Garrett Sussman: Ross Hudgens. Oh, man. Ross has been doing this for a minute. He knows content. He knows the intersection between psychology, content, SEO, and he’s seen how things are changing. He is the founder of Siege Media. He’s been delivering SEO and content marketing at scale, proudly helping brands like Adidas, boom, Airbnb, boom, and Healthline soar. Siege is a six-time Inc. 5,000 honoree and recognized as one of the best places to work presenting the Evolving Content Marketing Playbook, please welcome Ross Hudgens.

Ross Hudgens: Hey, everybody. Excited to be here. Things are changing, it turns out. So, I think we all know LLMs, AI, all that nature and changing landscape that we’re in means a lot of evolution. But beyond just the fact that we now have new search engines to optimize for, I think there’s an underpinning change or feeling in the search results we’re all kind of sensing as well. So we did a trends report earlier this year, and as part of that, we asked people how competitive do they feel their industry is compared to the previous. And there was a pretty significant jump in statement of actual competitiveness year over year from 2024 to 2025. I think this sort of reflects the overall feeling amongst all of us beyond the fact that there’s less pie to grip from that things are different. They’re difficult. They’re harder.

We’re getting less out of more. And that change means there’s something underfoot that we need to stay in front of to continue to perform for our companies and our and our, websites that we operate on. As part of this, and I think just a feeling we felt in the last year and past couple years is just an increase in the perception or the need for brand to underpin what we’re doing as SEOs to be successful. So Moz put out this new tool called brand authority. It’s kind of a variant of domain authority. If you haven’t heard of it, I highly suggest checking it out. There’s going to be equivalent versions that other people put out as well, but they did a correlation study between recent updates and those that had the highest ratio between the brand authority and domain authority, essentially stating that those who had an outlier from a high domain authority standpoint, but a low brand authority standpoint, more often tended to be the loser in that framework.

That was a pretty clear statement that maybe there is something here with brand authority being actually more credible today than even their own metric. There’s a little bit of an innovator’s dilemma there, where maybe domain authority is not is what Moz is known for, and many of these companies have a version of it themselves. But regardless, this idea that maybe this brand thing is more important than it ever has been became something that became louder and clearer to many of us. So, as part of that, I think that feeling in the data and talking to each other and seeing what’s performing now in search results, it’s a lot harder to extrapolate the positive correlation, or we see the positive correlation of brands are winning.

It’s a feeling, generally. And, when you see results kind of in traffic going up, we kind of just anecdotally have a gut feel that bigger brands are winning on average. But, I think the reverse side of that makes a clear statement of when this is actually the strongest and more likely reality today. And I think the test of this is when a big negative PR event happens. And when that happens, there’s suddenly a change that is dramatic for certain companies. It’s a lot harder to have dramatic positive swings as a brand. It’s normally a one step in front of the other, build great events like this, and then suddenly, you have a pretty strong brand over years and years and years. But, unfortunately, that reputation can swing in a negative extent a lot, lot faster.

So, unfortunately, we’ve been tracking two websites in particular that had a few of these negative PR events. In this case, this company had a public lawsuit against them that was covered in the news and because of that, basically had a big bankruptcy statement. Didn’t go out of business, but basically had to make a statement regarding that. It showed up on their search results, and suddenly, what was a pretty solid company suddenly had a pretty big negative PR event that very clearly showed up in their search results, in my opinion.

And it’s kind of like horizontal right at that peak there, but it’s one of the first clear moments that, hey, some big negative PR thing happened, and then there was a pretty pull, big pull downwards. And you could imagine how that could reflect itself in click through rate, brand searches, people searching reviews, all that, and then Google reflecting that on the non branded searches in a pretty quick fashion. So, this is only like, I’d say, a B- example. I think this next one is the A+ example of this same idea in practice.

So this company, amazing startup, generally, pretty good health product. And at the absolute peak of this graph, a review came out in a reputable website that said their products around health was an expensive way to learn a little. This wasn’t even, like, a hyper negative article, but it’s not an article you’re not excited to see if you’re that company. And it showed up second for their brand search result. And on the review search result, and, of course, other things are happening here that we’re all aware of in terms of AI Overviews and the like that likely are a percentage of this. But the fact that that they essentially were all positive up until that moment that pretty negative PR event occurred. It ranked second on their search result and then we see, really rapid kind of hill downwards in overall non branded search traffic in addition to branded search traffic. I think more clearly makes the argument for this brand idea and just how sharp and present and resonant it is today in all of the work we’re doing in a day to day basis.

So, I think as we think about this and how people are coming to us, generally, an amazing new feature that I think showed up a couple months ago in ahrefs is this branded versus non-branded search. It’s just a guess from them, but generally does a pretty good job of extrapolating what’s non branded and what’s branded. And an overarching theme I saw across all these companies that came to us is a graph like this, where it’s outsized amount of non-branded traffic, no growth in branded traffic, and inevitably, a sharp decline near that end of that hill in more recent times as brand seemingly has gone amplified for all of us.

And, I think part of that, a lot of these companies come to us and they say they want digital PR help, they want link building help. They think that’s the one solution. But the problem is, and as I’ll get into, I don’t think digital PR builds brands. I think it amplifies them. And if that does not exist currently, there is no brand to speak of, that’s problematic forever covering any of this traffic. And unfortunately, I think a lot of this traffic and non-branded, and this is a significant number, it’s not the end of the world, but is a reflection of just what we’re seeing more and more across many websites that simply do not have the positive brand search happening for them.

So, a takeaway, I think, for us, for everybody, based on this assumption, we believe brand is more prominent, more resonant than it ever has been in our day to day activity, is one, we simply have to put our foot down as practitioners, as people in house, as consultants for other people, and we need to say, we will simply not help non-brands. We can’t help you. Our work can be better spent lifting great companies and products that we believe we can make an impact on. Because if we believe that there’s something to this and it’s simply not possible to see results, we will waste a lot of effort and time and energy trying to apply work to a company like this that simply will never have the brand resonance to actually see the results. But the second is a more optimistic take, results. But the second is a more optimistic take that maybe we can’t build brands ourselves, I don’t think that’s a fair assessment, but we can contribute to activities that contribute to building and amplifying that in a one foot and in front of the other kind of way. And I think this is the more exciting path to do something in a graph that looks like this, where the brand search builds, but you also see the proportional increase in non-brand. I think this is a more common occurrence for winners today, or really, the most common occurrence is a graph like this and really where we’re leaning into in particular.

So, in practice, what does this mean? What am I saying we need to kind of evolve to? There’s two. One overarching focus, I think, needs to move towards this idea of product SEO rather than purely technical SEO. And what I mean by that is so much of good, impactful work as an SEO is going to touch things that would have impact without SEO at the core. So, as a website like this, it’s trying to rank for the term cheap flights. This is never going to rank for the term cheap flights because of how we use the word in the H1 or how we sped up site speed, for the most part. It’s going to rank because it has a novel user experience, it has a better flight inventory, it has affordable prices, and it has a brand that people recognize and are willing to click. None of those are captured within the technical SEO kind of map. And I think if we focus more on the right side of this equation rather than the left, we’re more likely to actually drive activity that has value and contributes to building brands over time.

User engagement focus is a big part of that. A conversion rate optimization, which I think are very often one and the same activities, is a big part as well. So, if we’re thinking about how can we get users to the end state, it’s likely also accomplishing a better product experience that, therefore, should drive SEO outcomes as well. So, I’m not saying technical SEO doesn’t have value. The overall theme there, though, is that if we kind of start at the beginning of this presentation and we say, we know that we could do a ton of technical SEO for this website here, but even if it’s the most perfect A+ technical, it’s not this traffic could still be zero. But if we focus on product SEO, improving user experience, improving conversion rate, thinking about user flows, all of that, it’s more likely we can actually go from 1 to 2. While technical SEO, if the brand it’s at max, can always be 1. And if it’s a 0 and we do amazing work in there, it’s still going to be a 0 at the end of the day.

So, if we think about where our energy is spent, we get it to a better place and a more productive place in doing that. As part of this thought process, one of the things we highly recommend more often, if we’re leaning to this idea, is just making sure you’re getting true user experience testing done. So, if you do user experience tests upfront, there’s affordable options now to get videos done, get true feedback from your customers. There’s no excuse as an SEO not to get that information to make better recommendations because if we’re just in isolation jumping into the recommendation state, but we’re not actually a buyer that goes through that actual workflow, we’re missing so much information to actually make the best recommendations that will, in turn, result in lifts for our websites.

So, I think that would essentially, as SEOs, we get that intake, whether it’s from our companies already existing and having that or asking them to go grab that or doing it ourselves via a few recommendations I’ll have, then making the recommendations, then working interdisciplinary, working with other disciplines to bring that to life from a web design and a development standpoint. So, we can only have ideas. We need to collaborate cross functionally in order to get these done, and then we bring it to life. And most importantly, a lot of the product SEO recommendations intuitively have revenue risk. So, there’s a core component of making sure we A/B test those ideas and what we bring to life in these three stages with a strong hypothesis. But if we simply roll that out, we have real risk and, therefore, should have an A/B testing component to that workflow.

So, if user experience is new to you and you want to learn more, I personally think the new beginner’s guide to SEO is an end group. If I have an SEO problem I’m trying to solve, I’m going to this website. I’m asking how to think about mobile accordions or drop downs or top navs. And there’s helpful things in there for every kind of use case. It’s essentially a user experience research hub and highly recommended for anyone who’s trying to learn more or you already feel you’re an expert, you probably already know about this website, but highly recommend checking it out. From a user testing platform standpoint, a few affordable options, Playbook UX or User Brain. There is the exact match domain usertesting[.]com. It’s a little more expensive, but there’s many options out there to get this data and testing done to learn more from your users and become a more performative SEO bringing these things to life.

So, we talked about product SEO as the first component of that holistic contributing to brand idea. The second is when we’re doing digital PR, growing up a little bit. I think our industry historically has done a lot of work that is purely for links, and brands and communication teams would actually not see it. We’d purposely, like, hide our digital PR work over here in this corner, hope the PR teams didn’t see it. And that’s problematic for various reasons. One, if we know that brands can’t be built or we can’t get good traffic now without brand search, if we’re doing a lot of things over here that do not positively contribute to that, almost certainly, it’s doing nothing for us, even if it’s creating some links. We saw that Maas correlation study. That’s one strong example. So, we should build things that tie strongly to product. Yes, have a little less reach, but have product resonance that our brand teams would be excited about and be more likely to actually drive the outcomes we want.

In the world of LLMs, we’re also moving beyond, hey, we’re just generating links for you. We’re now saying we need mentions and we need a co-citation around who we are as a brand to accomplish that. So, we didn’t pitch this company. I have no idea how this occurred, necessarily, but we do content marketing. We do PR. And it doesn’t hurt that they created an article that says best content marketing agency right around our brand term. I wasn’t mad at it. And it’s very possible that this somehow is contributing to us being mentioned and referenced as a top result if you do a search on ChatGPT or Perplexity. We’re coming up pretty commonly. And I believe that’s because a lot of these articles like this exist. We also do help people get on best lists, get reviews, things of that nature, all contribute to more of these co-citations. But in the world of digital PR, also thinking when we’re pitching or maybe we’re helping people write their article, we can think about the terms that co-occur around our brand terms. Thinking about that more thoughtfully and not feeling like it’s a loss if a link doesn’t exist there is a newer 2025 version of what we’re all doing today. 

The second component, as I think the strongest element of PR, if we think about the negative instances, is simply amplifying and accelerating the perception of our brands online. So, helping companies get more reviews, generally, could be a very, very strong focus if we know there’s a heavy link towards brand, if we know we actually have a good product. Building product, review velocity and reviewing review management when you do get occasional bad reviews will help you considerably. But one thing I highly recommend, and is a powerful way to get higher visibility on these LLMs is when you do a search like best HR software or what is the best CRM software on these tools, don’t just stop at where you rank and have visibility on those results. Go further and say, what did you use as a reference point to actually create this list? And they will give you actual examples of where that information came from. And now, you have the gold star of where you should actually go to and mine and work to get on that list and contribute positively. And even more so, you’re actually going to help build a brand directly by managing these things. So, on this result in particular, I did the search, what’s the best HR software, and then I primed it, where are the places you are getting that information.

And, of course, it’s the software review sites. It’s the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which is well known in the CRM or software world. We, if we want to rank highly, should be actively getting a lot of reviews here. I think there’s now an argument on a lot of transactional searches to advertise on these as well. It gives us better visibility and it gives you secondary ROI that maybe other people that are thinking very direct response aren’t being as concerned about on these if they are, pay to play. And many times, they’re pay to accelerate, but if you’re on these transactional round up type searches and you advertise to get higher visibility, a major, major step function as part of that is you’re going to contribute to other people that may create a round up, in your product category. Because they saw you, they’re more likely to list you. And that builds a corpus of information that says you are the best HR software, and then, therefore, you all kind of contribute to that bigger LLM consideration that you are that and, therefore, should be number one on this list, and the cycle perpetuates.

As part of this kind of brand consideration, I think as a wider industry, there’s a business model challenge for those that offer digital PR that you need to do more campaigns in order to keep the lights on. This is in conflict with strong brand strategy where most of the time, the more campaigns you do, depending on your industry, the more you’re stretching the topic relevancy that is possible. Also, the audience you can reach out to, that’s possible. Arms with any kind of relevancy, from a topic standpoint. And that is why these campaigns are so in conflict with that brand search actually going up into the right. And why, very often, there is a disconnect between that brand authority metric and the domain rating metric that we saw previously.

If we can get more comfortable with this, I think we’ll generally do better. It doesn’t mean universally this is true. If you have a glut of data, you have a consumer audience that has broad reach, it’s possible to go more frequent than this. But if you’re in B2B, rarely is more than quarterly for a big trends report something that makes a ton of sense for you unless you have a ton and ton of resources. I think a byproduct of that is what happens is occasionally, virality happens. And my take on this is that, actually, most of the time, virality is a sign of failure. It’s not a good thing. And why that is, is it’s either correlative or causative whether or not the link bump here resulted in negative traffic. But what it normally means when you have something go viral is you had several attempts to go viral. Also, generally, the tighter you are to product, the harder it is to go viral because you have commercial connection.

So, to be tight to product, it’s at arms, first, with going viral. But second, if we’re taking more shots on goal, we’re more likely topically stretched. And now, this also means that we put a lot of budget into this idea of generating doctor links instead of actually building brand. And whether or not the fact that this went viral and maybe generated off topic links is why it generated a downturn, there’s also the strong correlation that that kind of effort and consistency around campaigns that are off topic mean that that energy and budget was not spent towards activities that actually made that product better, their brand better, and their content better. And that link, I think, is pretty clear. So independent of whether it went viral or not, there’s several examples of graphs like this where a lot of people did off-topic link building and they didn’t go viral. But the thing that underpins all of them is that they didn’t do brand building activity. They just focused on generating a few more high domain rating links and a lot of bad outcomes happened because the brand lift did not occur.

So, I think instead of like saying, how many high doctor links did you get me? We need to instead hold the people thinking about PR, brand building, content marketing. So, what did it actually do to build a brand? These amazing tools now, ahrefs has the branded and non branded view. We should look at the before or after of our digital PR results or our PR work and say, did it actually contribute to brand lift? If it did, who cares if it got a ton of high doctor links or went viral? All that matters is that the actual lift happened. Even if it generated three links, but it’s from the most high relevant publications in our niche B2B industry, and then this happened, I bet that non-branded traffic is going to come with pretty quickly as well.

Other kind of just core themes and things we’re thinking about more recently in this world of AI and LLMs are search results are changing rapidly, consumer behavior in certain industries are changing rapidly, others are changing not so quickly at all. As part of that, we typically would have done like a once a year big keyword research project and data kind of grab to set the roadmap for that year. I think this idea is no longer pertinent. Things are changing too quickly, such both on the AI Overview standpoint, the search result feature overview standpoint, and then consumer behavior search changes that we need to refresh this at least quarterly. I think at least gut checking yourself, rerunning your data to make sure you evolve your roadmaps is a necessary beast in order to stay on top of things and be more performative overall.

And as part of that kind of AI Overview, kind of evolution, Rand Fishkin, who will be here, I think, Thursday, gave this great note that I think is a good theme for this year that traffic may be down, but most importantly, revenue’s up. I don’t care if I rank if I rank for, what do astronauts eat in space. I want to care I want to rank for things that drive transactions and I don’t care if AI Overviews take 100% of that traffic. I want that tier zero focused content that drives conversions, and if we take this brand focused activity as well, that’s the most important thing, all things equal.

So, the overarching key here beyond the product SEO, the digital PR, and also as we lean into content, is that I think we should stress ourselves to say, we should rarely be doing something for SEO these days that we wouldn’t have otherwise done without it. An example of this for us, we have this thing called a sales enablement atlas. We think about the permutations of the industry and the services we offer, and we should have thought leadership content or product content across our site that ties into each of those things. And if we can make that visible to buyers and they find it in our site architecture, sure, it’s great if it ranks for some SEO keywords, but I don’t care. I would do that independent of whether or not it does that. And that justification gives it so much more ROI and potential to actually build a brand, actually drive conversion. And as is the overarching theme here, because of that, we also most likely to drive the non-branded search traffic that we want.

So, there’s various ways of doing this in this world where we think about we should only do this if SEO does not exist. One, we can make that happen if we actually make our content visible in the site architecture. We distribute it through the multiple avenues we have available to us. Rippling’s top nav is a great example of this. We’re increasingly really pushing clients to give more visibility to content sections in the top, drop down, whether it’s to certain categories, primary content that’s high converting or high difficulty. All of those things should be given life. You shouldn’t just put your content section in the footer as an afterthought that no one will click. Give it a name that people actually care about and want to go to. Like, a good example is in the mental health space. People don’t go to blog. They often want to get advice. So push to that job to be done for your company and people will be more likely to engage with it and it won’t matter if SEO is there or not. And of course, SEO will do even better because of it. And on the content hub itself, don’t just have the newest to oldest post. Think of it as a library. Give a lot of options. Curate by category. And again, the problems each of your customers have. This is a hub we created for the music tool Splice. And we have different curated content sections. We do have a newest section, but we’re seeing a lot of different options all in one area that is pushed and given visibility in their site architecture. This gives their amazing content life that would give it value independent of search. And, of course, having it one click from the homepage, having it be more visible, giving the most high competition terms visibility there is also going to contribute to good search, but it’s going to be worthwhile regardless.

And beyond that, we should ask ourselves with these digital PR reports and the trends things and all of that, like, if our social teams, our communication teams don’t want to use it, they’re not leveraging it, they don’t care about it, or otherwise, we feel like we need to hide in our corner to go do it over here, that is really problematic for actually seeing any kind of results if we believe this thesis that I’m putting out there today. So, have that rough conversation with your communications team if it does exist. Why aren’t we using this? If we aren’t, we need to kind of recalculate why we should be, maybe think differently about what our goals are for digital PR. Is it brand mentions? Is it brand lift? Can we measure that brand lift after the fact? And not and still, yes, look at the links, but maybe not as lean as hard into them for the overall kind of thought process.

And on the programmatic side, the biggest, biggest problem I see in this realm is there’s so, so many examples of this where this would not make sense to exist if SEO did not exist. There’s just really, really bad long tail where you would never have built that for your users. I think that’s a challenged approach in the same way for the long term health of this as well. So Webflow is an amazing example of this. CMS, I think all of us are probably aware of Webflow. They have a website kind of marketplace where they show all the great examples of Webflow websites for different content types. Portfolios, art portfolios, video portfolios, these are all long tail, different versions, not just portfolios. But it’s a rich experience that you can imagine they wouldn’t want to have, their user team, their product team would want to have, even if programmatic SEO wasn’t a thing, even if SEO wasn’t a thing. And no wonder this drives so much conversion for them and actually ranks quite well because it’s a user first behavior that would have happened otherwise, rather than that super, super crappy long tail that maybe is not doing the same thing.

And if I’m a marijuana card company in Wilmington, North Carolina, or really, that’s not what they are, they maybe are just trying to capture that in that city, but they have no location I don’t know if that’s the best. Like, what I would think through is, almost certainly, you roll this out, you may feel an instant, quick, twinge of dopamine release where there’s some conversion lift from thousands of pages that go live, but the unwritten thing that you don’t see is the brand impression when people land on these pages that are less than. When you could have put more effort into a richer experience across the website where your effort could be better spent, where you actually do have locations and brand that you can build. And that, I think, unwritten thing is almost I know for a fact, this is not going to be a company that’s going to have brand lift month over month. But if they took the Webflow approach, perhaps they would, and indirectly, maybe a state page that is more relevant for them, would have such authority and actually be helpful to be able to rank for long tail terms such as Wilmington, which we see all the time. So, it’s just kind of difference in mindset and opinion, but I think if you want to get some value out of programmatic, ask yourself, would we have this otherwise? 

A great programmatic approach that I’ve seen and seen several people recommend and talk about recently is this tool called Optiversal. It takes this in a really nice direction on the e-commerce side. Essentially, we’ll look through review volume and look for co-occurence of certain terms that you don’t have pages for, such as my dog is a picky eater, and then it uses reverse proxy to kind of auto-generate those pages. Pretty affordable tool and it’s something users want. Clearly, they’re indicating that I care about this. It’s helpful. And this is a right way to do programmatic, in my opinion, and is why it’s working for these big brands that have a lot of review volume.

So, on the content side, same idea. If it weren’t true for SEO, we if we want to do it for SEO, we probably shouldn’t do it at all. We have an ROI calculator, and as part of that, we use this every day in sales. It’s great that it ranks for some keywords, but we would have done it otherwise. And that’s probably why it’s ranking pretty well for us as well. So, if you don’t have like, that connection is also important because if you don’t have a specific product differentiation, or data, or an opinion that gives you a reason to have built that without that, you probably don’t have much of a reason to rank either.

And because of that, you’re not creating a positive brand impression, and it’s not doing as well, and you’re not building that on-brand of traffic because of it. So that, for US Bank, they’re obviously a bank that offers mortgages. They have a mortgage rates page as compared to a super long tail affiliate site that will never offer anything of value to reasonably have a justification for ranking for this. They would have it independent of SEO, but just so it turns out, they rank for SEO as well.

And I think the core theme under this is that we only have so much time and effort. We’re being asked to do more with less. And if we can basically go out in our silos and do SEO and then go do brand over here, and there’s less search pie to grab, how are we going to win? It’s so competitive, going back to that first graph. We need to be doubly efficient in every activity we take. And If we do that, I think we’re more likely to have the outcomes we want and build the brands and have the non-branded traffic lift that we’re all hoping to gather.

And, of course, this is going to create diversification. We’re going to become better marketers. We’re going to get better at other channels. We’re going to be holistic in our efforts. It’s going to even if our pie shrinks, the extra 30% that we generated from direct traffic and referral traffic will make up for that. And it’s going to be transactional rather than traffic focused work. And that is, of course, going to contribute positively to to all that we do.

So, hopefully, the core thing I would ask people to take from this is, like, would we do this content today if SEO didn’t exist? If that’s the case, I think we’re on the right path. But if we’re not, I think the data shows we’re not going to have much search traffic at the end of the day, because of that lack of energy in the right places. So thank you. Best of luck.