Content Strategy

In April 2024, Vercel and MERJ tracked how Googlebot handled nextjs.org, a JavaScript-heavy site that mixes static pre-rendering, server-side rendering, and client-side rendering. Every indexable HTML page they tracked was fully rendered, including content loaded through API calls. For anyone worried that JavaScript sites can’t rank, that was good news.

U.S. shoppers spent $257.8 billion online between November 1 and December 31, 2025, according to Adobe. That’s a record, and $44.2 billion of it came in the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. When that much spending is packed into a few weeks, a seasonal page that isn’t ready on time has very little room to catch up.

A spreadsheet full of keywords and search volumes used to be the deliverable. Now, it’s often just the raw material. Ask an experienced SEO analyst what changed and they won’t say the tools got faster, though they did. They’ll say the job stopped being about collecting keywords and started being about explaining what a group of keywords actually means to the person typing them. 

Image SEO has a reputation for being pretty simple. Add some alt text, make sure the file isn’t huge, and move on. In practice, that’s where things start getting more complicated. Alt text tells Google what one picture shows. It says nothing about whether that picture is slowing the page down, sitting too far from the content it’s supposed to support, or hidden from crawlers entirely because of how it was loaded.

Mention backlinks to most business owners and they probably picture an agency sending hundreds of cold emails, paying for guest posts, or asking for specific wording in every link. It’s not a completely unfair impression. A lot of link building has been done that way, and Google has spent years trying to limit tactics such as paid links, excessive link exchanges, automated link building, and guest posts created mainly to influence rankings.  

While AI content is easy to create, reviewing it is the hard part. A first draft that once took hours can now be created with AI in minutes. The writing itself is usually not the biggest issue anymore. The problem is that reviewing the draft often takes just as much time, sometimes more.

Video SEO used to mean stuffing a title with keywords and hoping YouTube figured it out. That era is gone. Most brands now fight for attention in feeds stuffed with recycled content, bad advice, endless reaction clips, and videos people scroll past in seconds.

SEO audits sound simple on paper. Check rankings, fix errors, move on. In reality, a proper audit is closer to a full inspection of a house with wiring, plumbing, foundation, everything. Skip one part, and the whole thing can fail in quiet ways that don’t show up until traffic drops or revenue stalls.

Most teams don’t fail at SEO because they lack ideas: they fail because nothing moves. Tickets sit. Content waits on approvals. Dev work gets pushed behind “more urgent” tasks that never seem to end. Meanwhile, rankings stall and everyone wonders why.

Many SEO agencies treat SEO and paid search as marketing strategies independent of each other. Different budgets, different goals, barely talking to each other. That setup used to be common. It doesn’t hold up anymore.

SEO is the long game. You earn your spot in search results by publishing content people actually trust and find useful.