SEO Has Changed: Here's What Works Now

[0:00]If I was starting SEO from scratch today, I wouldn't start with technical audits, keyword tools or backlinks. I would start by learning deeply about how people search today. Because the biggest mistake I see beginners make today is learning outdated SEO strategies that don't work anymore. In fact, by ignoring these outdated strategies, I built not one, but two companies to tens of millions of visits. And two exits largely thanks to SEO. So in this video, I'm going to walk you step-by-step how to learn SEO quickly, so you can get results faster. So, without further ado, let's jump right in with step number one, which is to learn how people actually search in 2026. Now, when people think search, they usually picture someone typing a keyword into Google and clicking on a blue link. Now, that still happens, obviously, but it's no longer the whole story when it comes to search. What actually happens now looks more like a loop. People start with curiosity, then move into validation, then comparison, and finally confirmation. And this is the big change compared to how SEO used to be. They now do all this stuff across several different platforms, not just Google. In fact, I've seen this change happen first firsthand with my own site, Exploding Topics. When we first launched, a huge amount of our leads and customers came from someone searching for a keyword like trend spotting, finding us and signing up. But today, this sign up is more of a journey that happens across several different online platforms. For example, a potential customer might start with Google. In our case, our customers tend to search for something broad like, how to find trends early, or the best way to identify market trends. Then they skim a few articles to get a better idea of how this is all done. Then they head over to YouTube. There they want to see someone actually demonstrate and walk through how these tools work. That way they can see things like screenshots, real examples, pros and cons, and actual use cases. Next comes validation. This is where they head over to a community platform like Reddit and search for things like Exploding Topics, best trend tools, is Exploding Topics worth it? And they're going to these communities because they are looking for honest opinions. They want to know if people actually use the tool or if what they've seen so far is just hype. Now, obviously, a lot of people will use ChatGPT and other LLMs at any stage of this process. Either to start things off or to clarify something they've seen somewhere else. Now, when it comes to AI tools, they'll usually use prompts like, what's the best tool for finding trends early, compare Exploding Topics and Google Trends, and is Exploding Topics good for early stage product research? Now, they're not expecting ChatGPT to make the decision for them. They're basically using it to summarize what's out there and shorten the potential list of tools. Now, the responses that they see will usually mention a few familiar names, brand names that they've probably already encountered on Google, YouTube, or Reddit. Finally, as the person is getting closer to making a decision, they'll usually do some sort of branded search. They'll look up things like Exploding Topics pricing, Exploding Topics alternatives, and Exploding Topics reviews. This is where a decision, yes or no, is pretty close. And once they've gathered enough information across these various platforms, they're ready to make a final decision. As you can see, none of this looks like old school SEO. Instead of using Google search 100% of the time, they use each platform for a specific use case. Google helps them get a grasp on the product category in general. YouTube helps them see the tools in action. Reddit helps them see user feedback, and branded search helps them decide. And obviously ChatGPT helps them refine any questions that they have as they're doing this research. Or to help them decide if this product can help them for their specific situation. So yeah, if you're learning SEO today and focusing 100% on Google, you're missing out on a lot of the customer journey. Now, I'll of course show you exactly how to do this and optimize for all this stuff later in the video. But first, we absolutely cannot skip step number two, which is to learn the SEO fundamentals that still matter. Now that you understand how people actually search today, the next thing to learn is the SEO stuff that still makes a difference. Specifically, you need to know the SEO factors that go into not just ranking in Google, but also in AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. It's really important to nail search intent. In fact, the first thing I'd learn when it comes to learning SEO is understanding search intent at a deep level. And if you think about it, every search is someone trying to accomplish something. They're either trying to learn, trying to compare options or trying to decide. The important thing here is to understand that the keyword itself usually gives you a hint of what the person is trying to do. For example, take this keyword that we're targeting at my site Exploding Topics, how to find trending products. Someone searching for this keyword is trying to understand the space in general. They want to know what's out there and how these tools work. And the page we published matches this search intent. But someone searching for tools for product research is much further along in the process. At this point, they're comparing options and getting close to making a decision, which is why the page we wrote for tools for product research explains what the tools do, who they help, and specific use cases. And if I was to mix up these search intents and get them backwards, I would have very little chance of these pages ranking. Even if I got everything else 100% right, which is why search intent is so key to ranking in Google. Next, I would chunk my content and learn how to structure it in a way that makes it easy to process. Not just for readers, but Google and AI tools, too. You know, as you probably know, people don't read pages line by line, starting from the top and going to the bottom. Instead, they kind of scroll between sections to try to find the section that's important for them. Search engines and LLMs do something really similar. They break pages into chunks and try to understand what each section is about. So your job is to make sure those chunks are super clear. Here's an example of a page that does a great job of chunking information into discrete sections. See how you could pull out one section and it could just basically stand on its own? That's how you want to structure your content. Next, you want to understand the basics of crawling and indexing. You don't need to become a technical SEO expert to rank in Google anymore. But you do need to understand the basics. Things like how search engines find pages, how they decide which pages to index, and why some pages just never rank. For example, if a page isn't linked to from anywhere else, it's not likely to get indexed or rank in Google. And if it's blocked by robots.text, it has no chance of ranking at all. Finally, I would learn how backlinks work today. As you probably already know, backlinks help search engines understand which pages are trusted, which sources get referenced, and how information flows across the internet in general. The key takeaway for SEO today is that all backlinks are not created equal. Not even close. One link from a relevant page is worth 100 times a link from a random website. Even unlinked brand mentions like this one, from respective sources, can help build your brand's authority, and help you rank in search engines and LLMs. Which leads us to our next step, step number three, focus on "Decision Keywords". The next thing I'd learn is understanding which keywords are actually worth targeting now that AI is here. A lot of traditional SEO advice would have you target these informational style keywords. I'm talking about things like, what is X, definition of Y, or how does Z work? Honestly, these keywords converted pretty badly to begin with. And now with AI tools answering these questions directly, they make even less sense to target. Here's a real world example that helps illustrate what I'm talking about. HubSpot took a major hit to their organic traffic a while back. On paper, as you can see in this chart, it looked really bad. Their traffic dropped significantly. But their conversions didn't fall off a cliff. How is this possible? Because a lot of that traffic was coming from low intent definition keywords. Keywords that weren't generating a lot of leads and customers in the first place. So even with this massive traffic drop, HubSpot continued to perform well on branded searches, commercial terms, and comparison and evaluation keywords. In other words, they lost a lot of definition traffic. But they held on to the rankings for keywords that people used when they were about to buy. And that's the big lesson here. If I was starting with SEO today, I wouldn't spend a lot of time on definition keywords. AI is already really good at summarizing basic information. Instead, I'd focus on keywords that show that a choice is about to be made. For example, here are two pages from Exploding Topics that are targeting these high intent terms. These terms are harder for AI to fully replace, and if you rank for these terms, they're much more likely to actually grow your online business. And now it's time for step number four, which is to double down on the right things. Back in the day, I check my Google rankings multiple times a day like a crazy person. But today, I don't really focus as much on rankings. Instead, I look for early signals to see what's working well, so I can double down on it. Here's what this looks like in practice. When I publish a new page, I don't obsessively look in Google to see where it ranks. Instead, I look to see if the page is getting any impressions in Google Search Console. That's a good early sign that Google is willing to show my pages to users. Next, I would start to look at the average position in Google Search Console. Again, this is just to see if the page is starting to creep up the rankings, not obsessing about a specific position. Then, and only then, would I start to look for clicks to that page. Even then, I wouldn't sweat the specific keywords that the page is ranking for all that much. People nowadays search more than ever for super specific terms, and they also use AI prompts. Here's an example of a page on my site that's getting a nice increase in clicks. I honestly don't spend a lot of time analyzing the specific queries that brought them in. As long as the page's performance is overall doing well, I know I'm on the right track. And when I see a page performing well like this, I try to create more of them. So in this case, I'd want to produce other dynamic lists like this, the most popular AI tools or social media platforms with the fastest user growth. So if I was starting out with SEO right now, here's the exact process that I would use over and over again. First, I would publish content tied to people making decisions, not definition keywords. Then I would watch which pages are starting to get impressions. If that seems to be going well, I would create more pages that are similar to those pages that are already doing well. And then I would rinse and repeat over and over again, in other words, doubling down on what's already working. And that's how you scale SEO. So yeah, this is how I learn SEO if I was starting out today. Focus on how people make decisions and do research online. Create content that gets in front of them, and pay attention to the signals that show that you're heading in the right direction. And that approach holds up, no matter how search changes. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you later.