The Evolution of SEO: Navigating the Shift from Keyword Density to AI-Driven Strategies

Hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. And today we have Derek Kent, who is the SEO Director of iNet Media Ltd. Hey Derek, how’s it going?

Good to meet you. It’s going good.

Lovely there. Before we move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey a bit by how come you landed in the SEO space and also a bit about inet Media. What do you guys do, what you guys specialize in? And we take it off from there.

Yeah, sure. So I graduated with my marketing degree in 08 and began working in advertising for a large media company and then went into corporate marketing for a large international home building company. And then while I was there I started a copywriting business that people started to ask me to optimize things for search engines and then very quickly transitioned into SEO. Then began my own SEO digital marketing business that took me around the world, got to work in very interesting places across Europe, across Asia, across Australia and across South America before coming back to Canada and then eventually landing the role of the SEO Director at inet Media and then starting a agriculturally based digital agency with the owners of INET Media. So I’m still the SEO director there, but also the marketing director at inetag. And what INET Media specializes in is we’re a full stackdigital marketing agency. So developers, ui, UX designers, content writers, SEO specialists, paid search specialists, social media, advertising and content creating specialists, also very professional project and account managers on our accounts team. So we’re 24 people strong and we have clients across Canada, the United States and the uk.

And believe me that the United States and the uk, they love getting that haircut on the price when they hire a Canadian agency because it’s always quite a good surprise for them when they see how much we do and how reasonable our costs are. But that’s about me, where I am now and what inet Media does.

Lovely, lovely. And Derek, when you started SEO career, the overall SEO, the image landscape was much different. Right. So what are some of the biggest changes or shifts you have seen in the SEO landscape over these years? And talk us through the most significant Google update as per you.

Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely changed because I’ve been in Marketing overall for 16 years, you count my four years of education, 20 years. I tend not to because cutting your teeth on real experience is much more valuable. Backed by school is good, but the actual experience is much, much different. So I have been in SEO for coming on now about 12 to 13 of those years and what I’ve noticed from all the algorithm updates and how things are ranked, keyword density and content volume and links from things like personal blog networks have definitely gone to the way of the past. I do see the algorithm now prioritizing a lot more traffic and engagement, especially with the helpful content update. So if your content is not just SEO optimized, but actually written for human beings to read and take in and not over fluffing the content and being actually valuable for what you want to help your customers with, you’ll gain more traffic and engagement and that content will outrank the guy that has 12,000 or 122000 words and 12 targeted keywords and not getting it’s all SEO optimized but isn’t getting traffic because it’s not helpful.

It’s overly fluffy, it’s hard to read because it’s so optimized. But there is still a mix. Your target keywords do still need to be included for search engines to help find them, but then traffic and engagement I see to be heavily prioritized, especially again since the helpful content update. So the biggest advancement I would see, especially with AI is using AI as the assistant and not as the writer. So have IT help you do research because it does it very quickly. Have it help you create an outline, but make sure a human is writing your content and then all of your yeah, and because Google is starting to know index and devalue AI generated content because it is a product itself, it wants to create good results for their customers using it as a search engine and not just pump out a bunch of fluffy AI garbage, so to speak. But it’s still a great assistant and tool. And so what I do see in SEO nowadays is the need to hit all your content with an extension, a Chrome extension like copy leaks, to make sure it’s not coming up 100% AI generated because you also don’t want to be paying a writer a salary and then have them just using the $20 a month ChatGPT subscription costs.

So you’re actually hired ChatGPT. You might as well just use that or Grok or Gemini, whatever it happens to be. So that’s one of the biggest advancements I’ve seen in SEO lately would be the priority of traffic and engagement on your website and so actually creating helpful content to get that looking for things like content decay. If you work for a client that has 10 products but you have 270 blog posts, stop creating new content, start Looking at your blog posts that are actually ranking and helping people see if you have similar ones, roll them up into one helpful blog post. And if that means content needs to be cut down or the amount of blogs you have needs to be cut down, that’s better than having content decay on your website. Because when Google sees multiple pages or posts that are not getting any traffic, they will rank your entire website lower. So traffic, prioritize traffic and engagement, prioritize helpful content and make sure that your writers are using AI as an assistant and not the writer.

Absolutely. More of as an enabler versus using it as the final product. Because it’s not there. It’s still not there. And I’m sure Google being Google will always stay ahead of the curve.

That’s true. And that’s actually an interesting point because I see those articles where clients will ask me like, oh, I heard that SEO’s dead. And I’m like, okay, I know the article you’re talking about on Search Engine Journal or wherever it was, but if you actually read past the headline and read the article, it goes on to say and conclude that SEO is not dead. And this is actually a great way to explain this to clients, which is AI is not actually artificial intelligence. It’s an LLM. It’s a large language model. So what it’s doing is it’s collecting data from online books, websites and forums, much like a traditional search engine does. It also uses things like entity recognition such as people, places and topics, again, just like a traditional search engine. So when you’re getting things like the acronym, the AI, similar acronym SGE search, Generative Experience or geo Generative Engine Optimization. One of the main places that the AI generated answer is gathering information is from Google. And like I mentioned before, it’s using data collection from online books, websites and forums like a traditional search engine, using entity recognition for people, places, topics, just like a traditional search engine.

So when AI is scraping Google to provide you a generated answer, if your content is SEO optimized, you will have a better chance showing up as part of the references for that generated AI result. And the reason being is AI is using things like structured data markup or rich snippets that we already use in traditional SEO to identify. This is an article, this is a service, this is a person’s bio page, this is a location page, this is, et cetera, topic, et cetera, reviews. It’s using the same type of structured data markup to identify content and put it into its generative answer. Then there’s also the aspect of people that want to browse their own answers and people that just want the answer given to them, which is where traditional search engines will stay very viable. And the reason being, if you’re asking something like, what is the age of Ryan Gosling? I don’t actually know his age, but it tells you he’s 40 years old. That is a very objective answer. It’s an easy answer to get. How old is Ryan Gosling? 40 years old. Okay, there’s the answer. But if you ask it something subjective, what is the best dog breed?

It’s going to scrape the web and see there’s a thousand articles on huskies being the best dog breed and 200 on beagles. So it’s going to say husky’s the best dog breed. But again, that’s a subjective answer. You might think differently. I think beagles are the best dog breed, but it’s telling me huskies just because it’s scraped the web and the information it has in its data archive and just giving you an answer. So there’ll be times where you want to look through a traditional search engine to find the answer that supports what you want to see. And that’s the difference between objective and subjective searching. Right. So objective searching, hard answer. What is two plus two? Obviously, the AI is going to tell you four. You don’t need to search for the answer to see some kind of abstract answer or something like that. But that is a big difference in people saying SEO is dead. When I would argue if your website is SEO optimized properly, you will be found by AI or LLMs. Really?

Yeah, absolutely. As an SEO director yourself, direct how do you approach data analysis and when determining what strategies will work best for your clients across different niches? And if you could walk us through your process, please.

So that’s a great question because I love data. It always tells a story. And so our data process would be to. At the beginning of the SEO process, actually one of the best things to have and to just take this back a minute, is have a process to follow. Have a process that you follow so that you don’t miss anything, but have a process so that when you grow a team, you can teach your team to follow it and empower them and hold them accountable and let them think creatively because they don’t need to think about all the little things because that’s involved in the process. So in our my process that I teach my team, the very first thing to start on is checking all of your Google tools. Are they on the site? Are they optimized Are they working together? Do you have Tag Manager with GA4, Search Console, Google Business Profile, et cetera, all on the site verified and working together. Then before you even start looking at data, make sure your website is tracking and measuring properly. Have GA4 test it. Make sure it’s tracking everything properly. Have Google Tag Manager installed to make sure all of your unique conversions that are now Google just started calling them key events so your conversions and key events are tracking properly.

Some of these can be set up natively in GA4 now, but some of the more complicated conversions you need to use Google Tag Manager. So I do believe it’s always important to use Google Tag Manager because you can also debug your website to make sure your triggers and tags are firing properly and your clicks and buttons and links and whatnot are all tracking properly. So have a plan to measure before you start any campaigns, then taking it further into the campaign. Also your organic keywords what I like to look at data wise is your organic keyword ranking and however you’re tracking that SEMrush, ATrisMoz, whatever tool you’re using, they’re all similar with different type of skill sets and helpful points. But I prefer semrush. So have your organic keywords tracking. Have some kind of dashboard to share with your client that simplifies Google Analytics because if it’s not an e commerce site, there’s going to be about 90% of GA4 that you don’t need and we’ll just confuse them. So have a dashboard to simplify the data. Then look at things like your engaged sessions and your key events, your conversions. That’s almost all I look at because a session is some of your most valuable traffic because we know someone clicked, scrolled or viewed more than two pages.

But an engaged session is the same thing except they lasted longer than at least 10 seconds on the site. And you can adjust your engaged sessions time tracking. So I like to adjust mine based on the average session time on the website. If it’s two, two and a half minutes, adjust that to at least be 30 seconds, which I believe is the maximum unless they changed it. That way you’ll be able to see you’ll see a number like 7000 sessions in the last 30 days, but the engaged sessions will be like 1500. That’s a much more valuable number. So 1500 sessions in the last 30 days lasted at least over 30 seconds. Then I like to look at the key events. How many people actually hit the thank you page after filling out a form? How many People click to call and any kind of unique conversions. You might have some secondary conversions such as downloading white papers and infographics and things like that that you want to track. So that’s one good thing to set up and check. Is the data organic keywords, engaged sessions, key events and conversions, then individual page traffic as well.

Because when you drill down on the permalink and look at just your blog traffic, it’s a really good indication of what people are coming to your website for. Very niche subjects. I could quickly use an example for a divorce lawyer. People weren’t coming to the website for divorce services. The number one thing they came to the website for, even above their homepage, was a blog post about child support and child custody. And that makes a lot of sense because that’s what people are thinking about during that whole unfortunate process. So we take that to the client and they’re like, yeah, absolutely. That’s the number one question we get. Okay, let’s expand on this. And instead of writing more blog content on this, let’s take this already ranking blog content and expand on it and make it more helpful. Can we add FAQs? Can we add your process that you go through? Can we add a short video about how you understand how challenging this is? So that actually brings me to my last point, which is have a process to set up your tracking, have a dashboard you can share with your client to show them what you’re doing and to prove your results, make SEO a bit tangible for them.

Have a plan to track your conversions, look at individual page and post traffic to see the story that the data is telling you. But the number one thing you can do with your data analysis planning is talk to the client about it and view it with the client. Because often you will gain insights where the data’s taking you in the wrong direction. And what I mean by that is just one more example. Here is a garage door company we worked with that’s all across North America, a very large company. I would see that the garage door ABC A is looked at in the data way more than B, B way more than C. But when actually talking to the client, they say most people shop for A, they get scared of the price, then they go to B, they still get scared of the price, and then they go to C. So C is our number one bestseller. But most SEOs that don’t speak to their client will be marketing A and B like crazy. And a little bit of C maybe. But now after talking to the client, we know that your third highest traffic and engagement product page is actually your number one seller.

You can now roll that up into your marketing strategies. On product A and product B, you can add a caveat that says, hey, if, if this is outside your price range, consider product C. And now you’re capturing that traffic. And so this is where SEO looks and data analysis looks more and more like real marketing. Instead of using SEO to just capture people through optimization and then hope they buy or convert or do something, or look at the data and only rely on that, the number one thing you can do is take that SEO strategy, take that data analysis, sit down with your client and just talk it through with them.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you have had quite a bit of success driving 15 to 20% sales growth through organic traffic and improving website engagement. Like you’re talking about, give some tricks up your sleeve. If, if you were to point out top three or whatever tactics that you want to share today, please feel free.

So I would say the number one thing you could possibly do for your SEO strategy to be successful is to understand your client and have a process to do that. And I know so many people saying, of course, understand your clients to have a good SEO strategy, but so many people jump directly into their tools, they start crawling the website with Semrush, doing keyword data and things like that. I would take one step back, read the. You would not believe the amount of SEO specialists that bring a strategy to me that have not actually read the client’s website, they have not read the top competitor’s website, they’ve just gone directly into the tools. Build yourself a bit of a process to have a notes document of key points that you want to find. Also, if you’re from India marketing for a Canadian business, do they separate their city into quadrants? Northwest, south, east, etc? Do you understand that winter and summer are going to be completely different marketable months for that business? Yeah. And that’s. That would be like me marketing in India. I would need to understand that Delhi is separated by sectors. Am I talking about sector nine?

You’re marketing to Calgary, Alberta from India. Are you talking about people in the Northwest? Are you talking about air conditioning in the middle of December in the winter, when no one’s buying that your client know their seasonality, know their sales range, have a good scope document for your client to fill out at the very beginning?

Absolutely.

And also recognize when your client is possibly bending the truth to send your marketing company out on a suicide mission if they’re a Canadian company entering the United States or they just tell you we Want business from the United States, but in their data all their business comes from certain locations in Canada. Have that conversation with them. Say I want you to market to your base first. So my top SEO tip would be to understand your client before you start anything. And my second tip is related to that. Have a process that you follow. So the first step in the process is to understand your client. The second step in the process is to organize your documents, logos, files, brand guidelines the client supplies into a single further folder that your entire team can access. Don’t think, have things on your desktop, email, chats. Yeah keep it all in one area and be that person for your client that always has something, has everything organized. Then the next step would be take care of all your data and tools. Make sure your Semrush audit is set up. Whatever your citation tool is local, Viking Bright local, whatever you are using, make sure your SEO tool is set up.

Yoast Rank Math, whatever you’re using, all your Google tools that we discussed before, make sure those are all set up and tracking and working properly before you get started. Then start your keyword research, start your metadata writing, all the basics. Start your audit. Then when getting into an audit, before you touch your tools again manually, use your customer’s website, your client’s website as one of their customers. I’m not saying go buy a bunch of stuff from them. Complete the journey that they expect their customers to do. And you’ll often find lots and lots of points of friction in that. You’ll see downloadable PDFs that aren’t working or are way out of date that Semrush never picked up. You’ll see all kinds of different things that just could be smoothed out to improve the process but before you even touch your tools. In fact, I can almost guarantee that when you manually audit your client’s website, you will find better improvement suggestions than your tools do. Like Moz Ahrefs and Semrush. They’re great at picking up things like content to HTML imbalances, broken links, missing alt tags, duplicate metadata. They’re still really great for that stuff.

That would be very hard to catch manually. But do a manual audit first and again. To take it back to my second tip, have that process so you’re always following it in order. And then when you build a solid team, teach them your process, give them your process and hold them accountable to stick to it. Because when your team members come to you saying I’m having trouble with this, are you following the process or do we need to adjust it and add something into it. And when they start adjusting the SEO process with you, it’s becoming your teams and they become a lot more empowered to feel like they want to use it. Also, you’ll be able to document things that change with Google. Like when Google my business became Google Business Profile and they scrapped a lot of tools such as the site business where you could button push and turn your entire Google My business profile into a mini website. Do you remember that?

Yeah.

Do you remember how bad that was? Yeah, absolutely I remember. I saw that. Now all my clients were asking, should we do this? Should we do this? I’m like, no, no. It’s so garbage. It’s the worst looking site. It’s from Google, but oddly not optimized at all. And they’re going to scrap it soon. And they did scrap it. And so you can use your process to even make a note to say they scrapped this in November 2020. I’m just guessing, I can’t remember right now. I don’t have it in front of me. But it’s a great way for when clients eventually ask you, is this still available? You can look like the smartest guy in the room right away because you’ve got your process in front of you and you’re like, actually it’s not something like even short links or short names being available in Google Business Profile. If you have one, you get to keep it. But if you don’t have one, you can no longer set them. So when you have that in your GBP optimization, you can leave that in there to say if your client has this set, if you remove it, you can’t get it back, you can just leave it.

But they’re no longer able to set for new profiles. So you’re always up to date on the latest changes with Google. So that’s my biggest thing. Get to know your client, have a process that you follow and do manual audits and have quarterly, if not monthly meetings with your clients. Just 30 minute check ins where you share a dashboard that they have access to. And just make sure that your strategy is on track and they don’t want to change focus because the more you’re in front of your client talking to them, the more if you’re not pulling results or things aren’t going your way, they’re not going to get rid of you and look for anyone else. They trust you. They know that everything’s not going to go right all the time. Like Derek and his team are always on top of it, always flexible, always communicating the opportunities and the gaps to me, honestly, there’ll be clients forever.

Absolutely. Very valid point there. And I love the point wherein you mentioned about reading through the client’s website, understanding the business before actually going and typing in the domain URL on any tool or any platform. And that is what, unfortunately, a lot of specialists do these days. That’s a fact. So I’m glad you raised that point. And then. Yeah, Derek, so you know, you have been in this space for quite some time now. So what is your favorite client story?

Oh, favorite client story. Oh, man, that’s a good one. I would have to say it would be for a very challenging, a very challenging industry of a gentleman that does sales, negotiation, training. And again, this is where I mentioned before that SEO more and more is looking like real marketing than simple optimization. And this will go into all of the secrets, tips, tricks, whatever you want to call them that I brought up before. And he did the same thing, sent me on a suicide mission to say, market to the America from Canada. I’m from Canada. This client’s from Canada. Market to America. That’s where all the money is. And they always hear the same thing, 1% of X amount of dollars is Y amount of dollars. So looking at his data, I said, all of your current customers come from this area. We should market to them first. And this is a very tried and true marketing strategy. The 8020 rule, where 20% of your customers produce 80% of your revenue. So play to your cheerleaders first, make your base happy, and through that process, you will naturally start building new clients. He fought me on it at first.

So I was like, you’re the client, you’re paying the bills. But I want this on the record that I’m saying this. We tried to enter the United States market. He just got crushed. So he went back to me and said, what’s going on? I said, let’s try marketing to your base. So we tried marketing to his base SEO, focusing on the location where his traffic and engagement was already working, started getting leads immediately. So that was already a work because I really understood his business from talking to him and his data together. And of course, he fought me on the data results, did it his way for a little bit, but because I was constantly meeting with him, even when things weren’t working out, he trusted me to continue on the path and then actually switch strategy completely. We started marketing to his base. Everything started working out, but leads that were coming in, which is my job as the marketer, his job is on and his team on the sales side to close Them weren’t closing. And so now this has nothing to do with SEO strategy and targeting different locations. This is about knowing their business.

So I went through the website as a customer and noticed against his competitors, price point was way too high and a lot of the courses could be available for free on places like YouTube. So I’m like, you need to cut your courses in half and make them paid and free. It was a very difficult conversation to have. But thankfully from everything happening in the past, he trusted me to do and we did that. He took half of his courses, made them free, and the other half made them paid. But then at the end of the free courses for anyone that completed them, we moved them over to the paid, which was an internal linking strategy. So we’re getting a bit back to SEO now. Where this comes back to SEO looking like real marketing is I actually used his website like a customer, looked at his competitors, very true, pure marketing strategy. Talked to him about a campaign and marketing strategy that needs to shift his entire business model. Then where the SEO comes in is those free courses drove a lot of traffic and engagement. People that were stopped by the large price point were now engaging with his website.

And Google just saw it lit up like a Christmas tree because there’s so many users and traffic engaging on his website now. He’s now ranking much higher because there’s tons of activity, all the keywords, stuff like that already in place, sales training, et cetera. But they weren’t getting any traffic for Google to actually see that people are using the site. But now people are taking courses on the site, so they’re spending more time on it. They’re not bouncing off, they’re engaging with multiple pages and they’re clicking conversion links to reach out to get their certificates and to be marketed to for the free courses. And now this is why it’s my favorite SEO story is his entire business has been transformed. He trusts me, he trusts our agency. He’s a client for life. He goes and tells. He’s also a business owner. And business owners know other business owners and they talk to each other. So when it’s not someone that’s in competition to him, they say you have to go to inet Media. They’re so professional, they know what they’re doing. They meet with you, they talk with you, they don’t hide when things aren’t going well, if your engaged sessions aren’t good, some SEOs will show impressions or, sorry, that’s paid search views.

You’ll show the views are high, the users are high. But the conversions for the key events are low, so we don’t cherry pick the data. We always give our client access to their data dashboard so they can see it whenever they want. But I would have to say that’s my favorite example because it combines successful SEO strategy that came from real marketing and meeting and discussing with the clients.

Lovely.

Great.

Yeah, great. Derek, thank you so much for the insights. But before I let you go, a quick rapid fire.

A rapid fire of insights.

Just some audio.

Oh, just about me. Oh, I’d have to say. If you’re interested in reaching out for SEO services in Canada, United States or the uk, please visit Inet Media ca. If you’re interested in agricultural based marketing, we have a focused agency just on that. I have six years of agricultural marketing experience and I’m on the Kamet board. The Canadian Agri Marketing association works very closely with nama, the North American Agri Marketing Association. So you can reach out to us there at Inet Egg Ag. Can’t speak right now. INET Ag ca. And reach out to us there for anything ag production, ag business, agri food or ag tech. And that’s, I guess that’s my big thanks for letting me have a plug there at the end.

Yeah, lovely. Derek, thank you so much for doing this with us. Yeah, I really appreciate it, man. Cheers.

Yeah, thanks for having me.