We Tested Every SEO Strategy. Only These 5 Really Work.

SEO is changing. There's chat GPT and Google serving AI results, but there is still Google traffic and loads of it. So, how do you know what the best SEO strategies for 2026 are? Well, today I'm going to break down some of the best SEO strategies that the team here at Exposure Ninja are implementing for our clients. And how do we know that they're the best? Well, everything that you're going to see today has been shortlisted for global search awards. That's right. We've been shortlisted for 14 global search awards. So, these are the creme de la creme. These are some of the best SEO strategies in the world. We're going to break down exactly what we did, why we did it, and most importantly, what you can copy and implement for your business. Strategy number one is the AI search revolution. Now, of course, you know that people are searching on search engines in different ways. They're getting AI answers. They're going straight to Chat GBT and avoiding Google altogether in some cases. So, how do you adapt for this? So, if you don't have an AI search plan, the likelihood is you are already being left behind by competitors. So, what does an AI search plan look like? Let's take a look at some examples. One of our clients runs an e-commerce store selling lawn care products and we wanted to make sure they had really good visibility in all the AI tools. Through our keyword research, we identified the type of conversational topic queries that LLMs and search tools like perplexity were surfacing and then we wrote this content in a way that we knew these tools liked, i.e. bags of firstparty experience, really detailed and super high quality. This type of content is obviously amazing for users because it's so packed with information, but search engines and AI tools love it as well. Because of the way this content was formatted, the topics it targeted, and the links that we built to it, this content picked up some great visibility in tools like Perplexity and Google's AI overviews. In fact, because this content was so well optimized for AI that when Google launched AI mode, this content was already ranking in first place. Now, a quick tip here. If you want to evolve your content strategy to work really well for AI search tools, some of the tools like Perplexity can actually give you a hint on how to do this. And that's something that we used for this client. When a tool like Perplexity goes and does its background research, it will show you the underlying web searches that it is running. You can then make sure that these topics are handled in your content so that when Perplexity runs these searches in the background, it recommends your website as a source and your business as a solution to the customer's problem. And it's working really well for this business. In fact, traffic has increased 120% yearonear despite the carnage that AI is causing to website traffic volumes elsewhere in this industry. This sort of strategy works really well for any business. And in fact, one of our skincare clients, which we're going to come back to in more detail in just a minute, we use this for them doing a very similar thing. We structured the content section on their website not around individual keywords, but around topics and topic clusters. We formatted the content that we're publishing around natural language and making sure it's structured in a way that these AI tools like to use when they're citing sources. Now, this is a massive global brand with a huge online presence, and we still managed to increase the organic traffic to the content section of their website by 451% using this strategy. So, how do you do this for yourself? Well, most people when they're producing content for their website, they think about individual subjects that they want to cover. And that can work really well to an extent, but if you want to take this to the next level, then think about the content that you're publishing in topic clusters. You can break down the individual topics that your audience is interested in, and then think about the subtopics that come off each of these topics. You might have a pillar piece of content on your website which is super detailed and includes all the information anybody could possibly want on that topic. Then supporting that you'll have related pieces of content that go into less detail but about more specific subjects. These less detailed pieces would link through to your pillar content. To identify the topics and subtopics that you want to cover, you really need to understand your target audience in a lot of detail. And that leads us nicely on to strategy number two. Rethinking your audience and keyword research. SEO has changed because search tools have changed and the way that people use those tools has also changed. We are now asking Google much longer tail and more detailed queries and we're asking tools like chat GBT even more personalized queries. And that means we as digital marketers need to move beyond just ranking for individual keywords. Okay. So, how does that work in practice? Well, for one of our clients who is a mortgage business, we identified some distinct buyer journeys that customers for their product would go through. We worked out the stepbystep process that each of these different customer types would move through, and we thought about what topics they would be interested in at each stage of that journey. This allowed us to categorize all of the information that people in these different buyer journeys would be interested in. We then produced different pillar content and supporting content that allowed us to cover each of these topics from multiple angles. And this business had come to us with relatively low organic traffic, just 778 sessions in the prior year. Well, we managed to take that 778 sessions and turn it into 150,000 sessions. That was a 20,000% year-on-year increase. And we then doubled it again the next year. All because we move beyond just posting individual articles on their website to thinking much more strategically about the topics, the pillars and the supporting content that we published and linking all of this back to the buyer journey and the buyer persona. Going back to our skincare climb, we actually identified that there were six different customer profiles. These weren't necessarily demographic profiles, i.e. women aged 30 to 40 who lived in this area with this sort of income bracket. We found actually that that type of demographic profiling was really restrictive for a business like this. So what we did instead was break out these customer profiles into psychoraphics instead. We gave these psychoraphic profiles names like skincare newcomer. We then ran surveys on Facebook to help us understand the drivers and motivations of each of these different personas. This told us things like how easily these people were influenced by peer recommendations and online forums and whether they buy into new trends in skincare or not. Now, you might be thinking, psychoraphics, Tim, I'm just here for the SEO. Just kindly give me five backlink strategies that work. Well, here's the thing. This type of stuff is increasingly important as more of us turn to AI search tools which are giving us really personalized results based on where we're at in our journeys and what sorts of things are most important to us. The information that we collect in surveys like this then allows us to tailor our content to make sure it really resonates with these customer types. For example, if we're targeting a customer profile that is uh uses peer recommendations heavily but is skeptical of new trends, then we want to make sure we're tailoring our content to that audience. For example, by talking about how this new product is getting loads of great reviews online, but it's based on proven ingredients that are tested over time. If we just relied on pure demographics, saying, "Hey, 18 to 30year-olds love this product," we'd be missing all of that nuance. Another one of our clients installs bathrooms for the elderly. We identified that one of the customer segments we most wanted to go after was younger people, for example, children and carers who were in the process of researching bathroom solutions for elderly relatives. This group is very early on in their research and they're also very inclined to use tools like chat GPT. So, we thought about where those people were at, the sort of questions that they'd be asking, and the sort of content that they would most value. We shaped our content strategy around these personas and it got our clients some fantastic results picking up some amazing visibility in chat GBT. So how do you use this for your business? Well, a lot of marketers think about their target audience as one sort of homogeneous blob. Our target audience, they may have a single customer profile in their head which they write to or they think about or they might not have a customer profile at all. But where things are going in 2026 and beyond is the next level deeper. If you can map your audience like this into different customer profiles, that can be really helpful for you to come up with topics that are going to get found by your customers and then when they do find you, the content tone is really going to resonate with them. We'll often conduct surveys or scour Reddit or do phone calls with customers to really understand our clients buyer personas and get under their skin, what makes them tick, what objections they have, what fears and concerns they have. And you can then design your content strategy around these personas. Strategy number three is contentdriven commerce. In the olden days, we just used to write blog post and maybe have a call to action at the bottom of the page. We'd hope that someone would find our content from organic search. They get to the bottom and then they click to get in contact with us or buy a product. In 2026, though, that is no longer enough. With AI tools cannibalizing a lot offormational traffic, marketers need to work harder than ever to make the most of the traffic that they are getting to the content pages on their websites. And that means embedding commercial actions in your content. Okay, so what does this actually look like? Well, for our lawn care client example, this means embedding products into their blogs so that when a visitor is reading about a topic, they don't have to navigate elsewhere on the site. they can just click to add the product to cart directly from the content page. We also did this for our global skin care client embedding similar sort of buy actions inside their content pages. Now, previously the content section on their website hadn't really suited this type of call to action because it was mostly focused on sort of telling the brand's story and sharing expertise. What we did though was help them pivot this towards topic clusters like we talked about earlier. So, skin care routines or deep diving into the effects of particular ingredients in skincare products. These sorts of topics lend themselves much better to linking to individual products. If you're reading about someone's skincare routine and then there's a link through to the product that they've just mentioned, that makes a lot of sense and can drive a real improvement in the revenue that those content pages generate. And this helped to contribute to an 8.5% increase in e-commerce revenue for this client. Now, that might not sound like a lot, but for a business of this size, that is absolutely huge. Okay, so how do you use this? Well, if you're an e-commerce brand, then of course you can just embed e-commerce product information in your content pages, making sure, of course, that those content pages are tailored for the products that you are recommending. But this works just as well for non-ecommerce businesses. If your goal is to generate leads to your website, for example, then you can embed calls to action in your blog posts to submit an inquiry or request a quote or download a brochure. The key is to make sure that those calls to action are relevant to the content that they're being found in. And that typically means that content has to be informational. It has to be helpful and useful. When we've just been taught something really interesting, we are much more likely to then go and inquire or buy from the business that has taught us that information. Speaking of which, if you're watching this thinking, I wish that our digital marketing campaign was being shortlisted for global search awards. Well, maybe we can help you with that. See, the team here at Exposure Ninja works doing exactly this type of thing for our clients in every imaginable industry. Seriously. And if you're looking for some help with your own SEO or broader digital marketing, then you can request a free digital marketing review from the team at Exposure Ninja. Now, safe to say this review is not like other reviews that you may have seen. We have done thousands of these, including for some of the world's largest brands, and they go into loads of detail. We'll look at things like your visibility in search, your visibility in AI search tools, the performance of any paid channels that you're running, as well as the conversion rate optimization and general performance of your website. We'll then take all of our recommendations and map them into a prioritized action plan over the next 6 to 12 months that you can follow to hit the targets that you gave us when you filled in the review form. What review form is that, you might ask? It's the one at exposurinja.com/re. Click the button, tell us a bit of information about the business and give us the goals that you want us to design the plan to achieve. If you're eligible for the free review, we will then send it to you within two to three working days. It is amazing and you will love it. But not everybody is eligible, so you do need to apply for this review at exposuringinja.com/re. Okay, strategy number four, tapping into seasonality. Many businesses experience some sort of seasonality whether or not they're actually aware of it. And now a lot of the time we think about seasonality as a weakness. I.e. we think about it when we're in a bit of a downturn. But far from being a weakness, seasonality can actually be a really useful source of customer momentum that we can tap into with our SEO strategy. Let's take a look. So, back over to the lawn care business. Now, the lawn care business client has a very obvious seasonality pattern because people get their lawns ready for the spring and they enjoy them in the summer and then they prep them in the winter. So, what we decided to do was essentially plan four different content strategies to coincide with each season because each season people are searching for different things. They're thinking about different things to do with their lawn. They're seeing different types of things happening and they've got different questions. So we carried out seasonal keyword research looking at trends data to see when people were searching for different things. We even track those keywords and the performance of them separately in our tool. So we can see how the site is performing each season. We can then work out what content to publish and optimize based on the interest levels that we're anticipating. I.e. the weeks before people are searching for a particular topic. We can publish new content on that topic or go and boost some old content that are being produced. Not only does this benefit search because when people are searching, they see new content that's been published on that topic, but it can also get visibility in places like Google Discover. This particular piece of content blew up on Google Discover because we'd published it in the days before this topic started to get loads of attention online. Now, whilst this approach means, yes, there's a bit more work thinking about when each topic is going to start trending, it can be really effective. In fact, this website is now ranking in the top three positions on Google for 4,874 different keywords. And of course, now that strategy is designed, we can then roll out the same thing year after year, like the garden center that switches out all their garden furniture and places it with all the Christmas decorations in September. Yeah, September. Now, if you don't think that your business has as much seasonality as this company, then fair enough. But I would challenge you that there isn't any seasonality in your business. Often there will be other drivers which are seasonal in nature. For example, are you impacted by the end of the tax year or the summer holidays or the Christmas holidays or the weather getting warm or cool? These experiences are universal across society and they influence our search behavior. So, have a think about what seasonality trends you might be able to tap into and build your content strategy around those. Okay. Strategy number five is trust and authority boosting. AI tools can give their users generic information. So, there's really no point you publishing masses of generic information on your website if you want that content to ever find the light of day. Instead, 2026 and beyond is about leaning into authority, firstparty experience, and the expertise that your business has inside its team. Let's take a look at some examples from the Exposure Ninja award campaigns. With the bathrooms business, trust and credibility is huge. If you're buying a bathroom for one of your elderly relatives, you want to make sure the people going into their home are trustworthy and reliable. This is literally your money, their life. With our client in this space, we lean into that by making sure that content that's published is attributed to someone inside the business. And when that happens, we make sure to give their backstory as well. Founder Sam's personal experience is amazing here and we can tap into that to really build a sense of trust and credibility with the audience and the AI tools surfacing this content for their users. But we wanted to take this authority and credibility building even further into thought leadership. So we conducted a survey to understand the extent of some issues that a lot of customers of this business face. This gave us some statistics that really quantified the scale of the problem that this business was addressing. These are statistics that this business will always own. So when somebody asks a question to an AI tool or a search engine about the scale of this problem, well, here are some reliable statistics that will always be associated with our client, increasing the chance that they are referenced in the answer. And of course, it's an amazing tool to build a connection with the customers of this business. We took it even further, creating a petition on change.org to petition the UK government on this issue. Of course, trust and authority boosting can look very different for different businesses. So, for our mortgage client, we took a different approach. We built loads of tools that would be really useful to customers of this business, helping them work out things like their eligibility for certain types of mortgage. We produced a range of ebooks that again helps demonstrate credibility and authority on the topics that this business was talking about. And it worked. 69,000 keywords ranked in the first 12 months and a 30,000% increase to their content because search engines and visitors are now seeing them as a genuine authority and thought leader in the space. So, how do you use authority and trust building in your business? Well, think about the insight that your business has that nobody else has, including AI. What are you uniquely expert at? What sources of data and information do you have that others would love to get their hands on? Are there any problems in your industry that you can provide some quantitative proof on? The definitive statistics that define the scale of those problems will always be useful. We've done this for clients in the past where we've conducted surveys and noticed that even months or years later, the mainstream media has picked up on data from those surveys because the journalist needed something to quantify a point that they were making. If you can become the source of information and data in your market, that gives you immense power and credibility. Okay, let's talk about the integration effect. The real power of all of this isn't just picking one of the five strategies that we've talked about today. is integrating them and then going a step beyond. And that's exactly the approach that we take. So for the skincare client for example, we didn't just do the SEO and the content. We also helped them with conversion rate optimization and improving the performance of one of their product pages for their hero product which had seen a bit of a drop in revenue and visibility. that conversion rate optimization work improved the performance of that product page and gave them a template that they could roll out to the other products across their portfolio. And for the mortgage client, for example, we didn't just focus on the SEO and content. We also built them an email strategy which segmented their email customer database and sent them out different strings of emails according to where they were at in the journey. For the bathroom company, we increase their lead volume 50% yearonear by improving the performance of their paid search campaigns. So, of course, digital marketing isn't just about SEO and content. But if you are just focusing on SEO and content, the strategies that we've covered today, we've found to work really well in this new era of SEO. Hope you found this video useful. Don't forget to request your free digital marketing review from the team here at Exposure Ninja. And to save.