Dear all
Last year was unsettling for many online business owners, thanks to a big rise in the use of AI to create and access information, and significant changes to the way that Google is indexing and ranking websites.
So in this email, I'd like to highlight a few key things you can do to protect — and more importantly grow — your business in this brave new world we find ourselves in.
1 Make YouTube a key part of your SEO strategy
With the introduction of AI overviews into its search results, the prioritising of Reddit over expert content and demotion of niche websites in its search results, getting traffic from Google is harder than ever.
But there's another search engine —used by 2.5 to 3 billion users a month — that still behaves in a more predictable way, and converts really highly too. And that's YouTube.
Learn more about the advantages of switching your SEO focus to YouTube here.
2. Focus on increasing branded searches
For a long time, professional SEOs took the view that getting good Google rankings generally boiled down to three key things: finding out what people are interested in, creating strong content about that topic and building high-quality links to that content.
But since September 2023's 'Helpful Content Update' Google seems to have shifted the goalposts considerably: studies suggest that before delivering significant traffic to your site, Google's algorithm wants to see people searching for your company's brand name regularly too.
The question for indie publishers and site owners is how. How do you take a site that isn’t particularly well known and turn it into something that a lot of people specifically search for?
We have some suggestions on how to do just that here.
3. Grow your business with 'zero click content.'
All the major tech platforms increasingly don't want their users to go anywhere.
Google is answering more and more queries directly, through AI Overviews, knowledge panels, 'people also ask' boxes etc.
Facebook and LinkedIn’s algorithms don’t show posts containing external links as much as they show ‘native’ content (i.e., longer form posts or videos that don’t involve links).
Instagram won’t let you include a link in a post at all (hence all those encouragements to ‘click the link in bio’).
YouTube often asks you if you really want to follow that link to an external website — making you feel dubious about the link destination.
So how do you build your business in a zero-click world? We have some answers to that question here.
4. Make the most of email marketing
In an environment where you increasingly can't rely on tech platforms' algorithms to send you traffic, your mailing list — an asset that you can control completely — is your friend. If you haven't got a good email marketing game, make 2025 the year to get one:
All the best for 2025
Chris Singleton | Founder @ Style Factory | 