Stop chasing what’s new and start mastering what’s timeless

Nitin says: “Don't get lost in buzzwords and stay focussed on the fundamentals.”

What buzzwords do people get lost in?

“A lot of them. People talk about AI-first indexing, zero-click optimization, voice search dominance, entity-first strategies, and much more.

Now, they're also talking about AEO, GEO, and a lot of other different names. Essentially, though, it’s SEO.”

Has SEO changed much with the advent of AI search or do the fundamentals mean that it has largely remained the same?

“SEO has been evolving since I started my career, back in 2012. Every 6 months, I have heard that SEO is dead because there’s a new shiny stone to look at.

However, the foundation stays the same. Whether it’s Core Web Vitals, AI-first indexing, or GEO, at the core of it, we’re talking about how we take care of tech SEO, how we ensure that the content is written for the user first, and how we optimize for a better user experience.

Everything that is at the core of SEO has remained the same since I started working in the industry.”

How would you summarise the core fundamentals that SEO needs to stay grounded in today?

“First, make sure that your website is crawlable. If Google, Yahoo, Yandex, or whatever search engine you are optimizing for cannot crawl your website, you are in trouble. You will not be able to see yourself on the SERP.

Also, publish content that answers a user's intent. You're writing that content for the user, not for search engine bots. If a user doesn't find this content meaningful, even if you generate that traffic, you won't be able to sustain those rankings – and that traffic would not convert to whatever you ultimately want to achieve.

Delivering great user experience is another fundamental I would put emphasis on. If you don't have a great experience, you will not be able to retain those users. You won't be able to keep them with you forever. Then, whatever traffic you're generating is absolutely meaningless.

Search engine bots also catch these signals. If a user lands on a website and then they don't like it for whatever reason, they will go back and probably never return. Search engines don’t want to promote those brands and websites.”

How do you ascertain whether or not users are finding your content meaningful?

“The most important thing is understanding what a user is looking for. Your keyword research (which is a very traditional approach) can set the foundation here.

Start with that. Try to cluster your keyword research outcomes to understand what topics people are searching around.

Then you also look at your user journey, and try to map these different clusters to that journey to make sure that you have a one-to-one mapping. If your users are looking for something, are you able to cover that on your landing pages through the content? Content is not just textual content either; it is also images, videos, etc.

That's how you can think of mapping that content on your website to what the user is looking for. Then, what can help you measure whether or not the content you have written is helpful to your users are KPIs like engagement, conversion rate, etc.”

What aspects of technical SEO are absolutely key in 2026?

“Technical SEO has been non-negotiable since the beginning, because it sits at the core of fundamentals.

The first of those non-negotiable technical SEO aspects is Core Web Vitals. You want to have a website that is fast-loading. It helps your users, of course, but you also want to make sure that whatever search engine crawler is coming to your website is able to easily and quickly crawl your content without wasting too much crawl budget on those pages.

Then, properly implemented schema markup also helps. If that page is very disorganised, you can’t expect a crawler to understand what you have. Schema and markup can help you communicate with those search engine bots. You can tell them, ‘You are on a blog page where the title is X. It's written by person Y. From a content perspective, these are the things that it covers.’ Schema brings that structure, which helps any search engine understand what the content is all about.

Then, keeping your information architecture super clean helps a lot. I’ve seen a lot of websites that have a lot of amazing pages, but they’re not linked anywhere. Often, search engine bots will then be sceptical of whether or not those pages are valuable, because they’re not part of the architecture.

Keep it clean to help your users understand what they're looking for and how they find it, and help search engines too.

Also, when we talk about content optimization, you should not only think about text, but also images and videos, because they can also generate a lot of meaningful traffic for you, and traffic that converts.”

You say that evolving search patterns need a 360-degree content strategy, so what is a 360-degree content strategy?

“This is about understanding your users.

Imagine you’re a travel brand. When I'm searching for travel destinations and I'm looking for inspiration, and I don't want to just read text. I also want to see some videos. As a travel company, you might publish a blog article that includes a three-minute TikTok-style video describing an ideal two-day itinerary for Paris. That’s what users are looking for.

You can also provide structured FAQs for folks who are looking for textual content, and you can think about adding nice images, perhaps from real users.

Everyone loves UGC. If your users are saying, ‘I had a great experience at the Eiffel Tower,’ or whatever you're talking about in that guide, people appreciate it, and they would have more trust in it as well.”

How do you ensure that your content supports authority and trust?

“It's another buzzword, but EEAT. A lot of SEOs went a bit too mad over it a couple of years ago, but it plays a role.

The first E stands for Expertise, the second E stands for Experience, and then we have Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are factors that search engines consider when they’re trying to understand whether they can trust your brand or not. This is how you build a relationship of trust with them.

Once they know that your brand is something that they can trust, they are more than happy to rank you in the SERP to ensure that users also click on your website and consume that content. That then provides further trust signals when users engage, and they don’t go back to the SERP to click somewhere else. These are additional trust factors that they consider.”

To decide what type of content to publish, do you review the user journey and try to determine what's likely to resonate at different stages?

“Yes, absolutely.

In every niche, there are different types of content that users prefer to consume at different stages of their journey. How they are searching also matters. Are they sitting at home and looking for videos, or are they travelling and just looking for textual or image searches because they can’t listen to a video right now?

A user will be looking for different kinds of content for different kinds of queries, and you need to understand that.

First, you can do some competitor analysis to see what kind of content they have, and how that's performing. Second, you can also run A/B tests to understand that. If you have those itineraries for Paris, you can post one purely textual article, another one that has text and some images, and another one that has video. Then, see how the engagement changes.

This will give you direct signals explaining what it means for your users when you add a video to your article. It gives you good signals, and it’s not just you looking at this engagement on your Search Console or in Google Analytics. These are the KPIs that are easily accessible by search engines as well.

They will understand that someone is landing on that website, spending time there, and engaging with that content, so you probably have the content that they’re looking for. Therefore, they’re more likely to rank you for other related queries, because your website deserves to rank better.”

When you’re analysing the performance of your competitor's content, do you just look at how often it appears on the SERP, or are there other metrics to look at?

“Mainly, you’re looking at how they're ranking and how they're able to sustain those rankings, because that is the byproduct of engagement and other metrics.

You can use tools like Semrush to understand engagement-related metrics and get some details and insights on how they're doing. However, those are really surface-level KPIs, and they don’t give you the depth you're looking for.

Just make it easy on yourself. Look at the keywords that they are ranking for. Are they able to sustain those rankings? Are they increasing the number of organic keywords that they are ranking for?

These are some of the KPIs that will help you understand how they are performing on the SERP, and how search engines perceive their organic presence.”

You say that brand authority is the new backlink, so how do you measure brand authority?

“Nowadays, there are a lot of great platforms that you can use – from Profound to Peak.ai to many more – which will tell you all about your brand citations, and how many times you're appearing in LLMs, or how many times you are getting a branded click from LLMs.

These are really good KPIs, because brand definitely plays a role. You want to see some branded traffic – which should be attributed to SEO these days because, whatever you're doing, it is going to give you some visibility in LLMs as well.

Brand mentions and brand citations definitely play a huge role, and they should definitely be thought of in the same way as backlinks were in the old days.”

To stay adaptable, how do you know which trends to chase and which to ignore?

“The worst thing in the SEO world is that you hear these buzzwords, and the whole community just runs after them. For example, Core Web Vitals suddenly becomes the biggest thing, and even if your site score is 90, you chase that buzzword and optimize for another 10, to turn that 90 into 100. You don’t need to do that.

Of course, some of these buzzwords are also meaningful. You should definitely listen, but you need to process them wisely. While you are processing, think about the framework of fundamentals.

For example, when AI-generated answers started dominating search, some companies panicked and started producing thousands of AI articles. Other companies slowed down and asked themselves, ‘What do users still need, outside of that AI box?’ They doubled down on in-depth guides, interactive tools, and community-driven Q&As, and they were the group that won out in the end.

Understanding what these new buzzwords actually mean for users and for sustainable growth is very important. If you do that and play the game wisely within the framework of your fundamentals, you can definitely create a nice case study.

However, if you just start running after every buzzword that you hear, you will waste your time. In most cases, you won't achieve anything.”

If you’re an SEO who’s just starting out in your career, how do you know what to listen to?

“Whatever you are hearing about, do more research. Understand what people are publishing about, especially those who have first-hand case studies on it.

Also, run your own experiments. This is very important. Something that works for one industry might not work as well for another industry in the SEO world. When you run your own experiments for tiny things, you can come to your own conclusions. That gives you more confidence, and it gives you first-hand data to prove whether your hypotheses are correct or need some adjustment. Testing plays a huge role.

Take everything that you hear with a pinch of salt, and move wisely.”

Nitin, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Buzzwords will keep coming. Some will matter, but most will not.

If you blindly follow them, you're wasting your time, and you're wasting an opportunity for your brand to grow. If you build a technically solid user-first website with credible content and brand authority, you will thrive, no matter how search evolves.

In 2026 and beyond, the best SEO isn't about chasing what's new; it's about mastering what is timeless.”

Nitin Manchanda is Founder and Chief SEO Consultant at Botpresso. Find out more over at Botpresso.com.