The New Rules of SEO

We sit with our clients to go over those reports in detail. Like, we are not the agency that's going to just send a monthly report. We do send a monthly report, but we absolutely do not expect you to understand it. And this is really where it's different.

We are your marketing partner, so we want to make sure that you understand specifically with idea of what are we doing, why are we doing it? What's working and what's not working? And own it when it's not working. Like we are not going to hide behind the fact that if something seems like, you know, it didn't land right or didn't get the results that we expected.

We just own it and then we figure out how to optimize and make the changes that we need to make so we can get the results that we need. Welcome back to Torch Talk, the show where we spotlight bold leaders growing their businesses and communities with grit and purpose. Today, you get just me. I am here to talk about search engine optimization, all of the things that you should be looking at, measuring, and considering in 2026.

Search engine as you know it is really gone. It's been a hot topic in all of 2025 with the introduction of AI. Everybody is talking about Chat GPT, Cloud, all of the different AI platforms and how that is impacting their lives. It has certainly impacted the search engine optimization area.

SEO used to be fairly simple. It's never really been simple, but it used to be a little bit more clear-cut. So you wanted to rank on Google. Google is the number one search engine out there, and it is the end-all be-all.

So when it comes to managing organic ranking and managing your paid ranking, Google was really it. And that is no longer the case. Google is still the biggest player, but there we definitely see on the horizon that there are other things up and coming. And it is definitely worth paying attention to how you rank on AI search engines as well.

So one of the things that we have done over the last year in working with our clients is looked at how we can make sure that we're writing content not just for Google, but also for all of the other AI search engines as well. It doesn't mean that we really have to change our overall philosophy or overall SEO practices, but we do need to make sure that those content pieces that we're creating are good for everything. So it used to be a lot simpler to uh look and see where you're ranking on Google, specifically in a geographic area, and we could see how your your keywords rank, and then come up with a strategy to increase that keyword ranking.

So, first of all, the fierce philosophy has always been that we are going to worry about ranking where you're actually working. We don't care about ranking in the state if you don't want to cover the whole state or certainly not nationally. And most of the companies that we work with are working here locally. So we want to make sure that we're focusing on ranking where it actually matters and not putting a lot of time, energy, and effort into the places that it doesn't.

So for a roofing contractor, say works in the Columbus market, so that's Franklin County in Ohio, we would want to rank for searches like roofing contractor Dublin, Ohio, uh top roofing contractors for Columbus. These are the types of keywords that we would actually care about. And it used to be that on Google, we could go just go measure that. You could see who your competitors were, and you can still see this to a degree.

But now we want to measure your AI overviews as well. So how authoritative do you sound as a roofing contractor in Columbus, Ohio? Um so we just want to make sure that we're writing for multiple platforms, not just from one platform, and that we're optimizing across all of the channels in a different way. So, what is SEO?

That's actually a question that we get a lot. Usually people have an idea what it is, but it's probably our most misunderstood service. So SEO is search engine optimization in a nutshell. It is creating content on your website so that you will have keywords that rank directly on a search engine, the number one search engine being Google, at least in the past, that's quickly changing.

Um, so that is a super simplified definition of what SEO is. We uh have we manage SEO plans for our clients, we manage them at different levels with different levels of strategy depending on the investment that they're able to make, and we also try to line that up with their goals. So if you're a smaller company and you really just care about getting business in your local market, then we can do a local SEO plan that is hyper focused on making sure that you show up in your local market.

And if you're a larger client and you might have a larger region, then we need to make sure that we have a more comprehensive SEO approach. One of the things that has changed on SEO over the last year is that AI is coming in and making Google quake in the boots a little bit. Maybe. I mean, it's just been if I had said before it feels a little bit like the wild, wild west.

We're in the middle of a changing landscape, and it's going to be interesting to see where this really changes things over the next couple of years for both SEO and for paid digital advertising. Something that we see often is clients come to us and they really don't know how to measure whether their SEO is working. We sit with our clients to go over those reports in detail. Like we are not the agency that's going to just send a monthly report.

We do send a monthly report, but we absolutely do not expect you to understand it. And this is really where Fierce is different. We are your marketing partners, so we want to make sure that you understand specifically with SEO, what are we doing, why are we doing it, what's working and what's not working, and we'll own it when it's not working. Like we are not going to hide behind the fact that if if something seems like you know it didn't land right or didn't get the results that we expect, we just own it and then we figure out how to optimize and make that the changes that we need to make so we can get the results that we need.

When we go over the monthly results, the things that we are paying attention to, the easiest thing to look at is what are my organic clicks? So, what is the traffic to my website? Ultimately, that is what you want to see. You want to see people on your website so that we can then second second measurement is conversion.

How many conversions are you getting? How many phone calls, lead forms, the type of business that you want to get? It could be sales if you're an e-commerce business. Those are great ways to measure your SEO success.

We also want to look at your click-through rate so we can see if your impressions are high, so you can see how many times did your website show up organically in search results, and then we can see what the click-through rate is for that. And if your click-through rate is high, I'm sorry, let me rephrase that. If your impression rate is high but your click-through rate is low, then you usually have a messaging problem. So that could mean that your uh headlines for a page or your subtitle, the descriptions, those things need change.

Some some messaging needs change so that people want to click on what they're seeing and get to your website. When you review SEO results at the end of a year, it gives you much better visibility over what's working and what is not working. So we do review monthly results. We'll compare January this year to January of last year, quarter one of this year to quarter two of last year, and we even like to go back two and three years so we can see the growth over a long period of time.

We say all of the time SEO is a marathon, so you should not expect to complete it in a short amount of time. You could write a bunch of content and put it on the website and maybe get some quick results, but that's not sustainable. And so you need to make sure that you're building uh, we call it the low and slow plan. For all you smokers out there who like to do a little bit of grilling, it's the low and slow plan.

Okay, so when we are looking at the annual performance review, that allows us to see at a higher level what was the organic search traffic to the website, what was our conversions, what's our click-through rate. Again, we measure that over the monthly time period, but we really get the best visibility when we look at year over year and see where did we come. And then we can make changes for the upcoming year. When we build out SEO strategies for our clients, we build them out over a six-month time period.

We lay out exactly what we need to do, so that includes all of the tasks and the goals for the next six months. At our monthly client meetings, we go over what was completed last month, the results that we have seen, and what is planned for the upcoming months. Sometimes those plans shift based off some updates that happen, a client need or goal priority has changed, or there might be something local that has actually happened in the market to shift the need. But we like to have a long-term plan because SEO is a long-term solution.

And so we want to make sure that we have those tasks and goals mapped out over a longer period of time. So when you work with Fierce, you get to know specifically what are the things that my SEO retainer is going for each and every month. And then we sit down and go over that with you. And part of SEO that we don't want to ignore is also managing your Google business profile.

This is super vital with online tracking and online ranking, and it supports everything else that we're doing on your website. We talk to service-based businesses all the time who know that Google reviews are super important. They don't always have a great strategy for getting those Google reviews, but those directly affect your ranking uh abilities online. So just so everybody remembers, the way that those organic search results, at least right now on Google, are you have your ad results first, then you have your map results, which Google reviews directly affect, and then you have your organic results.

But your your reviews also tell both uh all of the AI platforms and Google where you're where you work, what you're really good at, and why you're the authority in your specific industry. And so it is so valuable to get real people talking about what you do, and it is the future. With or without Google, it is the future and something that you definitely need to be paying attention to. So some of the problems that we typically see whenever we bring a client in is that a website might be well optimized for SEO, but it actually looks bad and it has an awful user experience.

So you might get great SEO visibility and maybe even clicks to the website, but the conversion rate's actually low because the real person using the website has a terrible experience. When we are building and designing, we always want to make sure that we're retaining the real user experience for the real person sitting behind the screen and make sure that it feels good to them, that it's modern, that it looks fresh, that it's the best representation of the client. So we're not just going to write content and throw it out there.

We're also going to make it look nice, make sure that it flows well and that it makes sense to real people. We also see clients who have come to us with websites that are keyword stuffed. So you can definitely tell when something has been written from an for an SEO perspective, and just to get those pages out there and to get all the words on there so that they can hopefully rank, but it doesn't actually make very much sense. It's not in line with the client's goals, it's usually not even getting them the results that they think it's going to get.

Okay, so that was a lot of information just to summarize. SEO can be super confusing, it's a changing landscape. You definitely need to consider AI and in the upcoming year and years, that's not going anywhere, and it's only going to grow and change and continue to evolve. Fierce's philosophy is to create a long-term strategy that matches our clients' goals, and we'd like to be very forthcoming with exactly what we're going to do, when we're going to do it, and then we share those results, good or bad, with our clients directly.

If you have questions about what to do with your SEO or you would like to have your website reviewed, feel free to reach out to us. We'd be happy to take a look at it and be a local resource for you. Thank you for tuning in to Torch Talk. If today's story sparked something for you, share it with a colleague, future change maker, or community leader.

Until next time, stay inspired, stay intentional, and keep your fire burning.