Focus on what hasn’t changed

Simon says: “The web was a revolution. Everything since has been evolution, and it's been fast-paced.

The smartest strategy is to focus on what hasn't changed.”

What hasn't changed?

“There are a lot of things that haven't changed. What I'm really talking about are the core fundamentals of what we do.

Stay still. There's a huge amount of noise going on at the moment. It's been increasing this year, and it will be more so in 2026. There is a lot going on, so it's very difficult to focus on what we should be doing.

The best thing to do is step back, look at the fundamentals – and go back to pure marketing fundamentals, not just SEO. Look at brand and technical SEO, those core things that make a website work well, and make content work well, etc.”

Why do you think brand is the cornerstone of organic visibility?

“For me, brand is something that never changes. It hasn't changed since brand first became a thing in the 1870s when Bass produced their Red Triangle. That's when brand started. It was the first ever trademark in the UK.

I'm sure brand was there before. When Queen Boudicca invaded Roman London, there was a brand there.

It's harnessing the basic human behaviour to understand things. Human behaviour is where marketing comes from in the first place. It’s zeroing in on that and understanding how people behave.

Part of that is brand and brand recognition. If you trust something and you recognise it, you're going to trust it again. Building that brand will always be a key cornerstone to any commercial proposition.”

Has the way to build a good brand changed much over the years?

“It has kind of swung around. People come up with new ideas for selling brands, and different sorts of media have changed that.

When print came along in the newspapers, at the end of the 19th century, you had very complex adverts. Then, when radio came along, it all changed – and again when TV came along. Of course, the internet as well. Any time you get one of these changes, people explore that to see what is the best possible thing to do.

We're going through that at the moment. The internet started in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it really took off as a commercial proposition in the 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst, and people have been optimizing that ever since.

TV adverts were optimized in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and they have now got to the point where they are horrible. I don't understand why they work. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, they were fantastic. It's similar with the internet, where everybody's trying to get that added advantage.

It all comes back to trying to persuade people to do things that they didn't think they wanted to do in the first place, which is a key part of marketing.”

You say that technical SEO is evolving, not vanishing. What elements are evolving, and how?

“Websites will be around for a long time. Things may change a little bit in how you get that content, etc., but web pages are going to be around for ages. They really haven't changed from the end of the ‘90s.

As a consequence, the building blocks that make them work and make machines able to read are basic technical SEO. That's not changing. It is getting more complex, though, as we try and ensure that those sites are readable not just by humans but by all sorts of different machines and crawlers out there.

With AI coming along, it is not really crawling huge amounts at the moment, but it’s in its infancy. All that needs to be taken into consideration, and it's not going to change. Technical SEO is going to be around as long as websites are around. We've got to make them work.”

Is there a significant difference in what needs to be done technically to a web page to optimize for AI search engines?

“Right now, there's a lot of hype around AI. It's quite possible we are about to go through an AI bubble and burst in 2026, and maybe a depression after that burst. We'll see what comes out of it. Hopefully, there will be some good stuff, like we saw with the dot-com bubble.

As far as right now with AI goes, it is changing so fast that nobody can keep up with it. Small sites can maybe tweak stuff, and it's good to test bits and pieces. I've been testing all sorts of things, and silly things mainly. If you’re following what people are saying, there's a lot of grift going on out there. People are just chucking out ideas and seeing if they work, mainly to sell courses, booklets, etc.

When it comes back to proper marketing, you've got to stand back and watch all this stuff float past you. There’s no point in jumping. If you've got a 1,000,000-page site and you jump on a particular course where people are saying ‘Chunk all of your content!’, it's going to take you months and months and months to do that.

Is chunking not just paragraphs of content, in context? Shouldn't we be writing our content like that in the first place anyway? Yes, we should. It's come back to Cindy Krum’s Fraggles from many years ago. Nothing’s new; history repeats itself.”

What kinds of silly tests are you doing?

“The way I test silly things is, an idea will come to me, and I will say, ‘Oh, I haven't tried that!’ So, I'll build a web page or a silly little website, and they don't do anything in particular.

I was watching a TV program, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and Susie Dent said the word ‘latibulate’, so I made a website called Latibulate.com. Every now and again, it gets a massive spike when ‘latibulate’ comes up in some newspaper's crossword (that's the only time it ever gets hit), but I try things on that. I've tried sticking AI content in there, like AI poems. Just trying them and seeing whether they get indexed or thrown out for being AI-written.

Incidentally, they got indexed. There's nothing wrong with it. It's quite good. There's a haiku in there and other poems, etc.

This week, I built a web page on my personal site where I made up a village, built an AI image for it, and got a load of content in there. I made up a silly village name, and I've let Google index that page, but shut everything else out. I want to see where that content appears in the AI results when I go and search for it in AI. I'm going to give it a couple of weeks and see if I can get any of the AI tools to come back with content for that.

I've already tested it, and I know that one particular AI tool has come back with it, which means it's scraping Google's content – but we know that already. That's a whole process. I did a little test like that, just to see what's going on.”

Should SEOs within large agencies be conducting their own tests as well?

“When they've got time, yes. It's not normal business practice to be doing that all day long, like I do, but they certainly should be doing that.

With an agency, they'll have lots of different sizes of businesses and different business requirements, etc. It's worth going out and building little test sites and pages, or hiding pages on a client’s site, and doing those little tests (with the client's permission, of course).

If I were working in an agency, I would do exactly that.”

You also say that SEO is increasingly multi-disciplinary. What do you mean by that?

“I call myself a technical SEO, but really, I'm a webmaster. That's an age thing; I've been around since the ‘90s doing web stuff. We get clients where, while I'm there to do the technical SEO, I end up doing all sorts of other things, like security and various bits and pieces.

Especially in technical SEOs, we get involved in a lot of stuff that isn't really SEO but is allied to it. I’ve got the developer hat as well. I develop websites – not to the same quality as a pure developer, but I know a lot. I will go in and fix issues on people’s websites that developers should be fixing.

It is multi-disciplinary. If you’re in content, then you should be thinking about brand as well, for example. It's not one single discipline; it touches a lot of things.

If you're in a job where you are just doing one thing every day, you're like a factory worker: just put a lid on a tin and then do the next one. That is terribly boring. You should be spreading your wings and learning, because all that information comes back, and you get a lot more experience, which helps you solve problems.”

Another phrase you use is that the SEO mindset is shifting from tactics to strategy. What does that mean?

“That comes back to the speed of change at the moment, especially with AI. People are trying all sorts of bits and pieces; it's really just tactics. The long-term strategy should be more of a marketing approach.

When you are running a website, you can't be chasing all the different things everybody's saying right now, because there is so much. Eight years ago, Google decided it was going to put meta descriptions up to 255 characters, and a few months later, they brought it back. At that point, everybody thought, ‘Let's have a go at that and see if we can get more content in there and bring more traffic in.’

Now, it's not just Google; it's all the AIs and everything going on. Everybody is trying to see what works. There’s a lot going on. The thing is, if you find something and make it work, they may well change it four weeks later.”

Another phrase of yours is that the SEO gold rush is long over. What was the gold rush? When did it finish, and what does that mean for SEOs nowadays?

“The gold rush was finding ways to make content that would bring traffic in, and then you can make money off it. I'm thinking about building websites that sent people on to other websites, and you made a little bit of money off it. That was the gold rush days. Now, it's much more business-like.

This is actually a mirror of the dot-com bubble, where people went and built all sorts of ridiculous things and couldn't make a profit, and it all fell to pieces. It's going to happen again with the AI industry. It's all going to collapse soon, when the money runs out.

In a gold rush, you don’t go looking for gold. You sell picks. The people who made money from the gold rush were selling picks to the people who were looking for gold.”

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

“We are living through digital evolution, not revolution, and the winners will be those who master the timeless fundamentals.

Look back at marketing fundamentals. Human behaviour hasn't changed, and history is repeating itself yet again.”

Simon Cox is a Technical SEO Consultant at Cox and Co. Creative. Find out more over at SimonCox.com.