Webinar: 2025 SEO Predictions

Get ready for a SEO masterclass that’s absolutely essential for your 2025 strategy. With AI tools like Search GPT completely transforming the search landscape, your traditional content approach might soon be rendered obsolete. Fancy knowing where to direct your resources for the greatest impact?

This Duda webinar delivers exactly that. You’ll gain crucial insights to keep you steps ahead of your competitors whilst building a truly forward-thinking SEO strategy that works not just for 2025, but well beyond.

Led by Peter Mead alongside industry experts Amanda King, Jes Scholz, Dan Petrovic, James Norquay, Gaston Riera and Brodie Clark, this is your opportunity to secure your digital future.

Full Transcript from the 2025 SEO Predictions Webinar

Peter Mead:
It’s Peter Mead, and welcome to this Duda webinar. Today we’re talking about 2025 SEO predictions with Australia’s best. Really excited about this. We’ve got a panel of some of the best of Australia’s SEOs here, and we’re just trying to figure out what is going on in SEO. So, I’ll just—because we have so many—it’s going to be a power panel. We’re going to go through things pretty quickly. So, I’d love to introduce some of our special guests today, starting with Amanda King from Flock Consulting. How are you, Amanda?

Amanda King:
Yeah, I’m very good, thank you. Very well this afternoon.

Peter Mead:
Thanks for joining. Thank you. We have Jes Scholz, growth marketing consultant. Welcome, Jes. Fantastic to have you.

Jes Scholz:
Thanks for having me on, Peter.

Peter Mead:
And Dan Petrovic from Dejan Marketing. How are you, Dan?

Dan Petrovic:
Couldn’t be better. Living the dream, Peter.

Peter Mead:
Ah, terrific. James Norquay, founder of Prosperity Media and the Sydney SEO Conference. James, thanks so much for joining.

James Norquay:
Thank you, Peter. Good to be here.

Peter Mead:
We also have Gaston Riera. Gaston, welcome. Thanks so much for joining.

Gaston Riera:
Hello, hello, everyone. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Peter Mead:
And last but certainly nowhere near the least, Brodie Clark from Brodie Clark Consulting. How are you today, Brodie? Thanks for joining.

Brodie Clark:
Doing well, Peter. Thanks for having me.

Peter Mead:
Awesome. So, I am so excited to have all of us on here because I want to get it from, you know, just your opinions. You’re all on the cutting edge of what’s going on in SEO. So many things have changed. It’s no longer just Google’s game. Used to be sort of SEO was just Google. Now it’s much broader. Top of the funnel seems to be going away. All kinds of other platforms. It now seems to be sort of SEO everywhere—optimisation. So, let’s start at the start, and I’ll start with you, Amanda. What is your opinion? What are we looking at in 2025? What should we be focusing on? What should we do for SEO?

Amanda King:
Well, look, I am rather selfishly hoping that 2025 is the year where we truly hit a Panda 2.0 and reach a tipping point of the AI-generated content. So, I’m hoping that folks, regardless of what Google says or doesn’t say, start getting back to the basics and writing more valuable content for their customers and for their business. But whether or not that will come to pass is a question mark here, right? But it’s my genuine hope.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, absolutely. What’s your thoughts, Jes? I mean, I’ve seen your talks, and you have sort of wowed me with your really kind of wake-up approach to SEO, to sort of shock us all into getting out of the past. Is that what we’ve got to do now? Just forget about the past? Where is it all going?

Jes Scholz:
I would love if we could forget about saying “ranking in search engines,” because even when we’re talking about it’s not just Google anymore, people are like, “Yeah, it’s Google, Bing.” Like, no, that’s not enough. It’s not just search engines. It’s not about ranking in search engines. It’s about visibility across indexing platforms, and it doesn’t really matter what that indexing platform is as long as it’s controlling a distribution point that your target market’s on. So, we need to think a little bit less like “I’m a heavy technical SEO” and a little bit more about “Where are my customers? What platforms do they want to use?” They’re all powered somehow by algorithms or LLMs. How do I ensure my brand’s getting the right type of visibility there?

Peter Mead:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s omnipresence. It’s a whole different, across-the-scale approach. Dan, what is going on? Are we—I mean, I know you have been so heavily into the AI with the LLMs and so much work you’ve been doing there. Is that influencing the way you see SEO going to go in 2025?

Dan Petrovic:
Well, let me just start with a quick major correction. AI means nothing to me. It’s too broad an umbrella term that doesn’t really describe anything in particular, and LLMs are largely uninteresting to me. So, what do I actually do? My prediction is that people will start acting like active participants in the whole search and brand and product discovery game, and act less—so we’re no longer observers, passive observers, feeling out what Google’s—we can build and we can make things. So, we’re taking a role of active participants in ’25 and ’26. We’re going to start doing more, building more. To answer the question, what do I do if it’s not AI and LLMs? Machine learning, natural language processing, building classifiers, helping traditional SEO tasks get automated, doing things that I couldn’t do before. That’s what I’ve been busy with, and I think a lot more people will shift towards that sort of mentality.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, right. That’s really interesting. James, do you think that, you know, the way things are going, especially people’s behaviors are changing, they may be not searching on Google the way they used to? Is this having much influence, or what’s your approach this year, James? What should we be thinking about?

James Norquay:
Yeah, I mean, like, Google’s still very big in Australia, in the Australian market, in the US market. Bing has a lot more dominance. I’ve got personal websites that do really well in Bing in the US. So, yeah, I mean, we see a lot more traffic in the US market versus Australian market. But, yeah, I mean, back to the prediction for this year, I think people need to go back to basics. I get calls from people all the time that are doing idiotic things with SEO. I saw someone that put 800 links into a mega menu the other week—so bad from a UX point of view, so bad from SEO—and they’re spending very decent money on SEO and a digital agency. So, you’ve got to go back to basics. If you’re doing something that’s wrong for the user, don’t do it. It’s going to affect your SEO. Like, a lot of sites—this company wanted to put money into digital PR, but I said, digital PR isn’t going to fix your problems; you’ve got to fix the basics. I think a lot of businesses have to get back to basics with SEO, get your foundational elements right before you want to scale things up. If you want to invest in something serious like digital PR, you can’t do it with a lot of problems across your site from basic SEO stuff, not having the right foundations. That’s kind of my prediction: just getting foundations right, going hard on things like digital PR. I think we’re seeing really good results across a lot of competitive verticals for that. But, yeah, you really want to invest in Google, you want to be across other platforms, you want to be thinking about Bing. A lot of people don’t even have Bing Webmaster Tools installed. Get on to that, start tracking how Bing Webmaster Tools is going. We have clients that invest in how they’re ranking across— I know Jes said don’t say ranking—but ranking across, um, Coles, Woolworths, you know, they’ve got different algorithms on their search engines within there. We’ve got clients that invest right now into things like that. Their algorithms don’t change, you know, they kind of stay very stable. It’s not like Google, where there’s constant changes. It’s pretty rudimentary, some of that stuff. So, yeah, we’re doing all sorts of things.

Peter Mead:
Very interesting. Gaston, I know you’re heavily into the technical side of SEO, and some of what James is saying there—I mean, at an enterprise level, you know, dealing with millions of URLs, and if you make a mistake technically, it can really just drop you straight out of the results. Is technical SEO going to be still so important, or do we just believe Google where Google says, “Don’t worry about technical SEO, we’ll take care of everything for you”? Where’s it all going?

Gaston Riera:
Oh, that’s a really good question. I think we should always take whatever Google is saying with a big pinch of salt, because they are just saying whatever is best for their company, and we should always be looking after either our clients or our companies and do what’s best for them and for our users. We always have to try to get users. If we don’t have users in our platforms, we just don’t make money. I would like to build on top of James’s point about going back to basics. For me, technical SEO is a lot about getting the basics right. If you have the basics right—either it’s a one-page website or a billion-pages website—you have to keep those basics right so Google can understand how hectic your website is and all the content and all the signals.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, the basics still matter. But we’ve seen so many changes in the way that the SERPs—and I know, Brodie, you’ve been so well known for the different SERPs and the different kinds of rich results and all this. I mean, of course, AI overviews being one of those. Where’s it going? Are we just going to end up with, like, is Google by the end of the year just going to be a Gemini prompt, and we’re just going to be all just using AI as the search engine? Or is it more nuanced than that? What’s your opinion, Brodie, of where we’re going in 2025?

Brodie Clark:
Yeah, I think the rich result segment in Google search is certainly one that has evolved a lot over the past year. In the past, there was a real focus on using schema to influence rich results, and as we’re seeing, every few months at the moment, Google’s taking away all these different tools that we used to be able to influence different features and how our results appear in search. I do a fair bit of work in the e-commerce space these days, and that historically has been an area where you can get a lot of rich results, and there still is a lot of those opportunities. But the influence of Merchant Center in particular has really changed how everything operates in this sense, with a lot less reliance on schema. It still is a big part about how you can influence your rankings, influence the rich result treatment that appears in search, but I do think a big change that we’re slowly and also quickly seeing in the space is product feeds for e-commerce sites just having so much influence over what we’re seeing in search. It can be a very tricky area to do well in because of how difficult a lot of the implementations are, but it also opens up a big area of learning for SEOs into, I guess, an area which has historically been more dedicated to a paid search kind of team. But now, I think SEOs should take a lot more responsibility for the feeds.

Peter Mead:
Okay, so it’s still highly important to get all the SEO aspects of that correct. I always think SEO is kind of lining things up, joining the dots, and piecing everything together at a sort of philosophical level. But I’m interested—I’m going to change up this conversation now a bit. Maybe let’s talk a little bit, just go on the other side of the coin here: what is not working anymore? What’s not going to work? We’ve seen so many amazing things from Google, like the HCU and site reputation abuse, and not even just Google, but most recently, the conversation going around about HubSpot perhaps losing the top-of-the-funnel traffic. The conversation I’m hearing is that top of the funnel is kind of going away. If you’re spending time trying to influence the top of the funnel, you’re wasting your time—unless you happen to be one of these companies or websites that does engage in reputation abuse and gets away with it. That seems to be a thing as well. So Amanda, what do you think? What should we no longer be bothering with? What should we just completely forget about in 2025?

Amanda King:
I’m going to spin your question on its head a little bit. In terms of what’s not working, I think not endorsing and embracing and building your brand is no longer working. I think that’s becoming a lot more important. To speak a bit more directly about what you’re talking about with top-of-funnel content: the Gemini and all of the models still have to mine for their data somewhere, right? If you have the brand recognition and the entity recognition, you’re more likely—and you’re in that kind of top 10 results and in those kinds of RAG opportunities—you’re a lot more likely to be fed into the integrated AI results than you would otherwise. So I think there needs to be a renewed focus on brand for a lot of SEO professionals and a lot of marketers, full stop. This is entirely conjecture, but I have heard it said that because Google has gotten to a point where they can actually understand your content standalone—whether or not your content is authoritative—links are becoming a lot less important in general. But that’s entirely hearsay; that’s me vaguely remembering something that someone potentially said on LinkedIn, so don’t take my word on that. But that would be an interesting conjecture to follow: whether or not content is becoming strictly more important than links.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, interesting. Of course, that is a conversation that is going around at the moment—the brand SEO approach, which I find interesting because many years ago, I copped a bit of flack because we were just working at agencies and all this kind of stuff, and people were always saying, “Oh, we only want non-branded keywords, we only want non-branded traffic.” I was always thinking, no, you want your brand to be known. I’ve never understood why that was never a thing. But it seems to have come full circle again now. I guess I’ve been around probably long enough to see a lot of things go full circle—hence the grey whiskers. If we’re talking about a Penguin 2.0 or a Penguin 3.0, depending on how you calculate things, then I’ve been around the block a couple of times as well. What do you think, Jes? What should we just abandon? What are SEOs wasting their time doing? What will you no longer be doing in 2025?

Jes Scholz:
For me, the thing I would love to get rid of is this concept of the funnel. Tying into branding—like, as soon as you say “top of funnel,” you are focusing on a tiny portion of your addressable audience. Straight away, you’re only thinking of the people who are actively looking or could be convinced to maybe buy. The reality is the vast majority of people who are your target audience are not currently in any portion of the funnel. That doesn’t mean that you don’t address them on a regular basis. This focus on the funnel makes us focus on ranking keywords in search engines for queries, because people have to be querying to be in a funnel. You need to focus on all of the people who are not querying or not actively querying for your category that you can stumble upon. This is the power of platforms like Google Discover, this is the power of TikTok—which I know is not technically traditional SEO, but there’s an algorithm there that you can mess with in order to get visibility for your content, to drive brand and conversion. It’s something that we are very adept at being able to influence and get more of our brand’s coverage there. So I would hope that we stop focusing on “I need to focus on people in the funnel,” or worse, “I need to focus on people in the very bottom of the funnel to drive immediate conversion.” That’s not what SEO is about. SEO is about: how can I actually have my brand reach my addressable audience on a regular basis in order for them to have that high brand awareness, so that when they go in-market, they think of me first and they do a branded search query, or they put me into ChatGPT, or they go to TikTok and search for me, or wherever they want to consume and get to me, I’m there and I’m accessible, and they can come and convert. That is what I think our job is—the entire market touchpoints, not somewhere in the funnel, let’s try to push them for an immediate conversion. That’s so short-sighted.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, okay. So just to sort of go back to you on that question a little bit: because SEO is search engine optimisation and we’ve always sort of fitted in with the other forms of marketing, and we always sort of sit below the marketing director or the VP of marketing somewhere, is that part of that language? Is it a recognition from other areas, not just from SEOs, to have that recognition? Or is there a broader recognition as well that perhaps people have looked at SEO as a certain type of channel to drive traffic per se, and if we’re no longer really looking at it in that way, is there a change of mind that’s needed?

Jes Scholz:
I think we’ve put ourselves in a box where we feel quite confined, and now we’re hitting against the edges of that box in frustration that we put ourselves in. If you say, “I’m the search engine optimisation person and I’m going to give you high rankings in search,” that is how your executives are going to treat you, because that’s the KPIs you’ve set for yourself. You’ve set a KPI that not a single CEO who should be a CEO in this world cares about. Never in an executive boardroom have they set a corporate target of, “We need to rank number one for this specific keyword.” That’s just not what executive levels think about. So if you want a higher position, if you want more influence, if you want higher budgets, stop talking about search engines, stop talking about rankings, start talking about things that the CEO or the CMO or the CFO actually care about: “How do I get you more money? How do I get you more market share? How do I get you more brand visibility?” We are exceptional at those things if we stop putting ourselves in a little box of “I optimise for keywords and rankings.”

Peter Mead:
Yeah, all right. Preach! Nice. Hey Dan, just on that—so this whole thing of rankings, traffic, I mean, it’s addictive, right? We’ve done SEO for a long time, and when you see those rankings and when you’re looking at your Search Console and you’re seeing that traffic trending up like a hockey stick, it’s just—it’s like a bit of a contraband, you know? What do we—I mean, do we have to get away from this? Because I know for sure that I’m seeing a lot of sites that are ranking really well, but that traffic just isn’t—you know, and the impressions are going up, but the clicks aren’t going up in parallel the way they used to in the old days. What are we—what are you going to stop doing, or what should we not think about anymore?

Dan Petrovic:
Well, let me start by crediting what’s been said already, starting from James’s comment about old school SEO through basics—they still need to be done. Crawling, indexing, clean information, everything nicely structured. We have a good solid foundation and background with technical stuff. Amanda and Jes have covered some of the things that I was about to say, so I’ll just add some further thoughts to all that. On a top level, there’s no room for mediocre work anymore. We’ve been blessed with superpowers through large language models, and that’s how I use large language models—to build stuff, not to do my analysis. They build stuff that I use to do my tasks, and they help with bread-and-butter SEO. So you wouldn’t throw a dataset into Gemini and say, “Do a keyword research for me,” or you can’t do content analysis, link analysis—these things are done with specialised tools, which you can build now yourself, but you wouldn’t just throw it into an LLM and expect output. The bar is very high with the quality of work expected from SEOs now; there’s no more excuses for average work. Speaking of average work, we’ve got a funny situation: there’s no more room for average content either, but Google’s got this—you know, when I saw in the leak, in the algo leak, when I saw the consensus score, Google wants all the content to fall and conform to a certain overall internet consensus, yet they want us to have the content that’s better than everything else, which are two—it’s a paradox, right? So I don’t know how to solve that; go and think about that item. Examples of things that wouldn’t work anymore: your obvious link building. If I have a look at a page and I know who wanted that link on that page, that’s already eliminated. So can you still do link building? Yes, you can—really good, well-integrated, purposeful linking. So that paints the picture of how I’m thinking about where we should head, moving on to ’25 and ’26. Things like content analysis, link analysis, data analysis, keyword research—yes, do all those things with the superpower that you have, but not through direct input in LLMs.

Peter Mead:
Okay, so the bar’s been raised. Absolutely, and of course the bar’s been raised. However, I do agree, but I also see—and we see so many examples—where the ordinary stuff is just doing well, right? Where the stuff is still actually performing, or making it through, sort of going against what we think should be happening. Is it hit and miss? How is it?

Dan Petrovic:
No, that’s temporary. I think that’s temporary. What we need to remember about Google is that Google is the giant of energy, steel, computation power, talent, and resources. They’ve been given a kick in the butt from ChatGPT, from OpenAI, and they’re activated now. Google’s activated—they act like a startup. There’s entrepreneurial energy at Google, and things are happening. Just watch Google and what they come out with. So all these average results and things—they’re not there because Google can’t do better results. It’s that they need to figure out the economy of it. You can’t throw a Gemini-level model at every search result; you don’t have that much energy on the planet. So they need to make—quantizing their models, shrinking everything, making everything work at scale. We forget how big Google is and how big the user base is. They’re going to figure everything out. Google’s going to reclaim their spot as a leader and they’re going to come up with a delightful set of features and quality of results. That’s my prediction. So all these little ordinary stuff works—that’s going to be phased out, and Google’s going to get so much better in the next two years.

Peter Mead:
Okay, so just messy in the meantime, but the bar has been raised, and for everybody, we all need to do much better. So, James, I’m just interested about this idea of exceptionally good quality work—you know, we have to really just do way better than everyone else. I mean, it’s not a new concept, it’s been for a long time. But how about, you know, is this just for enterprise? Do the small guys get excluded because they don’t have the resources to do this exceptionally great work compared to enterprise-level clients? What’s your take on what’s not going to work in 2025, James?

James Norquay:
I think it’s going to be hard for small businesses to compete. You’re going to have to go for local SEO, like GMB stuff—that’s where you’re going to have to go. We don’t really work for small businesses; most of our clientele is mid to enterprise level. I agree with what everyone else is saying. I think low-quality link building is dead. I probably think about 80 to 90% of agencies in Australia rely upon guest post marketplaces for all their links. A lot of them are guest post farms that are devalued by Google; they have no value whatsoever. I’ve got over 30 test websites so I can test this stuff, see what works. High-quality digital PR is going to be what’s working. It’s hard to get a link from news.com.au, but anyone can write the same piece of content. That’s why I still think link profile is still highly important, like site authority. If you’ve got really good links, they’re hard to replicate. If you’ve got links your competitors can’t get, that’s what’s going to move the needle. Anyone can build the same piece of content. Content is easy, accessible—anyone can use AI to throw in prompts and build out content at scale. That’s not hard. But getting really good links is—it’s getting hard. I look at the price of expired domains; they’ve gone through the roof in the last few years. You still see people buying these domains and they’re still working. That’s just a sign. But I agree with Dan—it’s short term. That stuff might work for a little bit, but then it gets hit. I think you’ve got to focus on long-term strategies that are going to be around today and in 10 years’ time. I still feel like people think SEO agencies are bad and ripping people off. You should see some of the stuff I see from PR agencies—they charge 10K a month, they don’t do anything at all, they’re just monitoring the media. Yes, I definitely feel like doing high-quality work is going to be the game changer. I think a lot of mediocre SEO agencies that are just doing cookie-cutter stuff—they’re going to be out of business. What a lot of people are doing, just real cookie-cutter links, you know, like a link from a mummy blogger for a plumber, that type of stuff—it’s not going to work. Google’s not even rewarding that; the sites have been hit hard. I think it’s going to be hard. SEO is getting hard. I see a lot of mediocre agencies move to paid search—they’re not even offering SEO anymore because it’s too hard. They go all in on paid search because paid search is easier for them; they can manage 50 accounts per person. That’s just the honest truth.

Peter Mead:
Okay, so scale of economy. I agree. I got involved in the worldwide web way back when it was just a project and here we were with dial-up modems trying to get online. One of the things about links is that they are fundamentally the backbone of the worldwide web. That’s how we navigate on the worldwide web from page to page—by clicking on links. So it’s very hard for me to see how backlinks will be completely devalued and totally devalued. I understand that, yes, there won’t be—you know, tactics and things won’t work, but I do find it difficult to see how a link is not going to be important. I think a link will always be important. But the other thing you were saying there, James, is just that scale of economy. Does that mean that the little guy or the small business should just forget about SEO and double down on PPC? Or is there an approach that they can take? What would you say to small business SEO potential clients that come to you or ask you?

James Norquay:
I think if you don’t have a decent amount of money for SEO—like if you’ve got like 1K a month or $500 a month—it’s not worth doing SEO, because the people that operate in that really cheap SEO space, they can do a lot of damage very quickly to your website. I get calls from people that say, “I went onto Fiverr and I bought this links package, they blasted 20,000 links at my site, the site is damaged.” It could be a business that’s been around for 20 years. People can do a lot of damage very quickly with SEO. So I think if you don’t have a decent budget, SEO is not right for you anymore. Maybe you can do some local stuff, some GMB. You’ve got to think of other avenues. SEO is a resource-heavy game. To do things well, you’ve got to have a good team. Sure, there’s going to be a lot of AI stuff coming in that’s going to save time, people are going to be able to do more, but I think if you don’t have an okay budget for a sophisticated team, you’re going to be in trouble. If you’re just trying to use people that are doing things on the cheap, it’s not going to work effectively this year and in the future. There’s been a lot of agencies that have come and gone over the years. I’ve been in the space for well over 18 years. I’ve seen Dan, he’s been in the industry for a long time. I remember back in 2020, we were talking at events together. People that have been doing things the right way and doing high-quality activity, they’re still in the market, they’re still talking at SEO events. There’s a lot of people that, yeah, they’re just not around. So I think it’s going to be hard, Peter. I’m just being honest with people—if you don’t have a lot to spend in SEO, maybe look at other channels, because we get people that call up and they’re in a competitive vertical and they just don’t have the money to compete. In these competitive verticals, people are spending big dollars. The more competitive it is, the more money people are spending. They’ve got in-house teams, they’ve got massive resources, and then to go into that kind of niche—it’s so hard to compete.

Peter Mead:
Gaston, let me come over to you, because you’re in the enterprise space. I know you’re dealing with millions—may I even say, perhaps billions—of URLs that you’re dealing with. I mean, it’s clearly in the enterprise level, but is it getting harder? What are the things that you’re going to not worry about? Are there things that you—are you just forgetting about building links, or is there some kind of a practice that you’re just going to give up on in 2025?

Gaston Riera:
It’s a really hard question to answer, to be honest. At an enterprise level, when the product is really, really big and you have a lot of weight from your brand—when you have a really nice brand and a very powerful brand on your back—do links matter? Yeah, but not that much. You want exposure, you want visibility, you want market share. With that market share, you get exposure, you get visibility, and then your brand is more known, and then eventually people just start searching the brand. It’s just getting them cooked—that’s how I like to see it. But honestly, to me, it’s just related to what other people were saying: we have to stop being basic, we have to stop being generic, because this is what it’s becoming. It’s a reality of SEO—when there is a tactic that works, everyone starts doing it, and then it becomes basic. Nowadays, it’s just, “Oh, we have ChatGPT, we can just write the prompt and then spit out a thousand articles.” Everyone can do that. That’s just basic, that’s generic, that’s blasting away with very basic content that now Google can filter out, and then people complain that whatever they’re doing is not working. So to me, it’s more about thinking long-term and trying to stand out. Stop being basic. I’m lucky enough to have a team where I can work with—I have two more engineers, I can build software for SEO that makes my product stand out. That’s the goal there: just trying to create, to come up with tactics and strategies that help me stand out. And I just want to call out that—Peter asked me if I’m drinking mate—yes, I’m Argentinian to my bones and I have to be drinking mate all the time.

Peter Mead:
Does the mate help you to improve your SEO?

Gaston Riera:
Well, I would say yes. I have to say yes—if not, I lose my passport, you know how it is.

Peter Mead:
Just a follow-up there on that—you’re saying not to be basic, you want to be sort of advanced. Does this include offering something more to the user side, to the user interface, more engagement, maybe more ways that the user can become more sticky on the website, this kind of thing?

Gaston Riera:
I have like ten different ways to answer this question, but I will try to look smart and just take a step back and answer it in a way that could spark other conversations later on. To me, I usually think about this as a channel. We have Google and all search engines as a channel to bring people into our product. When we are at an enterprise level, at the volume of pages, the volume of traffic that we look after, we don’t pay that much attention about how the product is—that’s the realm of other teams, just product, product marketing. We want to bring people in, then that’s a problem for another team. So I want to have the perfect set of pages to put on Google so when people are searching or just browsing, they find the best page that they could find. The problem for me now is not just having a page, it’s having too many pages, too many options. I want to reduce the set of options that Google can have. It’s a content problem, it’s a scale problem, which is fascinating, but it’s more about showing Google and the users the right page. Eventually, that is through building a feature in the product, building a new block of links—sorry, a new widget with links that could help Google find the page that I want Google to find. That’s kind of the way. I cannot say much because of my media training, so I’m biting my tongue a little bit.

Peter Mead:
Well, understood about the media training, but thanks for giving us an insight into your thinking and the kind of approach. It’s always fascinating to hear how you approach these sort of things. Brodie, what would you say? Are we chasing the algorithm, or are we just forgetting about chasing the algorithm anymore? Are we chasing SERP features, or are we not? Or are we doubling down on brand? What are you going to not do anymore, or what would you advise people not to do in 2025?

Brodie Clark:
I think I’d have to echo the core topic that’s been brought up here: there’s no more room for mediocre work. I think that’s a big mindset shift that SEOs should take on board this year, and I think it applies to all areas of SEO—technical, content, links—just as important in all of those different areas. In general, if something is too easy to replicate, then you probably shouldn’t do it for the most part. There’s always those quick-win opportunities that make sense, but I think if you ultimately want to be competitive in search, you need to be doing stuff that’s really hard to replicate—meaning something that you execute on and it takes your competitor six months to figure out even what you’ve done. It shouldn’t be something that they can just look into tomorrow, make a quick change, and they’re then on a complete level to what you’re on. I think something in general as well that’s good to keep in mind and is good to constantly bring up in the space—and you mentioned about brand there—that if you’ve got a… you see all these graphs that get posted online where, after a core update or helpful content update, sites are getting one, two thousand clicks a day and suddenly they’re at zero. They haven’t been given a manual action, but they’ve just been demoted so heavily that they’re barely getting any non-branded traffic anymore. I think in a lot of cases you can look at that from the outside and see it as, “Okay, so you weren’t getting any branded traffic through to your site because you went down to zero.” In a lot of those cases, that is self-explanatory in itself. If users aren’t trying to go to your site because they want to go to you as a starting point for their search for whatever they’re looking into, that should be a red flag. In general, for a lot of large websites that you see gradually declining over time, it’s good to look at what their branded searches have been trending over that period as well, and sometimes there can be correlation there, sometimes there isn’t. But generally, if you can see a real decline in brand to an extent where the business isn’t investing in other channels that generate demand and interest in their brand, then that can be a sign to Google that users aren’t trying to look for your business in search results and maybe getting less clicks as a result. So in general, two major areas to highlight are what Dan and James mentioned in particular: no room for mediocre work, and a big one, focus on brand. Do all the things that generate interest, that make people want to click on your content, buy your products, use your services.

Amanda King:
Peter, just really quickly before we move on, something I wanted to add on the context of no room for mediocrity and that concept: I think it’s also really important to acknowledge that it’s no room for mediocrity from us either. Historically, a lot of times SEO specialists also got lumped into doing the copywriting or doing emergency edits on an image, or all of the kind of small little things. I think we’re at a point in time where, particularly with copywriting and content creation, subject matter expertise is a lot more important and not necessarily something that can be faked or projected. So I think that’s also a step—taking a step away from those tasks as well, where we aren’t the subject matter experts or haven’t been trained as journalists or whatever it may be, and not doing that work, but instead working with other teams to do the training or to create the processes, rather than us doing that work ourselves.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that’s a fantastic point, Amanda. I’ll bring that back over to you, Brodie, because I understand what Amanda is saying. Oftentimes, perhaps the team is maybe a little bit cobbled together, or maybe where SEO’s been kind of lumped with these ideas. So, does the SEO team, in order to achieve that brand result, need to be more integrated with the rest of the whole marketing team—across PPC and across brand marketing, etc.—or what’s your take on that to get those better brand results?

Brodie Clark:
I think in general, if we even go back to the example of, say, a small business—they don’t have budget to invest in SEO, where should they put their dollars? I think in general, SEO does have trickle-on effects from every single other channel that is being invested in, which is good to keep in mind. Something that I do in my role, doing purely just SEO consulting a lot in the technical area, is I’m not afraid to give recommendations for other service providers who maybe focus on digital PR, content creation for social media, even looking into stuff like radio ads, which can generate branded searches to come across your website. That’s stuff that I like to push towards other experts who are a lot better at executing on those areas. But I often do recommend my clients to reach out to other resources, because I know it can hamper our efforts as SEOs, for sure.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that’s a good one. You talking about radio—I’ve got a bit of a longstanding joke that I picked up somewhere years and years ago, and I believe that fridge magnets are going to make a comeback, and that fridge magnets can be part of your SEO strategy.

Brodie Clark:
How can we optimise the magnets, Peter? What’s the trend?

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that’s the way—send them out in the mail and get people, every time they go to the fridge, they will see your brand and your slogan.

Brodie Clark:
Nice, I like that.

Peter Mead:
That’s a bit of a joke, but I guess we’re just coming up to around about ten minutes or so of the webinar left, and it’s been some terrific insights so far. What I just thought was, for the last—well, let’s say twelve minutes or so—I want to go around and perhaps, if each of you was able to give our audience your top takeaway, your number one tip, or just a bit of a hack or tip, point people in the right direction for the year ahead. Amanda, what would you say to help our viewers along the way a little bit?

Amanda King:
I’m going to cheat a little bit—I’m going to say two things, but they’re both content related. First one: go back and undo all the work that you did around creating keyword-specific content five years ago and consolidate it into one article. The second answer is: not everything needs to be a 2,000-word article. Answer what your audience and your consumers are asking as efficiently as possible, and if that’s in one sentence, do it in one sentence.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, right. Does that mean we need to be also thinking more carefully about our categorization and the topical—dare I say—topical authority of the site?

Amanda King:
I mean, look, that’s a step beyond an easy tip, I think, for a lot of folks, particularly small businesses. Rolling back some of the SEO bad practice from five, seven years ago is going to take time, and also just generally the concept of “answer the question as efficiently as possible.” Follow in the natural language processing way of understanding and don’t have so many content leaps or context hops. But that’s further, nerdier than we need to get. Answer things as efficiently as possible and remove as much kind of content overlap as you can would be my advice.

Peter Mead:
Okay, that’s great. Jes, what would your friendly tip be for our SEO viewers who are wondering what they should be focusing on in 2025?

Jes Scholz:
I’m going to address Lawrence’s comment from the chat here, where they’re asking, “Well, most are SMBs, so what’s a good tip for an SMB that doesn’t have the $100,000 SEO budget with a staff of ten specialists?” This is also for enterprise level, so it works for anybody. What I really like to do right now when I take on a new client is I look at their indexing in Google. Segment your sitemaps, look where the indexing issues are, and then do the exact same process in Bing. Then understand where Google and Bing both agree this is index-worthy and where they do not agree that it’s index-worthy, and why are they saying it’s not index-worthy. When you’re doing this kind of content cleanup, instead of doing a content cleanup based on, “Oh, let’s look at the number of page views,” you can add layers on top of, “What does Google say about this page based on sitemap indexing, and what does Bing say about this page based on sitemap indexing?” That’s going to give you a much more rich understanding of what types of pages and types of content these major indexes are looking for. When you understand better what two major indexes are really interested in and have high indexation rates on, you know that that’s probably going to be good enough for the smaller indexes that are being built by Apple and OpenAI’s own dedicated index or whatever else is going to come out in the next few years. So really look at your website not only as the place your customers come to convert, but it’s also the source of value that you’re going to be distributing out to the world—what’s index-worthy.

Peter Mead:
Okay, yeah, that should be—hopefully, Lawrence, that has answered your question. It sounds quite like a really amazing way to go about approaching your problem. So, Dan, what’s your big tip for 2025? What’s the Dan Petrovic power tip? What do we do?

Dan Petrovic:
Yeah, I want to bring it to one of the audience comments that, you know, we’re talking enterprise and big scale and blah blah blah, but let’s get down to real stuff that people can actually do with a small budget—small, medium-sized business. In a practical sense, like old school days, we went from focus on the machine and tweak the algo and exact match anchor text and tweak the titles. We went from there to—we bought the whole narrative from Google: focus on the user, do the great content. Yeah, of course, you’re going to do that, but we’re back to the hacking days now. We are at the moment in history—that’s not going to repeat again unless something new comes along—that you can do the same level of hacking and tweaking and, you know, call it cheating or whatever, easy manipulation of LLMs that you could do with Google algo in the early days. So we went from focus on the machine to focus on the user, now back to focus on the machine. That’s what I’m doing. Think about how do you influence the training data for the large language models. Spread the word about your brand, tie the brand with the concepts you want your brand to be tied in with. So things like digital PR, seeding of content, getting conversation going on social media—small businesses can do that, getting the chat, getting the buzz and activity around their brand. That’s one. You asked for one thing—I’ve got four. Value of clean, structured data for agents, because my agent is going to talk to your agent, and there’s not going to be anyone on the website doing stuff. So if you have clean product schema, clean—SEO still, if all that’s clean, the agent’s not going to have problems finding a price and a discount and how to do the checkout and bring back the information to the user who requested the agent to do the research. Another thing, number three, is representation monitoring. That’s what I’m busy with at the moment. I’m building systems that monitor how often my brand or my client’s brands are being mentioned in large language models. Final tip is get familiar with the machine learning terminology. It’s really going to help you understand this whole thing, so you’re not looking at AI as this mysterious godly thing, but it’s just down to technology. So those are my four tips.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, great, that’s a lot to think about, and you’re peppering in some futuristic thinking in there as well, Dan. There was another comment, which I believe Amanda answered quite well, but there was a comment there from Mr. Tello. I just wanted to briefly say that we’re probably not necessarily talking about SEO for brand-building purposes, but perhaps SEO as a tool amongst the whole suite of tools so that we can recognize the branded search. I think that’s possibly a little bit more where it all fits in, but of course it’s very nuanced. So, James, what would your big takeaway for people be for 2025?

James Norquay:
Just talking from a small business point of view, Peter, I think just going back to basics and getting videos done for your business and putting them on YouTube and having an optimised title and description. I was talking to a friend recently, and 30% of his business comes from YouTube now. It’s a kind of business, you know, he’s ensuring that he’s thinking about all of the key things in his company and producing video content. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to do that. If you’re a small business, you can get your video content onto YouTube, you can optimise it, it can start ranking for different queries within YouTube search, etc. You’re going to get more visibility across different markets. You can do YouTube Shorts, you can put the same content on TikTok. I have another friend that’s got a travel agency—he’s been putting a lot of his travel deals on TikTok and it’s been going bananas. People are really loving that type of content—deals, discounts, he does a daily deal thing. I think just getting more involved with YouTube, doing more video content, that’s definitely something that we want to do more this year. It’s something that maybe I’ve neglected a bit in the past, but we’re definitely keen to really ramp that up. I think that’s a quick win for businesses. You don’t need to spend a lot of money—everyone’s got an iPhone, you can start recording content, do some keyword research, look at what is already showing up from competitors. There’s a lot of traffic—everyone loves YouTube, so people are searching for that type of stuff, it’s showing up for commercial queries now too. I think that’s an easy win. Just having a good page—yeah, having a good page too. I was recently at my physio and they were talking about SEO, they said they were listening to some podcast. I just told them, “Think about your top services—what are the main products that people come in here to buy? Have good pages about this type of stuff, start putting a page about ‘running injuries Sydney,’ things like that.” I’m not a runner, but people are searching that type of stuff. A lot of this stuff is back to basics. People are trying to get too advanced, but I think a lot of companies—if you’re a small business, just get the basics right.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that’s some really good tips for those small businesses. Definitely some very important things they could just get into and do as a small team. Gaston, what would be your big tip for 2025?

Gaston Riera:
I have to continue building on what the rest of the team is saying. To me, if I want to be a little bit confrontive, I think people and businesses need to stop looking inward and stop looking outside the business and stop trying to be Amazon or stop trying to be that gigantic company. If you have a small business that sells, I don’t know, running shoes, you’re not going to be Adidas. You need to know that you cannot try to replicate what Adidas is doing, but you can investigate and research what other small businesses are doing in the same niche and try to break the noise, be a little bit different, do something—like James was saying, maybe YouTube, maybe TikTok—do something to be different. If I can say something about large enterprises and websites that have millions of pages: just have a look at the title tags, that’s the only thing that I can say. Let me say, we are getting just so much traffic by actually having title tags written the right way. That is just amazing.

Peter Mead:
Ah, fantastic, Gaston, thank you. Brodie, we just have—well, we’re coming up on time, but just let us know in a minute or so, what would your takeaway for the audience be, for anyone interested in what the heck are we going to do in 2025? What’s Brodie Clark’s top tip?

Brodie Clark:
I think a more basic recommendation is that Google has pretty good documentation these days for pretty much all areas of search. That wasn’t always the case, but in recent years they’ve put a lot of work into their documentation, and I think it’s pretty good to point you in the right direction. So definitely go on developers.google.com and get familiar with your type of website that you’re working with and the sorts of recommendations that Google has there. Sign up for one of the all-in-one SEO tools—SEMrush on a low plan, see what those tools are recommending, do your own research, figure out your competitors. There’s a lot to learn, but I think just those two areas are a good place to start.

Peter Mead:
Ah, that’s terrific. That’s just about it. I want to thank everyone so much. I love having these kinds of discussions. I just really like to hear the way that all of you think and to hear some of the little bit of differences, but also a lot of the similarities. But just the sort of catching little nuggets that, perhaps if you’re listening carefully, you can pick up on that. So I hope our listeners have got a lot of value from today. Thank you so much Amanda King, Jes Scholz, Dan Petrovic, James Norquay, Gaston Riera, and Brodie Clark. Thank you so much. Until next time, this has been a Duda webinar for the 2025 predictions with Australia’s best. Thanks all, and we’ll see you later.