SEO

Ever since the arrival of ChatGPT, all of its competitors, and eventually Google’s AI Overviews, the SEO market shifted. As more and more clients look for AI visibility, SEO agencies adapted to fill that demand.

Today, pretty much every SEO agency also sells Generative Engine Optimization services, or GEO, and claims results.

Most traffic drops after a migration aren’t caused by Google punishing anyone. They’re caused by someone forgetting to redirect a URL, or assuming a redesign and a domain change could happen at the same time without consequences. The site looks better, but the rankings don’t come back for months.

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.  

Website owners usually do not notice indexing issues when they happen. A page is published. The team moves on. Everything looks fine from the outside. The page loads, the design works, and visitors can see it. Then someone checks Google and realizes the page is not there.

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.

Most firms don’t hire fully formed SEO experts: they build them. The difference between average and high-performing analysts usually comes down to how that training is structured.

On the surface, SEO looks mainly like tactics. But inside strong firms, it’s closer to structured thinking and learning how to interpret data, spot patterns, and connect technical issues to real business outcomes.

SEO reporting dashboards are one of those things everyone agrees are necessary, but most teams either overbuild or underuse. A tool gets set up. A few templates get connected. Some charts are added. Then it slowly turns into something that looks impressive but isn’t actually used to make decisions.

SEO tag management is one of those things almost everyone agrees is important, yet it somehow ends up at the bottom of the priority list.

A new website launch, a content campaign, and/or paid ads usually steal the spotlight. At the same time, title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags, and indexing directives quietly sit in the background.