Aim for recognition over rankings

Sukhjinder says: “Say goodbye to rankings and hello to recognition. It's time to appear everywhere.”

Why is it time to say goodbye to rankings?

“It's not a complete goodbye, but it’s changing your mindset. We're still comfortable with tracking ranking positions as one of our main metrics, and it should be one of our metrics, but we need to become more comfortable with appearing in different ways and broadening our idea of what it means to be discoverable.

We should be focusing on things like brand mentions, entity strength, visual content, and all the different ways that you're surfaced in the SERPs and the more conversational interactions across platforms.

It's broadening that idea and getting out of the comfort zone of tracking the top 10 ranking positions. Even now, that has been made more difficult with Google's change to pagination and how tools are picking up information from beyond position 10.

It’s not a complete goodbye, but it’s time to open your mind to other ways of tracking brand recognition instead.”

How do you measure recognition, and how do you tie that back to ROI?

“It's still evolving. You can do manual checks by carrying out search queries and seeing how you are surfaced and cited across the main forums and platforms related to your industry and your website.

You can also use AI tracking tools or add-ons, which are being developed as we speak. At the moment, I'm using SEOmonitor with the AI search add-on. I've also got Ahrefs. That add-on's a little bit pricier, but I'm also looking into LLMrefs and other tools. You can search for share of voice, brand visibility, and both brand and non-brand traffic. Those are good ways to measure at the moment. LLMrefs is one of the cheaper ways to start tracking AI mentions in places like ChatGPT.

Tying this back to ROI is the other thing we've got to become comfortable with. You can track referral traffic from these different LLM platforms, which is great, but you can't track someone being served a brand name and then them doing an organic brand search, or clicking on a paid ad, a social media ad, etc. It's really tricky.

At the moment, focus on share of voice and brand search, and try to correlate that to activity around citation work, brand-related activities, digital PR, and entity optimization. I don’t have a perfect solution for how to attribute that back to ROI, but I've got a solution in the making, and I'm keeping an eye on other people who are doing it as well.”

When you're having conversations about ROI, internally or with clients, how do you get them on board?

“When I've talked to my clients about this recently, I've referred back to when we came up with KPIs 2 or 3 years ago.

My longest client as a freelancer is a big e-commerce brand, and they’ve been with me for three years. From day one, when we tried to come up with some KPIs, I said, ‘This is the best I can do in terms of forecasting how much performance you're going to get from all of this work,’ and it essentially worked backwards from keyword search volumes in different regions.

I said, ‘With SEO, this is our best guess. There is some data to back up what we're planning to do, but it's not as trackable as something like paid search.’ That's always been the case. I have those existing conversations that I can build on when these new developments come up.

However, if it's a brand-new client, then you have to go back to square one. While we do have solid metrics that we can track, SEO has always been less solid than something like paid search, unless you're willing to invest a lot of data resources and cost into connecting a CRM to an analytics tool. Even then, revenue, lead generation, ROI, etc., is still hard to 100% attribute to activity.

I've got some case studies that I can use to show where I can correlate activity to final revenue on the CRM. You can see the analytics going up and down as well, as a result of that. There is some connection, but that is the best way that we can do it. You can give them case studies and examples to show that you’re also not the only one who's saying this: other popular brands and SEOs are in the same boat.”

Is direct measurable organic traffic dwindling across different industry sectors and countries?

“I haven't gone that far into sectors yet, but I do want to. I've looked at broad data.

For example, in a study from Ahrefs, AI overviews reduced general clicks by 34% year-on-year between March 2024 and 2025. There is also an increase in impressions and a reduction in click-through rate as a result of AI overviews. Zero-click searches are up 24% in the US as well.

Industry-wise, I would like to drill that down because I've got a wide spread of industries across my freelance clients. I have a lead generation client who sells household appliances, and then I've got an e-commerce client who sells children's clothes. Those are two vastly different industries.

The kids' clothes client has a lot of data on how people are searching, just from referral traffic and making purchases. The revenue figures are quite small relative to organic search and paid search, but there's a distinct increase in traffic and revenue from those referral sources over the last 12 months. That's a lot more stark than it is with my lead generation client.

Anecdotally, I can say that there’s a difference, but it’s something that’s worth drilling into.”

Is the SEO role splintering into different functions, and not every SEO will be doing every role?

“I think so, and I think it's already been happening for the last 10 years.

We have seen featured search results and paid search results appearing amongst organic search results, pushing those below the fold – and Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube videos appearing there as well. We've had to integrate more with the different channels and get clued up.

What makes a good Instagram post? How can we put in keywords? How can we split up our YouTube videos and create YouTube videos from our popular organic content, like our FAQs?

However, this definitely takes that a step further. I was talking to someone recently about the new university courses for AI prompt engineers and things related to AI search. In all the podcasts and studies that I've read, seen, and listened to, there's a stark difference between people either saying, ‘It's the end of these jobs,’ or ‘It's going to be fine.’

SEO is going to evolve and build upon the helpful content system and EEAT guidelines we've already been following. It does require us to think in more strategic marketing terms, like old school marketers, and be comfortable with having our brand mentioned across different platforms, but not necessarily being able to track whether someone saw that and then did a search through paid search, organic brand search, or whatever.

Instead, you can look at the final traffic, revenue, or conversion figures and try to correlate the offline PR or citation work that you did a couple of months before those sessions and revenue increased.

We do have to get more clued up on what makes a good Instagram Reel, how to input keywords, etc. I've started to process and template that, and upskill myself on how to convert popular blogs into YouTube content, create videos from this, and get more FAQs, etc.

I personally find that evolution exciting. I've been doing SEO for over 15 years, and having new stuff to learn is exciting to me. It should be welcomed.”

Why are short-form videos and conversational social content critical, and where do they fit into the average buyer journey?

“This content might be more important than critical, depending on the industry and the audience. In e-commerce, users tend to consume more of that type of content, whereas that video format might not be as appropriate for some of my other clients.

I'm thinking about A/B testing different formats and lengths of videos for my lead generation client versus my e-commerce client.

Ultimately, short-form video is being surfaced a lot more in search results on Google. You can see that by looking under special features in your ranking reports, and by doing manual checks.

It’s highly prevalent for informational searches and for anything relating to products. We're doing a few sprints coming up to Black Friday and then lining up the Christmas stuff as well. Buying guides are something that I'm currently optimizing for, which crosses between informational and promotional product searches.”

How do you create video content, and how do you incorporate that into your brand’s presence online?

“I'm currently going through this process. I’m listing the top blog posts for one of my e-commerce brands and figuring out how to convert that content into video across different platforms, like TikTok, Instagram, and even YouTube.

What’s the ideal length, and how should the video look? Should it be a combination of cheap and cheerful animated images and captions with audio, or do I need an actual human in there?

I'm trying to determine what's going to be the most engaging and economical way to create these videos and scale them up. I’m going to carry out an A/B test where one version is in the style of the videos that you see on the BBC News website, which are essentially just animations or images with captions over the top, and the other version is converting a blog to talking points, picking out the data sources, and actually shooting a video based on that.

I'm confident that will surface some decent search results.”

You say that the future SEO is part technical strategist and part storyteller, so why does an SEO need to be a good storyteller?

“I do a lot of content ideation, and I didn’t need to do that earlier on in my career. I’ve started to lean more into helpful content, EEAT, and what helps us to compete in AI search results as well.

For me, it's been coming up with interesting blog ideas and encouraging engagement. We know that engagement metrics can also help with rankings in Google. How can you promote the brand, build your topical authority, and really tell a story about your brand and engage with the client through different content pillars?

Try to think more creatively. Having that skill set will really help with content ideation and encouraging engagement with your supporting content.”

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

“Broaden your definition of what it means to be discoverable.

Go beyond the SERPs and think about what makes you engage with a brand or remember a brand and search for it later on. Think about all the different positive associations that people make with your brand via reviews, consistent high-quality content, trust factors, case studies, and even decent pricing.

Broaden your definition of discoverability and focus more on the brand and the entity itself.”

Sukhjinder Singh is a Freelance SEO Consultant at I Do SEO. Find out more over at IDoSEO.co.uk.