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SEO is far from dead – it’s simply changed beyond recognition. To stay relevant, SEOs must adapt to these shifts, expand their skillsets and embrace new technologies. 
This article outlines 13 hard-hitting truths about modern SEO, revealing the realities every SEO professional needs to know to stay ahead.
These insights are intended to challenge your current approach, pushing you to rethink strategies that may no longer serve you.
Traditional content and website-level SEO tactics like page speed, keyword optimization and link building alone will no longer succeed. SEO now has three tiers: 
You must continue to work on traditional content-level SEO, but you will fail if you don’t upskill and apply all three tiers of modern SEO. 
The who behind the content is now key. Optimizing the creator and publisher entities, including their E-E-A-T credibility and topical authority. 
Dig deeper: How the Google leak confirms the significance of author and publisher entities in SEO
While links from websites with powerful domain authority (DA) remain helpful, their direct impact on SEO performance is dwarfed by other credibility signals. 
Google assesses many other signals to judge credibility, such as: 
If you overlook these factors or rely too heavily on traditional DA link strategies, your results will likely fall short.
Stop relying on keyword counts to boost rankings. 
Instead, focus on key elements like:
Keywords can still inspire your strategy, but use them thoughtfully and shift your attention to multimedia content that aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey. 
Keep your messaging consistent, clear and always on-brand across all content types.
Written content is steadily losing ground as Google and Microsoft Bing increasingly prioritize multimedia elements like videos, images, Knowledge Panels and generative AI in their search results. 
As AI becomes better at analyzing and presenting multimedia content, traditional text-based content is taking a back seat in the SERPs.
For decades, ranking in the blue links has been central to SEO strategy, relying heavily on written content, keywords and links. 
Yet these traditional tactics have steadily dropped in priority. 
They still serve as the foundation of the SERP, as confirmed by representatives from both Bing and Google.
However, their impact on visibility and traffic has been diluted by the rise of SERP features, knowledge elements and the steady evolution of search. 
With the integration of generative AI, blue links are becoming even less relevant for achieving meaningful traffic and visibility.
With the introduction of Bing’s Deep Search and Google’s AI Overviews, blue links now carry value primarily through what I call “implicit ranking.” 
In implicit ranking, the search engine analyzes multiple results based on a query and combines them into a single, summarized outcome. 
This process happens behind the scenes, making it nearly impossible to measure or control. 
Bing’s Deep Search already demonstrates this approach in action, signaling a shift in how search results are presented.
If you haven’t embraced on-SERP SEO, now is the time to start. It’s far more than a buzzword – it’s an essential strategy that’s here to stay. 
On-SERP SEO shifts the focus from generating clicks to maintaining consistent brand visibility and narrative throughout the acquisition funnel.
Achieving this level of visibility requires mastering SEO for both on-site and off-site content.
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Websites are no longer the primary gateway to online visibility. 
Instead, brands are gaining dominance across various channels, including social media, review platforms, video and traditional PR mentions. 
While your website remains the central hub and ultimate destination for your digital marketing and SEO, it’s essential to expand your focus beyond the website itself. 
Over time, it will become less visible in search results and assistive AI platforms, requiring a broader, multi-channel approach to maintain brand visibility.
Google’s understanding of your brand identity now outweighs traditional content strategies focused on keywords and links. 
It evaluates entities – whether a corporation, person or product – and ranks results based on how relevant the content is to these entities rather than simply counting words and links. 
A clear sign of this shift is when Google recognizes your brand name and displays it in the SERP. 
If it doesn’t recognize the brand, it will only show the domain, highlighting that the website is a weaker proxy for brand understanding.
Dig deeper: Modern SEO: Packaging your brand and marketing for Google
Google and Bing have moved away from schema markup due to its inconsistent and often manipulative implementation across websites. 
Much like the meta keywords tag of the past, schema markup is frequently misused in attempts to game the algorithm. 
Neither search engine is investing in expanding its support for Sschema beyond the basic types and attributes they currently recognize. 
Instead, both focus on extracting information directly from pages through:
The future of SEO lies not in explicit semantics like schema markup but in implicit semantics. Think clear, on-page content that is consistently validated by multiple trusted sources.
Entity optimization goes far beyond simply adding schema markup to webpages or obtaining a Knowledge Panel for a person or corporation – it’s just the beginning. 
True entity optimization involves creating a highly confident understanding of the entity, which is essential for search algorithms. 
This confidence is often overlooked but is crucial for search engines to accurately grasp every attribute of the entity and its relationships with other entities, such as persons, corporations, products, services, webpages, books, topics and cohorts.
To build this understanding, you must create a detailed and accurate network of relationships and attributes for your entity. 
Maintaining this confidence means ensuring that this web of relationships remains stable as your digital footprint evolves over time. 
Additionally, you must ensure that your representation of related entities aligns with their actual attributes and relationships, reinforcing the interconnectedness across the web.
Dig deeper: How to optimize for entities
Google is increasingly capable of identifying the creators of content and the corporations that publish it. 
As a result, it evaluates and applies credibility signals related to notability, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness and transparency (N-E-E-A-T-T) across three levels: 
People now rely on both traditional search and conversational assistive interfaces. 
This means your SEO strategies must adapt to the conversational and multimodal nature of platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and SERP features such as AI Overviews and Bing generative search.
Conversational, multimodal search is the future. 
Fabrice Canel from Bing highlights the “bridges” between these platforms that move users seamlessly from one to another, depending on the task. 
For instance:
This shift is happening now, so you must optimize for these new platforms today before it’s too late.
Supply creates its own demand. 
Assistive chatbots haven’t replaced search. They’ve expanded the ways we can leverage information gathered from the web, using algorithms to solve user problems. 
As AI transforms the search and assistive engine landscape, Google’s dominance is waning. 
AI-powered on-SERP features (i.e., Google AI Overviews and Bing generative search), along with off-SERP platforms (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta, Alexa, Siri, etc.), are becoming crucial for reaching audiences. 
With billions of users across these platforms, ignoring them would be a missed opportunity.
This shift to a conversational, multimodal, and multichannel experience requires optimizing your content, corporate brand entities and key subject matter experts for all the BigTech algorithms. 
Furthermore, AI bots are integrating more deeply into everyday tools like CoPilot+ PCs, Zapier, Canva, Gmail and Excel – creating new opportunities for those with a broad, beyond-Google SEO approach.
Dig deeper: Search everywhere optimization: 7 platforms SEOs need to optimize for beyond Google
Search has expanded far beyond Google SERPs, and this shift is irreversible. While content-level SEO remains essential, it’s no longer sufficient alone. 
As AI increasingly integrates into everyday platforms and tools, Google’s dominance is diminishing. Search now spans multiple modalities and channels. 
People are engaging in search, research and assistance across text, voice, images and video using a variety of platforms.
Although the number of ways to engage potential customers has grown, Google and Bing still control the web’s indexing, keeping things relatively straightforward. 
By maintaining strong, consistent content online, you can influence how search engines interact with your brand. 
However, relying solely on Google is a mistake; Bing, which powers ChatGPT and many of Microsoft’s platforms, also plays a crucial role.
To thrive in today’s landscape, you must implement a universal strategy that optimizes your content, brand entities and subject matter experts for all the major search algorithms. 
Doing so will ensure your survival and position you for success, as these new technologies offer vast opportunities for visibility and customer acquisition across the entire funnel.
In my next article, I will present a practical 13-point roadmap for navigating the future of AI-driven search and assistive engines, providing actionable steps to help you adapt to SEO’s new reality and capitalize on the evolving digital ecosystem.
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Recently, Google added support for rich results for podcasts but that doesn’t mean Google can understand what you are saying in those audio files. Meaning, if you do a 30 minute podcast, GoogleBot is not sitting through the whole 30 minutes listening to what you are saying and then parsing out the words for indexing and rankings.
Rich results are markup, so you are marking up your podcasts so Google can richen up the search results that have podcasts embedded on them. It isn’t that GoogleBot can understand the actual audio content in the file.
Gary Illyes clarified this on Twitter in one word – saying “nope” when asked if GoogleBot understands the words in audio files.

@kirwanseo No

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) April 24, 2017

@kirwanseo No
We do see YouTube do an okay job with machine translation but it is often wrong, espesially with how fast I talk through my weekly SEO videos but I did notice that over time, the transcripts get better and better.
Of course, it would be awesome if Google was able to very accurately parse, understand, index and rank audio files. Potentially then do this jump to feature where they jump you to the part of the podcast relevant to your query. We saw them test this with videos recently.
That would be cool, no?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
The content at the Search Engine Roundtable are the sole opinion of the authors and in no way reflect views of RustyBrick ®, Inc
Copyright © 1994-2024 RustyBrick ®, Inc. Web Development All Rights Reserved.
This work by Search Engine Roundtable is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Creative Commons License and YouTube videos under YouTube’s ToS.

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This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series – feel free to nominate someone over here.
Kevin Indig is 30 years old and lives in Silicon Valley, but he was born and raised in Germany. Kevin is a name many SEOs know, he very in the trenches on the topic of SEO and even on the technical SEO front. He shares a lot of his knowledge and experience on social media and through blog content and articles.
He is also a speaker, speaking at many SEO conferences over the years. He has an SEO podcast as well. He has been doing the SEO beat for over a dozen years now and has always been eager to share what he knows with the community. He works at Atlassian running up the technical SEO team there.
Season Hughes nominated him and wrote:

Kevin took a chance on hiring me – I have zero formal SEO experience – and has spent a significant amount of his own time training me in technical SEO, involving me in projects, providing industry news and blogs, and sharing SEO conferences and groups with me. He’s patiently shown me the ropes of in-house SEO, and I am forever grateful. Outside of Atlassian, he’s had 12 years of SEO experience through his own sites, consulting, mentoring through German Accelerator, speaking, podcasts, and a bi-weekly newsletter. He also trains for weightlifting competitions and is a wealth of knowledge on health and fitness.

Kevin Indig Bio: Kevin Indig has helped companies acquire +100M users over the last 10 years. He currently runs technical SEO @ Atlassian and is a startup mentor at the German Accelerator. Companies Kevin worked with include brands like eBay, Bosch, Samsung, Dailymotion, Pinterest, Columbia, UBS and many others 🚀.
Favorite thing about the SEO community? My favorite thing about the SEO community is the sharing 🙏🏻. Without it, SEO cannot exist. I remember, when I learned SEO as a young kid in rural Germany, it was the meetups and articles from which I learned the most. That inherent willingness to collaborate is what I love about the SEO community.
One piece of advice to the SEOs out there? Share and receive. Don’t keep the secrets to yourself, put ’em out there! Usually, you get paid back twice.
Favorite things in general? People who know me know that I spend most of my time I’m not working in the gym 🏋🏻. I compete in Powerlifting and competed in Crossfit and Weightlifting before. It’s the perfect balance to sitting at the desk all day and kind of a meditation for me. I have an Instagram account solely dedicated to my fitness endeavors (which is what Instagram is for).
What you want to be known for in the SEO space? In the SEO space, I want to be known as the guy who puts out fresh, valuable and exciting content, instead of beating dead horses. I want to be known for entertaining and informative presentations, fascinating podcasts and amazing blog articles. I’m working really, really hard at living up to the people I look up to 💪🏻.
To learn more Kevin check out his personal site or connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.
This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series – feel free to nominate someone over here.
The content at the Search Engine Roundtable are the sole opinion of the authors and in no way reflect views of RustyBrick ®, Inc
Copyright © 1994-2024 RustyBrick ®, Inc. Web Development All Rights Reserved.
This work by Search Engine Roundtable is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Creative Commons License and YouTube videos under YouTube’s ToS.

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Can AI-Powered Search Engines Disrupt Google’s Monopoly?  CMSWire
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Podcast Visibility Secrets: Stand Out in Apple and Spotify Search with Anthony Nwaneri
Welcome to Podcasting Smarter, in this episode we dive deep into the world of podcast SEO with Anthony Nwaneri from Get More Listeners. Anthony’s expertise spans across various successful shows like Chan with a Plan, The Period Whisperer, and Calling History.
Join us as we explore the four key pillars of podcast SEO: discoverability, visibility, user engagement, and building relevancy. Learn practical tips on optimizing your podcast for higher rankings on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other directories. Anthony shares real-life success stories and actionable strategies to help you enhance your podcast’s visibility and keep your listeners engaged.
“It’s not too late to grow your show. It’s not too late to implement these strategies and these terms.” – Anthony Nwaneri
Anthony Nwaneri is the best-selling author of the book Podcast Made Simple, the co-founder of Get More Listeners and the Co-host of ‘Why Your Podcast Isn’t Growing’.  Anthony is an established authority in the realm of podcast SEO strategies, specializing in optimizing podcasts for enhanced visibility and engagement across leading platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify. His expertise lies in formulating impactful episode titles and implementing effective keyword strategies, which have consistently contributed to the differentiation of numerous podcasts within the competitive podcasting sphere. With a comprehensive understanding of user engagement and retention techniques, Anthony’s proficiency in utilizing transcripts for podcast SEO has proven instrumental for podcasters aiming to broaden their audience reach and impact. His practical guidance and adept utilization of SEO principles position him as a valuable asset for podcasters seeking to bolster their show’s discoverability and achieve sustainable growth.
Don’t miss out on this insightful conversation that promises to take your podcast to the next level. Tune in now and start implementing these expert tips to see significant growth in your podcast audience!
In this episode, you’ll learn how to:
Optimize Your Podcast for Search Engines and Skyrocket Your Growth!
Uncover the Secrets to Getting Your Podcast Discovered on All Platforms!
Master the Art of Crafting Irresistible Episode Titles That Hook Your Audience!
Keep Your Listeners Glued to Your Podcast with Proven Retention-Boosting Tactics!
Harness the Power of Transcripts to Supercharge Your Podcast’s SEO Ranking!
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:28 – Importance of Podcast SEO for Visibility 00:03:33 – Creating Captivating Cover Art and Episode Titles 00:09:56 – Importance of User Engagement and Retention Time 00:12:19 – Importance of Engagement for Podcast SEO 00:13:20 – High Retention Time for Podcast SEO 00:13:50 – Encouraging Completion 00:17:30 – Consistency for SEO Success 00:21:24 – Transcripts and Chapter Markers 00:24:22 – Leveraging Current Affairs for Podcast Growth 00:25:08 – Synergistic Strategy for Podcast Growth 00:25:36 – Success Story: The Power of Podcast SEO 00:26:38 – Never Too Late to Implement SEO
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