a ranking factor for Google. It’s an appealing idea – if you can identify which key levers to pull, then you can focus your resources and outperform your competitors.

Sadly, it’s an outdated way of thinking about how Google works. Their systems are increasingly ‘black boxes’, which aim to emulate and evaluate user preference, rather than explicitly measuring individual metrics or pixels. Perhaps more problematically, discussing “ranking factors” tends to make us think about mechanics, instead of users.

That’s why I was delighted to see that Danny Sullivan recently posted that author bylines don’t help you rank better, but then went on to say, “[but] publications [with bylines] may exhibit the type of other characteristics our ranking systems find align with useful content”. To me, this does a great job of explaining how we should think about “ranking factors”; not in terms of whether specific features/activities move the needle, but in terms of whether those things are the kinds of things that a site that should rank well would do or have.

Author bylines don’t make you rank better. But having content which is demonstrably written by reputable authors is the kind of thing that a good, trustworthy, reputable site – the kind that users would want to see, and which Google would want to reward – would do.

This is a different way of thinking about SEO, which allows you to consider types of (things which aren’t) “ranking factors” that your competitors are probably ignoring. For example…

If the font on your website is hard to read, and frustrates people who use your site, is typography a ranking factor?

If your CEO is involved in a scandal that generates large amounts of media coverage, but reduces your audience’s trust, is virtue (or vice) a ranking factor?

If your customer support team goes above-and-beyond to help a struggling customer, who goes on to recommend and tweet about your company, is empathy (or your training budget) a ranking factor?

If your office policy allows pets, and that reduces the bounce rate on your ‘About’ page (and generates a bunch of social media shares), are puppies a ranking factor?

For all of these, does it matter whether they directly affect rankings, or whether they just correlate with the kinds of outcomes that Google is looking to reward? I’d argue that it doesn’t matter. Doing anything that improves how users experience your website makes your website more like the kind of website that Google would want to surface, because it’s the kind of website that users would want to visit. Don’t overthink it.

(From Feb 2024. Subscribe here.)

What is a search engine, anyway?

It’s easy to forget that there’s a landscape beyond Google, where SEO might still be relevant and worthwhile. Google’s 90% market share in most countries means that other search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo and Baidu barely get considered, and rarely get their own strategies and resources.

But as the landscape continues to shift and evolve, and as user behaviour shifts away from conventional search, it’s worth asking if we’re focusing in the right places.

An increasingly large share of users don’t go to a search engine when they want to pick a restaurant, learn how to change a tyre, buy artisanal homeware, get recommendations on laptops, or have questions about how mortgage repayments work. Instead, they turn to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other (often video-centric) platforms to find authentic, trustworthy, human recommendations and expertise – something Google’s search format has struggled to provide, even whilst they double down on EEAT and on promoting ‘discussion forum’ content.

And now those platforms are starting to look and behave increasingly like search engines – and the market is reacting. Strategies are changing, advertising budgets are shifting, and consumers are becoming customers in research and recommendation journeys that never involve a conventional search engine.

So understandably, there’s a lot of debate as to whether these are ‘search engines’. By extension, we might ask, is performing influencer marketing on TikTok, or improving the quality of your product photography on Etsy, a form of SEO?

Conversely, we’ve seen massive growth in the visibility of user-generated content from TikTok, Etsy, Amazon, LinkedIn, and others in Google’s search results. So we might well ask, is Google a search engine, if it’s just an index of TikTok videos and Reddit threads?

I don’t think it matters what we call these kinds of things. What’s important is that users search, and the results they see influences what happens next. That gives brands and influencers an opportunity to build awareness and preference, and maybe even to drive conversions. The tools, flows and systems may be different, but the same core principles of SEO apply. There’s an addressable audience with questions, and it’s up to us to help our content or clients to be visible and influential.

These changes might make “doing SEO” a lot more complicated in the coming years. We’ll certainly need to think about how we use SEO methodologies and content to influence, rather than to convert. Our opportunities in these new landscapes will tend to be ‘higher up the funnel’ than we’re used to, and we’ll need to adapt accordingly.

So how do we describe this new frontier, and the challenges of optimising across multiple platforms and formats? I think all of this gets a lot easier if we just drop the word ‘engine’, and just focus on ‘search optimization’. People search, and it’s our job (and unique ability) to shape the experiences they have, wherever that may be.

(From March 2024. Subscribe here.)

“Good content” isn’t enough

Once upon a time, SEOs wrote pages, articles, and blog posts based on search demand and opportunity. Search engines needed that content in order to understand our products, businesses, and services – and ‘rewarded’ those sites with traffic. Businesses and agencies grew, and thrived, around this dynamic.

Now, search engines increasingly don’t want, or need, our content any more. They ‘understand’ enough concepts, verticals, and user problems to solve them without relying on websites as an intermediary. So what happens to an industry that’s ‘optimised’ for content production?

The days of creating content “for SEO” are (almost) over. The system has evolved, and simply creating ‘good’ (or ‘unique’) content isn’t’ enough. Today, your content must add value to the corpus. It must bring new insight or value to the field, and genuinely solve problems for a broad audience – offering clear, tangible recommendations and solutions.

So if your pages look more-or-less the same as everyone else’s, you’re about to face an existential crisis. It’s time to start asking, “why would search engines crawl, index, or rank our content”? They have little incentive to expend resources consuming yet-another-page about the same topic, using the same keywords, barely-answering the same kinds of questions. Fighting an infinite wave of spam and derivative content, their priorities have shifted from scale to value.

To compete, businesses will need to rethink what and who their content is for, and what types of problems it aims to solve; beyond just ‘rank for keywords’. For content to drive business goals, it must now serve a higher purpose. It must establish trust, build authority, and genuinely assist users in ways that competitors (and Goolge) aren’t, or can’t.

As we navigate this shift, it’s crucial to understand that the future of content isn’t about abandoning SEO but evolving it. We must integrate genuine value, utility, and problem-solving into our content strategies. We must stop trying to find ways to make our500-word  articles seem helpful, and instead ensure that we’re producing content that is inherently helpful by design.

The challenge for SEOs and content creators is clear: innovate, add real value, and truly help your audience. This will be the benchmark for success – for survival – in a crowded digital landscape where the old rules no longer apply.

(From April 2024. Subscribe here.)

It’s all just a game, right?

We often treat SEO like a game. We tend to think of SEO like a grand strategy competition; like Risk, but for SERP positions. Google is our sandbox, where traffic and revenue are the territories we conquer, using our wits and resources as our armies, strategizing our next move to secure digital dominance.

But we often forget that this game affects the lived experiences of real humans; that innocent people, with real lives, are affected for better or worse by our strategies. Because even when we follow the rules (and especially when we test those boundaries and step outside of the guidelines), there’s a price to be paid for our play.

The heart of what we do is sway financial outcomes, through amplifying or suppressing information; manipulating how people discover brands, interact with content, and pay for products or services.

And more than just wallets, we shape perceptions. We affect what people see, think, and believe – both in the moment, and in the longer-term. Our strategies can influence emotions and opinions in ways we don’t often consider.

By altering the visibility and accessibility of information, we’re not just influencing present decisions but potentially alter the future course of individual lives – and entire societies – for better or worse.

And it doesn’t stop with individuals. Our actions ripple forward through the ages, influencing the corpus of human knowledge and experience in ways that will echo into future generations, steering the very course of what will come to be known and believed.

In our quest for success, we catapult businesses and our clients to new heights of prosperity, but not without consequence. The darker side of our victories often means the crushing of smaller competitors, leaving them struggling to survive in our wake. We dismiss their livelihoods, employees, and mortgages as casualties of war.The truth about SEO is that we affect suburban streets as much as we affect the SERPs, as we move our pawns around in this relentless quest for SEO supremacy.

This game we play has profound consequences, echoing through the livelihoods of countless unseen players on the board that we so cavalierly manipulate.

Now, more than ever, we need to consider our role as curators of the web; to balance the short-term demands of our businesses and clients with the integrity and utility of the web-to-come. We need to play nicely, and ensure that our work has a net positive impact on the world around and ahead of us.

(From May 2024. Subscribe here.)

Rethinking SEO as a channel

The more mature that SEO becomes, the less it looks and behaves like an acquisition channel – and continuing to treat it like one can be a route to failure.

Unlike conventional marketing channels, SEO rarely has a directly measurable connection between spend and outcome. There are no ROI or attribution models that’ll estimate the revenue you’ll generate by making your content “more helpful”, or by improving your page speed. There are no ‘campaigns’ that you can plan, run and evaluate in isolation. There are no discrete ‘tactics’ that you can apply, other than to provide a ‘better result’ than everybody else.

It’s also getting harder to show iterative progress, as it gets harder to make incremental (or any) headway in the SERPs against giants like Amazon, Reddit, and Google’s own properties. You can’t “test” SEO with a small budget, to prove opportunity, because anything less than being “the best” delivers no impact.

Even the most sophisticated attribution modelling struggles to join the dots between organic traffic and business outcomes, due to the long, complex journeys, which unfold across multiple devices, touch-points and time periods as users conduct research and make decisions.

All of this means that getting buy-in and budget to run SEO like an acquisition channel – when that money might be more accountability spent in other channels – is increasingly difficult.

We can’t solve that attribution problem, no matter how hard we dream. We no longer have a simple ecosystem, keyword-level data, or an ecosystem compromised simply of ten blue links. We no longer understand or control the outcomes of our activity. If we continue to try to manage and budget for SEO as if it behaves like (but significantly less reliably than) other marketing channels, we’ll continue to struggle to get access to grown-up budgets or conversations.

One way that we might solve this mismatch in expectations is by reframing the responsibilities of the ‘channel’ from conversion and revenue, to influence and preference. Sophisticated SEO strategies focus not on clicks or conversions from landing pages and articles, but on improving the propensity of an audience to recognize and choose our brands when they’re in the “messy middle” of expanding and contracting consideration sets.

When people search, we can aim to positively influence their perception of our brand, so that they’re more inclined to choose us when they become problem-aware, and seek out solutions. When we can influence what users see, read, and believe, there are more nuanced and effective ways to leverage that than shouting “buy now!” at them. We might, instead, simply ask, “how can we help?”.

Undoubtedly, SEO is getting harder. But more often than not, that’s because our organisations continue to structure, budget, and manage it in a way that simply doesn’t make sense in our evolving environment.

If we want to succeed with SEO, we must stop treating it like PPC, and start using it to win the hearts and minds of our audiences – before they’re at the point of purchase. That’s a hard sell, for sure, but the alternative is to see diminishing returns from the “channel” as competitors win hearts and minds against search results that you’re not even present in. Are you brave enough to outgrow needing to forecast and model the explicit commercial outcome of every effort and opportunity?

(From June 2024. Subscribe here.)

Competitor research reimagined

In SEO, competitor research typically focuses on evaluating websites, rankings, keywords, content, and links. That makes sense; those are the fields in which we play, and the things that we’re most easily able to understand and influence.

But there’s a problem with this kind of research – it only evaluates lagging factors. It tells us about what has been done and the outcomes, but provides little insight into our competitors’ mindsights, what their trajectory looks like, or what might change in the future.

That’s a worrying gap, because when we’re devising a competitive strategy, we need to be aiming to beat our competitors in the future, not just now. We also need to assume that they’re looking at us – and we need to outmanoeuvre them through time.

The good news is that, with some clever research, we can find clues about some of the inputs into their strategies – as well as their constraints, priorities, and budgets. This can sometimes tell us a lot more than looking solely at SEO metrics.

For example, you can learn a lot by investigating organisational structures. Exploring LinkedIn might provide clues as to where SEO sits in the company, how well-resourced it is, and how senior or experienced the team are. That’ll also hint at budgets and capabilities; as well as SEO’s relationship with other departments. Knowing the job titles and background of the people you’re up against helps you know where to focus your efforts.

Depending on the country and the type of company, you might also be able to find quarterly earnings reports, info on sites like Crunchbase, annual filings or tax returns, and so on. You can use those to explore their resources, and extrapolate their ambitions. A competitor with VC funding and high expectations on a return will behave differently to a steady family-owned business.

You might also explore the kinds of companies and agencies that your competitors partner with. Agencies and service firms are quick to shout about client wins, so their social media and press release histories paint a valuable picture of who’s working with who, but also, how long those relationships last, and the kinds of work being done. If you’re competing with a business that has a high turnover of agencies who’re working on purely tactical initiatives, that might nudge your own strategies towards longer-term plans that they can’t sustain or compete against.

Once you start thinking like this, the questions start flowing. Do their team attend, or speak at, conferences? Do they have an overbearing parent company? Do people like them on social media? What’s their return policy? Are they planning an international expansion? Do their teams work remotely, or from a central office? What’s the average retention rate of new starters? What’s the CEO’s background and experience?

If we want to build effective SEO strategies, these are the kinds of questions we should be asking. Of course, we should also continue to evaluate their websites, rankings, keywords, content, and links. But we should contextualise what we find there with a wealth of information about why they’re doing what they’re doing, and what that tells us about what we should be doing differently.

(From July 2024. Subscribe here.)

Less is more

As businesses moved online, we broke free from the physical limits of traditional retail. Our digital stores could offer thousands, even millions of products, and our blogs could host endless articles—driving massive traffic and engagement. This was, in many ways, the golden age of scale in SEO—building vast content silos and optimising for every possible keyword.

But the game has changed. Google now prioritises quality, relevance, and user experience over sheer volume. As their systems grow smarter, they have less incentive to discover, crawl, index, or rank pages simply because they exist.

This shift poses a critical question: how can a business with a million products or thousands of articles ensure each piece of content is top-tier? Meeting Google’s EEAT standards, conducting original research, and creating differentiated content at scale is a significant challenge. And it’s not just about new content; we must also maintain and improve our existing libraries to meet evolving standards.

Resourcing such an investment—employing in-house experts across all product and service categories—is no small task. The pressure to cut corners is real. Outsourcing or using LLMs may seem like viable shortcuts, but this raises crucial questions about our value propositions and differentiation. In a race to the bottom based on inventory size and price, we risk becoming indistinguishable from fast-fashion giants like Shein—a transformation that most businesses cannot sustain.

So, what if we took a different approach? What if we focused on doing less, but doing it better? Imagine offering a curated selection of 100 products instead of 100,000, each with a product page that delivers an exceptional, engaging experience. Rather than generic content, these pages could be rich, interactive, and tailored to meet every customer need, making the decision to purchase almost inevitable. A depth-first strategy would allow your team to specialise, delivering quality over quantity—exactly what both users and search engines are increasingly looking for.

In this new era of SEO, we must recognise that while digital space is infinite, Google’s and consumers’ attention spans are not. We need to shift from endless expansion to focused refinement. What if every new URL required you to delete an old one? Limiting yourself to fewer pages would force you to invest more in improving and maintaining them, ensuring they provide real value.

The future of successful websites won’t be defined by size but by precision. The websites that thrive will be those that carefully choose their battles, excelling in a few key areas rather than attempting to dominate an infinite digital landscape. Less can indeed be more, and focusing on creating high-quality, user-focused content is the way forward in an SEO world that increasingly values substance over scale.

For existing businesses, suggesting they reduce their inventory of pages, products, and articles by 90% might seem absurd. But trying to maintain, evolve, and compete with an unwieldy, large site might lock you out of the market completely.

(From August 2024. Subscribe here.)

When empires fall

As the SEO ecosystem continues to evolve, attracting, engaging, and converting traffic is becoming increasingly challenging. With AI-powered assistants, zero-click searches, and Google’s volatile SERPs, the fundamentals of SEO are shifting, and it’s only going to get tougher.

In the face of these challenges, businesses that have heavily relied on traditional SEO strategies may find themselves struggling to keep up. As they fail to adapt to new requirements, their revenue streams may dry up, leading to bankruptcy or administration. This creates a vacuum in the market—one filled with significant opportunities for those ready to act.

Sometimes, the warning signs of a competitor’s financial distress can be spotted early—through financial news, social media sentiment, negative reviews, or a declining online presence. Smart marketers can anticipate these failures and prepare to capitalise on them.

Recovering assets like domains, backlinks, and customer lists can provide an immediate boost, but there are more sophisticated strategies for those who plan ahead. Instead of merely scraping content or reaching out to linking sites, think bigger.

Businesses don’t operate in isolation—they are part of a complex network of suppliers, vendors, and customers. When a competitor’s network is disrupted, there’s a unique chance to step in and strengthen these connections. Your SEO strategy can—and should—include forming strategic partnerships with former partners, suppliers, or affiliates of the competitor. Beyond just gaining links or co-marketing opportunities, these alliances can significantly impact pricing, logistics, and overall business performance, indirectly benefiting your SEO efforts.

Talent acquisition is another powerful tactic. Your competitors likely hired skilled individuals who understood both the industry and your business’s strengths and weaknesses. As these professionals enter the job market, they represent a valuable resource. Bringing them on board can provide fresh insights and help refine your strategies.

Acting quickly to capture these strategic assets also allows you to craft a compelling narrative. Positioning your business as a saviour—rescuing customers, employees, and even local communities—can build trust and loyalty among new audiences. This is a powerful PR opportunity that extends beyond mere optics.

Moreover, the failure of competitors can serve as a valuable learning experience. By analysing what went wrong for them—using sentiment analysis, customer profiling, and thorough post-mortems—you can gain insights into what pitfalls to avoid. This proactive approach to learning ensures that you don’t just adapt to changes but anticipate and capitalise on them.

In the rapidly evolving world of SEO, success isn’t just about keeping pace. It’s about staying ahead, anticipating shifts, and being ready to seize every opportunity. Stay vigilant, stay strategic, and be prepared to turn every twist and turn into a chance for growth.

(From September 2024. Subscribe here.)

The death of the category page?

From October 2024: Category pages have long been a focal point for SEOs and businesses alike, serving as the stable cornerstone of many websites. Strategically, they’ve been favoured for a few key reasons: they’re more dependable than individual product or service pages (which tend to come and go), they offer a better user experience for broad or comparative search terms, and they’re easier to optimise. Why bother creating unique, high-quality content for dozens or even hundreds of individual product pages when you can simply tinker with one category page?

This approach has led to a familiar, if problematic, scenario: category pages stuffed with a block of spammy, keyword-driven content. Whether it’s at the top or bottom of the page, this “content” rarely adds value for users and often disrupts the conversion funnel. It’s a stopgap solution, not a sustainable one.

Now, with the rise of AI content generation, businesses are doubling down on this strategy—but at scale. Instead of focusing on a handful of well-optimised category pages, they’re producing thousands of variations, targeting every conceivable segment, modifier, and long-tail keyword. The result? A bloated, content-heavy website that’s filled with more fluff than substance.

But here’s the problem: this strategy won’t work for much longer. As Google, Apple, and others advance their AI-driven, generative search results, they’ll start delivering more comprehensive, unbiased summaries of content across multiple sites. Why would Google rank or return your individual category page—no matter how perfectly tailored to a specific query—when it can generate a better, more holistic result using data from across the web?

The hard truth is, category pages are becoming obsolete. Instead of competing with AI-generated summaries and rankings, businesses should focus on providing unique, in-depth value at the product or service level—something AI struggles to do in a personalised, context-driven way. The future of SEO isn’t about scaling low-value content. It’s about refining high-value experiences that AI can’t replicate.

(From October 2024. Subscribe here.)

Fulfilling vs. creating demand

In SEO, just like in any other area of marketing, we’re focused on finding opportunities for growth. Typically, this means analysing search data, evaluating market gaps, assessing competitors, and identifying keywords or topics where our efforts can lead to higher rankings and increased traffic. Our goal is to capture as much search demand as possible. But what if we thought bigger? What if we didn’t just aim to fulfil existing demand, but actively worked to create it?

Most SEO strategies are built around capturing what’s already there. We’re great at meeting the needs of those already searching—but we rarely ask how to spark fresh interest that drives more people to search in the first place. This means we’re often limited by the number of searches already happening, and our growth can be constrained by the limits of monthly search volumes – especially in mature or competitive markets.

What if, instead of expanding into ever-more saturated keyword spaces, you could get more people to search for the terms you’re already ranking highly for? That’s hard to do within the confines of traditional SEO, but it’s exactly what advertisers and marketers do with other channels every day. Harnessing the power of paid ads, local media, billboards, TV, radio, or social media, can help you dial up your SEO success to new heights.

For example, a cleverly crafted local campaign not only gets people searching for your brand and services, the behaviour of that traffic sends positive signals to Google that you deserve to keep those top rankings that you’ve fought so hard for. Maintaining those positions and CTRs is going to have a much better ROI than fighting over other, more competitive, keywords.

Another way to create demand might be by building excitement around key topics in your industry. If you become the go-to source for unique insights or timely takes on emerging trends, you’re no longer just fulfilling search demand; you’re shaping it. Imagine publishing a piece that leads the industry conversation or creates buzz around a trend—people will search to read your perspective first, and over time, you become the brand associated with innovative ideas and solutions.

This approach isn’t just about increasing clicks; it’s a way of building search demand that directly benefits your brand in the long term. In an age where “zero-click searches” are common, and users often find answers without even clicking through, brand recognition and recall matter more than ever. Users may not always click, but by creating demand that brings them to our name, you’re making our brand memorable. This shift is critical to long-term success, especially as search evolves and brand preference becomes a powerful tool for capturing attention.

In SEO, it’s easy to think our job stops at capturing existing interest, but sometimes the biggest growth comes from the demand we create ourselves.

(From Novembmer 2024. Subscribe here.)

On the importance of continual evolution

Near my home, there used to be a small greengrocer—a traditional shop selling fresh fruit and vegetables. It served elderly locals who valued its convenience over the nearby supermarket. But as the area prospered and demographics shifted, the shop adapted. It reinvented itself as an artisanal produce store, working with local farmers and offering high-quality fruits and vegetables. For a while, it thrived. But eventually, supermarkets caught up with cheaper alternatives, and the novelty faded.

Rather than accept failure, the business transformed again, becoming an independent café and restaurant. Using the same network of trusted suppliers, they built a menu around fresh, local ingredients. They rebranded as The Old Greengrocers, retaining their heritage while signalling a bold new direction. The name evoked familiarity and trust while emphasizing that they’d moved forward. Ironically, they’ve even started selling fresh produce again in response to customer demand—a return to their roots, but one made possible by their evolution into a trusted, multifaceted brand.

The most remarkable part of their journey is this: they didn’t treat any part of their business as untouchable. The core of what they did—and even what they sold—was completely transformed. They stayed true to their expertise, their relationships, and their brand identity, but everything else was open to reinvention. This freedom to rethink every aspect of their operation allowed them to adapt as the world around them changed. In doing so, they didn’t just survive—they thrived.

The same holds true for SEO and digital marketing. Our industry is shifting rapidly, with AI reshaping how people search and engage, zero-click searches reducing traffic opportunities, and consumer behaviors evolving faster than ever. Pretending otherwise is a fast track to irrelevance. Just like the greengrocer, success means adapting to these changes rather than resisting them. No strategy, no service, no product is untouchable. The fundamentals of what we offer today may not fit tomorrow’s needs, and that’s okay—as long as we’re willing to change.

At the same time, some constants remain. Just as The Old Greengrocers anchored their evolution in quality and trust, we must focus on understanding user intent, solving problems, and delivering value. These principles don’t go out of style—they provide the foundation on which we can evolve. By embracing new technologies, experimenting with fresh tactics, and staying tuned to the changing landscape, we can not only survive disruption but turn it into an opportunity.

The marketers and businesses that thrive will be those who accept that evolution isn’t optional and who recognize that everything—even the core of their offering—is open to reinvention. The lesson is clear: adapt, evolve, and use what you’re known for to succeed in what comes next.

(From December 2024)

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