SEO Strategy
If you last thought about SEO two years ago, a lot has happened. Many of the fundamentals have not, but what google rewards, what they punish, and how people search has changed. Old tips can actually be harmful.
The search landscape has transformed, not ceased to exist.
AI Overviews appear on roughly one third of searches in the UK, and roughly 58% of searches in Google end with no clicks on the search results, meaning the searcher gets the answer to their query directly and does not visit a webpage. This has given the impression SEO is less important. In reality, the businesses that get included in the answers that Google provides are the ones that rank organically. AI Overviews pull information from pages that Google already ranks in the top 10. Therefore, they do not have separate rules for what gets pulled. AI Overviews pull information from top ranked organic search pages.
So the question for this type of business is not “how do I optimize for AI search?”. It is the same question as before. Does this website contain a page that provides an answer to the search query that was typed? If it does, you stand a chance of getting cited even if the search results pulled ten blue links or provided an AI summary. If not, then neither of those formats help you.
Related reading: Getting cited in AI Overviews vs just ranking — what actually changes
Opt for a few, high-quality pages over a large quantity of old posts.
Not too long ago, a quantity game worked — publish faster, reach higher rankings. Fortunately, those days are over. The search quality updates in 2025 and beyond clearly identify repetitive, thin content, and favor those with fewer useful pages over those with more pages stuffed with filler content.
This directly relates to the existing posts in the site’s archive. A significant divide exists among the posts published. There is a set of older posts that have a simple yet effective design from 2017 to 2018, and there is a set of more recent, poorly written posts that were simply published to meet a word count goal for each post. Posts currently published on this site should be subject to a standard before being published, if a post is written in response to a question, a person should ask that question to a search engine. This post should be published regardless of the word count.
Local SEO is more important than many people in the industry will tell you
A lot of SEO skip over something that takes minutes: Google interprets an inactive Google Business Profile as a sign a business has closed, and will lower the visibility of said business. No recent photos, no replies to reviews – the algorithm treats that as inactivity, and not neutral.
For the types of businesses that this content marketing strategy targets, this is hands down the most effective low-cost strategy – more impactful than nearly all blog content. Some fresh photos. Some replies to every review, good or bad. This won’t replace a content strategy, but this type of interaction is skipped more often than not.
What really goes into a page that competes
Three things cut across the divide between pages that rank and get cited, versus those that don’t, regardless of which era of SEO advice you’re reading:
It answers an individual question and not a broad topic.
The page “SEO tips for 2026” is going up against hundreds of almost identical pages. The page “How much does link building actually cost for a small UK business” is specific enough for a generic answer to not quite cut it, and is something people actually search for.
It says something a template can’t. If the content could easily be swapped in for any agency’s blog and simply have the business name substituted for another, then it is a failure. This means there need to be actual numbers, actual trade-offs, and an authentic position (even if it is contrarian) rather than simply providing a balanced framework for the ‘wisdom’ that is accepted by most people.
It doesn’t try to be all things to all people. There are pages that try to be all things, and end up being nothing. A page called “link building strategies” that offers ten strategies with very short descriptions is worse than offering three strategies and saying very clearly that is all there is.
Where this leaves the existing content
Every post currently on the site fits within three main categories, and the distribution of the categories is more important than individual changes:
- Edit lightly — older posts that are written in a straight-forward manner that doesn’t need much work. These posts already have a casual, personal tone.
- Replace with new post — newer posts that have the correct topic but are templated, have padding, and have a generic tone.
- Combine with a related post or remove entirely – we don’t need these posts. They don’t answer anything sufficiently to warrant the space they take up.
All of this is a lot of work and is sustained effort. SEO of a site this size is done through multiple publishing efforts, but it is not done through a lot of publishing once and then leaving it. Each of the pages is published with the intention of providing something genuinely useful and current, responding to real questions that people have, rather than using an SEO checklist.
2026 UK SEO Research by SumFactors, Credofy, and AEO-REX): Sources: search-behaviour and AI Overview data