How To Create a Cutting Edge SEO Strategy for 2026

If someone sees you as the answer when they're doing research comparing different types of mortgage products or refinancing products, for example, and then they're seeing your brand name, then they do a different search. They see your brand name in another AI overview. Suddenly, you do start to become a trusted source to them. And it only takes a couple of different people to want to deep dive even further where they're thinking, "Oh, the AI overview actually hasn't given me all of the information that I wanted for them then to end up on your site." That won't happen all of the time. The majority of traffic will be satisfied with the AI overview based on what we've seen from clicks and impressions in general. Hello, welcome to the dojo research marketing podcast by Exposure Ninja. My name is Dale Davies and the head of marketing exposure ninja and I'm joined by our CEO Charlie Martin. And this week we're going to be doing episode 7 of our marketing strategies for 2026 series in which we talk about how to create a cuttingedge SEO strategy for 2026. And Charlie, I suppose the first question to start with is well, where do we start? And it's the perfect question for an SEO strategy. One of my favorite parts of marketing is thinking about how we execute SEO that's incredibly effective and generates an ROI. The way I like to think about SEO is pretty much as a pyramid with three parts. a foundational layer that's technical SEO, a middle layer that's our on-site or the SEO that we do on our website, the content we create, and then like a a kind of peak, a pinnacle that we eventually get to once our foundation is built, which is all of the offsite work that we do. So, digital PR, link building, that type of thing that then strengthens and supports the work we've been doing on site with our SEO. So place to actually start once you've got the pyramid in mind is to actually create a strategy, a plan for what you want to do and what you want to achieve from your SEO strategy. So that first has to be the goals or the KPIs that you want to track and how you're tracking them. Hopefully everyone listening to this is advanced enough that they've got their Google Analytics set up and firing well that they have a good idea of what their organic traffic and organic conversions already look like. and setting reasonable goals that they can focus on for 2026 as well. And then the second part is probably going to be in the keyword research side which is a fundamental area of how we do SEO and a fundamental area of how we actually drive the organic traffic and conversion growth that we want to reach in our strategy. Looking at those are any more any one of them more valuable than the other? Is the technical SEO more valuable and requires more of your time and attention or do you split your time equally? It honestly depends where the business and where the website is. So for technical SEO, I call it foundational because if your website isn't working well, if there's lots of errors, if you've got site speed issues, if you've got multiple redirect loops or broken pages, error 404s and 403s, there's no schema on the site. That kind of thing is really going to hold you back when it comes to your organic rankings, your Google rankings, but it will also hold you back in AI search as well, which many people are thinking about as we get into 2026. So, some sites will be in less good shape than others, shall we say. They're probably going to need to spend more time there, and the bigger the business, the more complex that can become. The bigger the site, the more complex those technical issues can become. And it's very much not a oneanddone job with technical SEO. It's where you want to start, but it's also something you want to look at, I would say, at least on a quarterly basis. If you have a very large site or you're running a particularly large e-commerce site, for example, or a booking site, that kind of thing, you're going to be wanting to keep track of your technical SEO even more frequently than that to make sure you don't have new errors cropping up. And that's just something that happens in the life cycle of a website, particularly a website that has frequent amounts of changes, new content addit, content edited, different landing pages for Google ads or other work that's going on in the marketing added onsite and offsite. They probably do take more time total as part of an aggressive SEO strategy. And that's mainly because the amount of time that you put in really depends on how aggressive the business wants to be on their goals and how much of a priority organic traffic and conversions is for the business. So, it's a little bit of a how long is a piece of string question. The more work you do, the better the result you're going to get, provided that the work you do is actually structured and strategic and focused on the keywords that you want to go after. Do you think that to become a market leader especially as a challenger brand you have to be as aggressive as possible in order to succeed or can you do kind of smaller things that can have big impacts? I mean both and that depends on the market if you're in an aggressive market. So, we have a client, for example, a law firm uh based over in Texas, and it's actually an extremely aggressive market where the rankings, the map listings can change every four to five hours. They can change multiple times on a singular day because that business and competitors are investing such aggressive amounts of time and energy into their SEO because they know the majority of their leads are coming through being top positions on those search results but also top positions on the map pack the Google maps listings. So in that kind of example, I think you to be a market leader, you have to be investing at at least the same level as your competitors, if not a bit more. Do I think there's opportunities where you can be strategic and you can make wins from specific things? Yes. But that also depends on the market. In a market like that, it's very unusual that there will be a stone left unturned. You can definitely think of creative ideas and different SEO strategies. You can find keywords that are potentially a bit more niche and those create opportunities. I think in less competitive markets, you've got more opportunity to do that because there hasn't been a situation where you may have competitors who have been investing in SEO for years. And in that instance, then there's going to be quite a few more stones that are unturned where the business can go after potentially niche keywords. There might be keyword gaps with competitors who haven't been targeting those keywords. I think there's a little bit more uh yeah a few more diamonds to be found. Just think of like some of the sectors that we serve um you know the healthcare and legal as you said there and also finance too. I wonder if there are any kind of examples you've got of the finance sector where there have been these kind of like diamond like campaigns or or things have been done for any of our clients that would be a good example. Yeah, I mean we have done some really fun things in the finance sector. So, one of my favorite clients that we worked with in the finance sector was DSLD Mortgage. They're based in the US as well. um an independent mortgage company, so not associated to any of the big banks. And the differences in their campaign was how integrated it was that actually it wasn't a campaign where we expected organic to just perform on its own. It was a significant part of an email campaign and a paid campaign. And we were having organic and paid Google ads working together to drive significant amounts of leads to the website. And actually, one of the diamonds there is perhaps a bit left field, maybe not what everyone's expecting. We didn't have any problems with getting qualified traffic to the website. Some of the earlier problems that we had were too many leads, which some people probably listening and thinking like too many leads, that's a great problem to have. And it is a great problem to have except what the sales team want is the most qualified leads they could possibly have. So actually a lot of changes that we made on the SEO side and the CRO side, the conversion rate optimization side was from all of that traffic that we're getting paid and organic. What do we need to change on the pages to make sure the people coming through are the most qualified leads possible? And a lot of that was copy changes that we made to the page that then significantly influenced how people moved through the lead form because one of the big issues was people thinking their credit score was better than it was. And actually the ideal kind of lead for a mortgage business is someone who's actually got a pretty good credit score. That makes them more qualified. There's more products that they're going to be able to purchase at the end of it. So, making changes to the copy on the page, making sure that it matched really, really well with the intent of the keyword, and then making changes to the form that they were going through, which is kind of SEO and conversion rate optimization combined here to then make sure the leads were incredibly super qualified so that when they get to the sales team, they're like, perfect, exactly the kind of gems that I want to have coming through to my sales team. I think for the longest time SEO has been seen as the traffic generator and that it does lead to lead generation as well. But do you think that that starts to change where it's more of a we focus on it more as a lead generation channel and the fact it brings traffic to as well is now the focus for marketers or is it still as it has always been for 20 years we're going after traffic alone. I have never liked the misnomer of going after traffic alone. To me, SEO and one of the reasons I fell in love with SEO early in my career is because I see it as a performance-based channel. I see it as a channel that drives relevant traffic. Yes. But more importantly, relevant leads or sales if you're an e-commerce business. Ultimately, like it's great to have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people visiting your website, but you want those people to have a great experience there and you want them to be the kinds of people that you actually want to sell to ultimately. So, are we using metrics like traffic? I think they're useful. They're useful progress markers, but more useful is the number of conversions that we actually get from our organic traffic. And do you think that brand has a part to play with SEO in terms of the the people in the brand team? Let's say we've worked with a couple of clients who are pretty well interconnected. Uh they're integrated with all of their different teams. Do you think that they whoever's the owner for SEO and organic traffic should be working more with the brand team to make sure that they see some benefit too, not just performance? The brand team have an interesting job where they touch almost every marketing channel because they want the brand to be sticky, memorable, consistent. They want that right tone of voice that actually if done well should resonate with the customer. So do I think SEO and brand should be interconnected? Absolutely. What I think sometimes happens is friction in those relationships where the SEO team might feel the SEO and content combined, the organic team shall we say, might feel that the brand team is slowing them down, that it's taking ages to get content published on the website or to make changes or tweaks. And if you're an SEO or a content marketer, you know full well that if you don't get anything changed and hit publish, nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to change. That traffic's not going to increase. the conversions aren't going to improve. So what is really important in this relationship I think is understanding and having a really good workflow where the brand team actually get to make sure the content going out and the visual identity is powerful and resonates with the target customer. If it does, it should be supporting conversions. It should be meaning that there's more conversions because people love the brand. They love the way it sounds. And I think making sure that relationship is really really smooth and not sacrificing actually getting things published in order to try and make them perfect has to be re very neatly managed to make sure that you're actually hitting the goals that the business needs to hit. On the subject of goals, it seems like the metrics have changed over time and you know for with the right focus lead generation seems to be you know a core SEO metric as well not just how much traffic and how many links you've earned and so on. Do you think that with how some sectors have been impacted by say the introduction of AI overviews or AI platforms in general those metrics need to change because I imagine there are some sectors where they are seeing 20% 30% 40% traffic drops year on year. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's been difficult for a lot of SEOs and particularly content websites or websites who are very strongly focused onformational content and that was making up a lot of their traffic because as you've mentioned Dale AI overviews in particular has driven a lot more zeroclick searches. Things are being answered in the search results instead of people needing to come to the website to read information in order to then um get the answer that they want. Most of the types of terms where that traffic is not coming to the website and the question is being answered in the search results tends to be top of funnel traffic. So to me, the most important thing to be looking at here is yes, keeping an eye on that traffic figure, but more importantly, keeping an eye on that organic conversion figure and understanding if you're still getting the commercial traffic, the the traffic that's more likely to actually convert on your website that's ideally more qualified. And you'd also be categorizing that by commercial keywords as well. So it's one thing losing informationational traffic to zeroclick search. It's an entirely different thing if you've actually lost rankings on commercial searches that are impacting qualified traffic that becomes a conversion, a lead or a sale on your website. And for me, when we're thinking about that, it's most important that the SEO person in the business can correctly diagnose what has happened, whether it's commercial or whether it's informational. And sorry for content sites aside where actually traffic is their their number one metric. They're really really having a wash out time right now as a result of this and having to look at a much broader strategy beyond that. But for a lot of businesses, they're still seeing that they're getting middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel traffic on a website. There are marketing leaders listening who are probably thinking that okay, I already intended to still kind of stabilize my commercial pages and you that's always going to be, you know, a priority for me. They may be questioning whether it's still worth producing content that's going to be absorbed into an AI overview. Would you recommend that they still do so? Is there even any value to still producing that content? Oh, this is such a pertinent question. For me, it depends on what the keyword of the AI overview actually is. So my answer is generally yes unless the term is so top off funnel that it's not going to move someone towards your brand or business eventually. So in just going back to the mortgage example, something like what is a mortgage? That could be anyone. That could be an 18-year-old who is just writing a project in Alevel who needs to understand what a mortgage is. That is so top of funnel. It's very difficult to visualize where that person might actually then come to your website. In comparison, if you are if it's a search that's comparing different mortgage products, for example, and that's being answered in AI overview and your business is being referenced as the answer, I think that's a great place to be because you're getting that kind of brand stickiness. If someone sees you as the answer when they're doing research comparing different types of mortgage product or refinancing products, for example, and then they're seeing your brand name, then they do a different search. they see your brand name in another AI overview. Suddenly, you do start to become a trusted source to them. And it only takes a couple of different people to want to deep dive even further where they're thinking, "Oh, the AI overview actually hasn't given me all of the information that I wanted for them then to end up on your site. That won't happen all of the time. The majority of traffic will be satisfied with the AI overview based on what we've seen from clicks and impressions in general. But I think it puts the business in a really strong position if you're getting that brand recognition for being lots of relevant middle and top of funnel keywords that spark AI overviews in the search results. I think anyone who hasn't listened to episode six of this podcast where we do create an AI search strategy may not be aware of something you mentioned then which I think you talks about called query fan out where you are still required to produce the content for those kinds of searches and perhaps for those who haven't heard that episode you could take us as a step back and explain what that is. Yeah, sure. So the query fan out is essentially what happens in the background when we search something within AI. So in chatbt for example, Plexity, Gemini, those kinds of AI platforms. And when we put in our search query, what the query fan out does in the background is break that into lots of different versions of that same query and some a bit more tangentally related, sometimes even hundreds of different queries. And that's because AI wants to give us a fuller answer to the question we're asking. So, we're quite used to just putting in, let's say, four or five words into Google, best wedding destinations in Switzerland, and then that's it. We just have that one keyword. In AI, if we're putting that in, we're just getting so many more different variations of that. That might also be asking us like best destinations in the Alps. It might be giving us like wedding capitals in Europe, best places in Switzerland as well, etc. It's going to do so, so much more. And when we're talking about SEO and content, if we want to optimize for those kinds of rich answers that AI is giving because of its query fan out, what we want to try and do with our content is reflect some of what we know will happen in the query fan out that we feel is really relevant to our customers. And particularly if you have niche or very specific personas, then you can dig a little deeper in your content. Give something that's a bit more interesting. What we're not trying to do is write a 3,000, 4,000, 5,000word essay that gets every single term that a query found out might be using. We're just trying to give rich, useful, contextual information targeting our kinds of customer personas that might enhance what AI then pulls from us and when it sites and sources us. I suppose part of the reason that I raise this point around AI and Google fan art is because Google's results are are now utilizing that technology. And yeah, there's been an introduction with a new feature this year which is potentially the direction in which traditional search is going with uh not just AI overviews but also AI mode. For those who aren't aware, perhaps you can uh explain what AI mode is because I think the the impact is significant. Yeah, I think it will be and even more so in 2026 than we've seen now. So Google's AI mode is another tab on the Google browser. So, similar to where you see images, news, shopping, all of those, you'll also see AI mode. And it's almost global roll out. So, the majority of countries now have AI mode, including the UK. The US had it first. Um, when you go on to AI mode, it's essentially an LLM, which is built into Google's browser. So, it's like a chat GPT experience, though honestly a little bit less chatty. And that's because Google wants to make sure that their version is as objective as possible. They don't want it to become too subjective. Um, so you can type in your query into AI mode exactly the same as you would in a Google search bar, but actually it will reply to you with a very chatbt like response, almost like a a blog post style response that answers your query, gives you additional information. It will still reference Google's other products. So, for example, you quite often see Google Maps within there. You'll quite often see the Google My Business profile with Google reviews, particularly if you're asking comparison questions or if you're asking about a business's reputation or something like that. So this is really a big gamecher in SEO for the long term because at the moment what we're used to doing in our SEO strategies is optimizing for traditional Google trying to get the top three spaces in the 10 blue links. Google's AI mode isn't using that exact same structure. So, what you see in positions one to three on traditional Google results won't necessarily be the top spots in an AI mode answer, which is going to be incredibly important in the long term because Google's already signaled that their plan is to make something closer to AI mode the default type of search over the long term. In reality, I think it's going to evolve quite a lot more from what it looks like now. I think we're seeing quite an early version of it. At the moment, there aren't ads integrated into it. It's something that they're testing that they're trying to figure out, but isn't something that's currently live yet. And they're obviously not going to just make that switch without having figured out how their ads product is going to integrate into it. So, it seems to me the question isn't should I make content for AI mode? all these different variations of searches in the background. It's just how many of them do I want to create with the time that I have because they're going to be like, as you say, hundreds of different searches in the background. I got to figure out how many of them do are important to me. How many of them do I want to dedicate time to? Yeah. And this is the same I think is when we think about keyword research though, but also the priorities for what we sell in terms of service and products as a business, right? is you can only do so many things as a business. So what is your number one priority? What do you most want to be driving traffic and ultimately conversions to and four? And then which keywords are the most relevant commercial ones? Which keywords are the most relevant information or supporting keywords that's going to help improve your commercial performance as well. So when we're thinking about it, we shouldn't be thinking like, oh my goodness, here's the whole wide world of everything that I could do. We're thinking, okay, here is the most targeted priority in my SEO strategy that I think is going to impact my bottom line or the business's bottom line the most. And as you said at the very beginning, a lot of this is based on some fundamentals. You need to make sure the website is technically sound and you've got the right kind of onsite content and and offsite too. with the technical parts of it, which are the most important bits to look at that we should be considering not only for our SEO but also for these new AI systems like AI mode and the other AI platforms too. Yeah, great question and it's hopefully the areas that most people already familiar with. So some of the highlights of things we need to think about is our schema, our structured data. incredibly important for SEO, but now even more important with AI search because AI likes to refer to schema on the pages as well. Want to make sure that we don't have loads of page errors. So 404s, 403s, broken links, that type of thing. Both important for SEO and AI search. And even more so with things like AI agents, not to make the SEO podcast very futuristic, but we know already that like chat GBT's agent mode, it will just abandon pages that have errors, users don't like them, let alone AI. So, making sure that those are all fixed and sorted as best as possible, that you've got proper redirect maps in place, really important. And then the other really big one that I think gets often overlooked because people don't like it's a bit messy. People don't like the idea of actually dealing with it is website architecture. And that's particularly true if multiple people have just been able to willy-nilly add pages to a website over time. Suddenly you've got a bit of a behemoth. You're thinking about how to manage it. But smart, clear website structure is incre extremely important for our SEO, our keyword targeting and performance, but also our AI search as well. And ultimately, it's actually important for users being able to navigate easily through websites. All of those things incredibly important. When I was an SEO work, I could have got really nerdy on this topic of uh information architecture. I remember designing once one time a spreadsheet of like how to really well structure this kind of stuff and I'm kind of glad in the way that those years are behind me because it's sounds like a lot of work. It kind of is, but it's also a little bit like a filing cabinet, right? If your business has got a filing cabinet and you've not got things in alphabetical order, you've got information everywhere. It's not categorized by different client types or, you know, external internal contacts or whatever it is. What a bling mess. People coming to work in your business thinking, "Goodness, I'm never gonna find that file that I need to find." Suddenly, you've spent like three hours looking for a file. And it's kind of the same thing when we think about website architecture if it's in an absolute mess. It why should AI and human users be seeking that out from the website? Obviously, something that's neatly categorized and logically in the place that it should be on the website has a lot more potential to rank well. And I think sometimes we forget that when we're preoccupied with publishing new content, updating old content, adding something to the website because we think we've got like a a gap, a missing opportunity, and then things start to get chaotic and messy. But those things that you're putting on, the content that you're putting up, you want it to be found ultimately. You want it to perform well. And so you have to also correctly file it. Well, you're talking about the second part of your pillar or your pyramid uh of the on-site content. You want to organize it so it can be found easily and the people enjoy it. What kinds of on-site content are working today? And are they any different to what may have worked last year? And do you predict that type of content to change for next year as well? Yeah, sure. So, a couple of different types of on-site content. Homepage is always the most important in terms of the main thing that your business does. It's almost always the homepage that gets found. So, the majority of the traffic, it's not true for every business, but for most businesses, the majority of the traffic does actually hit the homepage. That's always going to be important. The product or the service pages are also incredibly important particularly for SEO because they're the ones that should be if set up correctly showing for commercial keywords. You should have targeted keywords that would convert for those pages and they should be bringing the most commercial traffic through to the website. Then there's the kind of bulk offormational content that we have on the website. And there's really two ways to sort that type of content. One is a blog, which tends to be a little bit more messy and unstructured, but really excellent if you particularly need to do like new content, if you have changes, if it's time bound stuff that you're doing. The other version of that is creating something like a knowledge base, which in my opinion has a really nice architecture to it because you can have it very topically structured. And actually many businesses start to kind of merge the two together trying to sort their blogs into something that is more knowledgebased like so that it's easier to go into categories and subcategories within a blog rather than it just being the latest news on the website and what's most effective in those. I think it depends on the business and what the setup of the website needs to look like, how you're trying to get users in. But that's those kind of top of the funnel terms that will sometimes be referenced by AI. Important for reasons that we just previously discussed. But there is also sometimes middle of the funnel content there that actually quite often we see moves users towards commercial pages if those users are warm, if they're the right kinds of people, and sometimes even just gets them into your email funnel depending on what it is that you do or sell. Obviously, as CEO of one of the leading search marketing agencies, you have access to some of the best SEO campaigns that are available and as we're talking about like cutting edge as well. Are there any kind of standout pieces that you've seen over the last year or so that um really impress you or think that other people should be trying to emulate although not for our clients competitors? Of course. Yeah, of course. Not for our clients competitors. One of my favorite things, one of the standout things that I've seen um from our team's work in the last year was for a business that uh sells products online. So, an e-commerce type business, but that is very seasonally affected. So, I'm not going to say exactly who it is because we don't want any competitors copying the trash, but they had around a 280% organic revenue increase from the work that we did. And the work was entirely SEO focused. It was a really strong seasonal keyword campaign where because this business actually has different keywords delivering different amounts of revenue to the business at different times of year because it's very changeable based on the seasons. We split those keywords into the four seasons of the year. Summer, winter, autumn, spring. I know my seasons. Summer, autumn, winter, and spring. And then just ahead of each season, we started creating content guides about what you need to do in that season for users. And that kind of content was the stuff that gets referenced a lot. Sometimes it gets referenced in AI. this this particular client performed very well in AI, but we also saw that certain pieces of content would go into discover in Google as well and get thrown out there into uh Google's discover, which is great because then we're getting more relevant content at that season. It's getting picked up because it's a timely topic and then it drove quite big traffic spikes during um high demand months. Uh, one of those Google discover pieces actually drove, I'm just checking the stats, a 940% increase in peak season traffic, which is like wildly huge. So, this isn't a strategy that's going to work for every business, but if a business does have specific seasons to it, and some keywords perform differently at different times of year, what an amazing SEO strategy to have. I was just thinking of the mortgage sector that we often reference on our podcast maybe because we do some fantastic work there but also because I know you and I have been talking about mortgage stuff in the last you couple of years with our reorggaging and so on. Um and I think that's still like a seasonal business where there are more house sales a certain period of the year like there with every sector there tends to be some seasonality. We often think of you know like uh fashion, e-commerce and retail but there are other places too where you know we come over to tax year need to get in touch with the accountant. Oh a thousand%. And quite a lot of the time there's seasons that we might not even realize like it isn't divided into you know the annual seasons of the year. Um, I was just speaking at the UK wedding conference this week and one of their big seasons starts now because there's so many more proposals during this sort of Christmas season, the Christmas and New Year season which that isn't led by the time of like the the the changing of the seasons. It's it's just a time that is romantic for many couples and then Valentine's Day as well. So wedding season then starts to kick off with actually people getting engaged then starting their research phase for their weddings after that that initial engagement moment. So the seasons can be really really different for different businesses and there is usually something that can be picked up on the same as businesses that thrive during Black Friday sales or Christmas sales for example. And I guess with uh Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Christmas sales and whether season or not that tends to rely a lot upon off-site content. So I'm wondering which types to kind of get people on to your let's say you are in e-commerce or retail or whatever it is or you know again service based businesses can be seasonal too. Let's say that is the case and you've got to get that content out there. The off-site content is super important. What kinds of content are working and how do you get it out there that's going to help you with your SEO? Great question. So, there's so many different types of content that you can put out there when it comes to your digital PR and the link building type of content that you do as well. And what works depends so much on the sector that you're in. So, for example, things like comparison articles, best of lists, those tend to be quite popular. How-to content, we're seeing much more being absorbed by AI and less people actually going to read that kind of content. But when it comes to that that sort of peak of your pyramid, the kind of content that really works, you also want to be structuring that around the services or products that you want to push and promote. So you're actually trying to get links, mentions for your brand in different places, different websites on the internet that then focuses. Sometimes it's going to hyperlink through, sometimes it's just going to be mentioning certain aspects of your business, which is also fine. So that then you can actually be building your topical expertise in those areas. that then you've got other sources that Google sees as trustworthy referencing certain things that your business does and that it does well. And the reason I speak about backlinks and mentions there is because we know that Google cares about backlinks and for a long time SEO is focused on making sure that we've got a specific hyperlink on specific anchor text. Now that we're evolving and AI search is coming to the forefront as well, AI doesn't require there to be a hyperlink in order for it to understand the business that's being mentioned. Much more important is the context around that business's name being mentioned or the products that are mentioned because AI can read and understand that context as well. So the kinds of things that work really well massively depends on the industry you're in. Some examples of good PR though is going to be getting featured in articles um that are like newsworthy timely things. That might be comments uh on specific topics that journalists are writing on. It might be again seasonal, something that's coming up and it's going to be timely. Sometimes it's just going to be things like charities that you work with or partnerships you have, sponsorships that you do. That's a great way to get referenced. Um sometimes it's also going to be, it's going to sound old school, but directory listings. These are still incredibly important in lots of specific kinds of areas. Um, and potentially specifically, I'm going to say ones that are most relevant to your niche or industry rather than sort of generic old style directories um, where you're just listing the business, but it's not really a directory that gets used. Actually focus on ones more relevant to your sector. So, those are a couple of the areas that I think people would want to look at with their PR strategy. Yeah, I have flashbacks to filling out a hundred different directory listings back in back in the days. Yeah. Okay. So, it looks like there's a lot that we need to be changing about how we do SEO. There are some fundamentals that still work. We need to dedicate our attention to three areas, but is there anything we should probably stop doing and leave behind in 2025, or do you think everything still gets carried over regardless of how things change? I mean, I think all of the work that we've done as SEOs, if you've been doing good quality white hat SEO, I think you're going to benefit from that and the business is going to benefit from it. So, I don't think there's loads of things that we want to leave behind. The things that I if you if there are things to leave behind, I think it's going to be creating really thin content. My hope is that people would left that behind already and I'm not sure that everyone has particularly with the advent of being able to write uh content quickly on chat GPT. If you're actually creating not very valuable content and that isn't a slight on people who create content on chat GPT, I think it can be done very very well if you're using it as a conversational tool editing together to create something bespoke and personalized. But if you're just whacking in one prompt that's like write me a blog on the best mortgage products in 2026, it's not going to be producing great content based on such a simple prompt as that. So leaving behind any kind of thin content like that, structuring your digital PR, your offsite work more broadly to be actually thinking about context, how your business is described, your USPs and positioning statements within that and not only thinking about backlinks is incredibly important. I think if you get back links, great. But I also don't think you need to be hounding for backlinks like you once did, particularly if AI is going to be a large part of your SEO strategy. Anything else that you'd leave behind, Dale? Well, it's the buying back links that I would leave behind. Like I think backlinks, backlink acquisition as part of a smart SEO and kind of digital PR le strategy makes total sense. But I think for years we've often said that just going out and buying 500 links has been like a really unwise move. And if you haven't left it behind, most certainly leave behind now because they're going to have zero effect. Yeah. And I think there's there's almost different shades of buying back links. And the worst one is like bulk buying cheap backlinks where those sites that you're getting links from are pretty much just link farms. we might say like their sole purpose is to have back links and and the the the quality and credibility of them is not very good. The same with building links on irrelevant sites as well, things that aren't related to your niche or sector. Um, and I would emphasize much more that actually if you are looking at sponsorships, it's being featured in articles that you think are going to make a big difference. If you're looking at things like Forbes sponsorships, for example, totally different game to buying 500 backlinks. Yeah, absolutely. So, now that we've covered quite a bit, Charlie, how do we create a cutting edge SEO strategy for 2026? Fundamentals first. I think we start with the KPIs and how realistic they are, the growth that we want to see in our organic strategy and also worth considering how other channels are supporting that, how SEO is supporting other channels because these things aren't siloed. It's not that we do an SEO campaign in a vacuum. Other channels also support it. Then making a plan and keyword research is still foundational and fundamental to good SEO in 2026. That's going to start broadening out with AI search, but for now, keyword research is still incredibly important. And then building a plan around your technical, your on-site, and your offsite so that you have very clear plans for what you're going to execute and when in each area in order to achieve your goals. And I'm not sure if you did mention in there about just going over your metrics and objectives and just make sure they're as they're super relevant for next year and the crossover for AI search as well. He mentioned it earlier in the podcast, but want to make sure that people are taking that away today as well. 100%. Super. Well, thanks everyone for joining us this week for episode 7 where we talk about how to create a cutting edge SEO strategy for 2026. You can join us next week for episode 8 of the marketing strategies 2026 series where we'll be talking about how to create a content marketing strategy. So really diving into the pieces of content you might want to investigate uh investing your money and time into for next year. And if you want to catch all of the episodes of this series of which they continue to add up ready for 2026, you can go to exposure.ninja/strategies2026. You'll be able to see the entire playlist of all of these. So make sure you do check those out. If you want any more guidance on SEO or just your marketing, your search marketing in general, you can head over to exposureinja.com review where you'll be able to uh send us your information. We'll see how we can help you get the very best out of your marketing and your SEO for 2026 as well. So, thanks very much for joining us and we'll see you all next week.