Start all over again

Olesia says: “Return to the basics and fundamentals, and start all over again. Be very, very specific in what you are doing without those bad explanations, AI, or whatever is fashionable right now.

Just do the basics – the heavy lifting – and the fundamentals in the best way possible.”

What are the basics and fundamentals?

“We’ve had a small revolution recently in SEO with the introduction of AI and many new concepts and shiny tools. To be honest, these often seem to be very old concepts that were remarketed in a new way by people whose goal is usually to sell you something that you might not need.

I know that being basic doesn’t sound as sexy as selling something with AI, but basics really work. It’s very hard to fool people there because you either know what you are doing, or you don’t. What’s good about basics is that you always know the outcome of what you are doing, and you always know what to expect, how much time it takes, how much it costs, and all the specifics involved.

Right now, it’s so popular to say that you should write content that’s human-first and helpful to users, but what does that really mean? When you say that you need human-first content from SEOs, how will they measure if it is successful or not? How do they create it in the first place? How will you understand whether you’ve achieved your goal or not?

Start with your goals and expectations from the user. What is the goal of your website? What do you expect to get from them? Set KPIs and determine how you will measure that. Do you really need lots of content? Do you need to cover the topic in full, as was fashionable last year with the idea of topical authority? Do you really need to write Wikipedia-style articles, or do you need to sell what you are selling?

When you answer those questions, you’ll understand how customers or clients will find you – and how to make it happen.

By basics and fundamental, I mean doing the technical parts in full. Look at your robots.txt. I know how basic that sounds, but people sometimes fail to do that properly and the crawler starts scanning the website where it shouldn’t, or something is blocked in robots.txt and that’s why their website doesn’t perform well. Fix that.

Check if you have backups. You might want to use the database that I encouraged you to create last year. Build your factual database and create content based on it. It will be trustworthy and accurate, and you will create your content based on your potential users’ questions and answering them.

I know it’s fashionable to go into an AI tool, pull in a keyword or topic, and generate lots and lots of content to put on your blog and expect something to happen. That’s not how it works, and I’m afraid that this will have to change.”

What technical SEO issues are you commonly seeing on websites at the moment?

“I see lots of misunderstanding between content SEOs and technical SEOs. Google tells us that they understand code really well and you don’t need to do something specific with your HTML because they will understand everything. That’s quite ambiguous because people then think that Google will understand it even if they have lots of H1s or their content is not properly structured, but it’s not the case.

I’ve tested it for a long time and, when your content is structured and you have the right HTML tags in place, it performs better compared to when it’s not.

I see lots of problems with structured data. It’s often incorrect. People use incorrect IDs and structured data. People have problems with their robots.txt and their site maps. I’ve seen a lot of pages that don’t exist on the website but are still on the site map. I’ve seen important pages being blocked in robots.txt, and I’ve seen pages that should not be available, being available and not being blocked in robots.txt.

There are lots of problems with meta tags and HTML tags – basic tags, like H1 and H2s. Everyone started generating these pieces of content, and sometimes generating the mock-up and HTML in AI, and they don’t even read it before placing it on the website. The results can be disastrous for the business. I’ve seen blogs that were fully deindexed because of these types of things.”

How do you start defining your users’ goals so that you can then ensure they are being met?

“Why does a business have a website? The goal is mostly commercial. They want to sell you something or, if it’s a news website, they want you to buy something using the affiliate links or by consuming the ads on your website. They are still selling points. You need the user to perform some kind of action.

Define what action you want them to perform and make it easy for them to do. How will they do that and why will they do that on your website? Also, if you are an affiliate or you are selling ads, bear in mind that you’re now competing not only with other websites but also with Google – because Google wants to do that instead of you, in many cases. It’s getting a bit trickier for these types of businesses.

If you are in a business like SaaS, consumables, or products, it will be easier for you. You just need to sell those products and market them accordingly in search. Work closely with your marketing team and get their brand position and brand book, the questions consumers have, and all their trials and research.

Look less at keywords, topics, and tools – and maybe don’t use AI a lot, if at all. Work directly with the data from your marketing team.”

How do you set a funnel that you’d like users to follow towards your goal?

“In SEO, it’s quite tricky to do that. Start by optimizing for the keywords that are closer to the bottom of the funnel because you aren’t always going to be successful when moving from the very top.

I often see people start from the very top of the funnel. They never start from the bottom, and they never convert. I’ve seen blogs that had visitors who never made any purchase on the website at all. They visited the blog, they bounced, and they never returned to make a purchase.

That is problematic because you can show a successful graph, where your content is growing and everyone is happy, and you can post it on social media and say how well you performed, but those users don’t actually bring any money to your business.

Building a funnel is a very nice thing to do but start from the bottom, and start at least converting something. Then, you can see that people are searching for your product or your service on Google – unless you’re an affiliate or something like that. If you optimize it, Google will show your product in the search.”

How do you decide on the users that you want to target and bring to your website?

“Again, it’s from the marketing team. They say you should build your brand, and I like the concept of branding, but it’s very tricky for an SEO. How can an SEO build a brand? They always tell you not to build backlinks and build a brand instead, but how do you build a brand without any backlinks?

The concepts of brand and user are very connected because the brand is created for some cohort or category of users. That’s why you work closely with your CMO, or other people involved in the business. If you are a solopreneur, you decide for yourself who your brand targets, who it’s relatable to, and why they buy it.

All these questions are basic, and they all go around the same set. Who will buy it? Why would they buy it? How can you help them buy it from you, not someone else? It’s marketing 101.”

How do you format your content to make it as appealing as possible on the SERP?

“There are different types of content. You have landing pages and you have informational pages, which are closer to the bottom of the funnel or the top of the funnel, and you are building this funnel.

When you are describing a product, you want to present it with as many features as possible, and do that by optimizing with entity SEO. You have this entity, which is your product or your service, and you provide it with the properties of the product in a way that is consumable for your user through the web page or application.

Your description of the product will be the properties. Once you format it as a property, you use HTML tags so that Google will understand that this is a property of the entity. For example, you make your product an H1, and you say that it’s a product, and you use structured data to say that it’s a product. Then, you use the properties as subheadings, lists, or tables.

You construct your DOM in the H hierarchy so that it’s readable for the user and it’s not too overloaded or technical. At the same time, with these tags, you make it so that the search bot also perceives it adequately. It understands that the list belongs to the subheading and the subheading is a property of the entity. Therefore, this entity is related to another entity.

Google has said that it’s very important for you to show them when a product is related to another product, and in what way. Is it a parent product? Is it a child product? Is it an accessory, a sub-product, or something else? That’s very easy to construct with your basic HTML text.”

What do you do with content that isn’t bringing in the right type of user?

“Look at how it performs. Previously, when you had lots of poor-quality content, you might have lost all of your rankings, even for your landing pages and commercial pages. This year, Google sometimes just ignores your blog entirely, but it doesn’t necessarily negatively affect your product pages, which is nice of them to do. It’s not as horrible right now, but it’s still not good because you’re spending money and effort on the content.

Look at its performance. Sometimes, it’s poor-quality content but it performs quite well in search for different reasons. In that case, you just need to slowly substitute it with something better, but not kill it entirely.

If it doesn’t perform at all, you can kick it out of the blog and start creating good-quality content for users and the business. You don’t only create the content for users, you create it for the business as well, so there is this mutually beneficial relationship on the web page.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop making AI gibberish and poisoning everything, which is so popular right now. Stop using all those AI-generation tools that are producing really low-quality results and focus on something that you might have missed while you were distracted by these shining new objects.

Look again at your website. Look at your DOM. Look at your structure. Look at how your pages are related to each other and whether you have internal links in place and a good structure, on both your website and your pages.”

Olesia Korobka is an SEO Entrepreneur, and you can find her over at Fajela.com.