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SEO updates you need to know
Sponsor: Duda
The rules of search are shifting fast. If your strategy is still focused on just publishing more blog posts, you risk wasting budget and losing to competitors who invest in more effective strategies and a better website experience.
Join our webinar to learn what "quality" really means in an AI-first world, how to measure it with confidence, and how to build content that provides value to a brand.
๐๏ธHost: Mark Williams-Cookโ
๐ฅPanellists: Bengu Sarica Dincer and Yagmur Simsekโ
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15th January 2026
๐18:00 UTC
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Search with Candour podcast
Why AI makes long-tail keywords MORE powerful
Season 4: Episode 53
In this week's episode of Search with Candour, Jack Chambers-Ward welcomes Nicole Lee to discuss the significance of long tail keywords in SEO and content marketing.
Jack and Nicole delve into how these keywords become even more crucial in the age of AI, focusing on creating personalised, bottom-of-funnel content.
The episode also covers Nicole's strategies for programmatic SEO, the challenges of setting client expectations, and the importance of high-intent content.
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This week's solicited tips:
It can't rank anywhere except where its content takes it
Broadly speaking there is a "Ranking" and "Post Ranking" phase to generating the SERPs you see. Here is how I believe CTR plays a role in both of these phases and why "We don't use CTR directly in ranking" is true in my opinion:
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๐จโ๐ป Ranking is a relatively long and ongoing page/site-centric process Google goes through to generate a variety of scores, including things like PageRank. At this level, Google uses a model that tries to predict CTR for a set of pages based on how users respond to a query. This means that individual clicks on a specific site do not change the ranking for that site, it's being compressed into a more general model of "these are the types of pages a user is looking for".
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Evidence for this:
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Established principle - they have done this in Google Ads for years as a component of Quality Score
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Good evidence within Google endpoint exploit of data showing what I believe to be CTR predictions that would change when page title changed
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Logical basis for how other systems that respond to user interaction work
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Aligns with everything Google has told us
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๐ป Post-ranking is a comparatively fast process and the stage where things like rich results are generated. It is at this stage you can have "re-ranking" of results based on SERP interaction. If SERP behaviour radically goes outside of the expected CTR model, Google will re-rank the results for that query. It is important to note that I believe this is happening agnostic of the specific site/page, it's a query-centric method that doesn't benefit that URL.
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Evidence for this:
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The DOJ trial gave a specific example of how Google does this post ranking using the example of a SERP for "nice pictures" and then a terrorist attack in Nice, France meaning the click behaviour for "nice pictures" changed, so results were re-ranked temporarily.
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Every CTR manipulation test I've seen has the same results: It works until CTR manipulation stops then everything returns to "normal" as it was ranked, which makes me strongly believe it is only affecting this post-ranking query-centric stage.
โ I think there is a lot of confusion when the term "used in ranking" refers to a very specific part of Google's systems where pages and sites are scored, whereas our layman usage perhaps refers to "everything Google does to make the SERP"
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SEO is easy. ๐
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Content isn't the only thing that tells users what you're thinking
Want to get 10% more on all content investments you make on your website, forever? That's how to think about the value of technical SEO audits - as amplifiers of your efforts.
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This means:
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๐ If you're currently not getting much traffic, an SEO audit is unlikely* to produce any immediate value. You're amplifying very small numbers.
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๐ On larger sites with more traffic, there is a higher probability that you'll get some immediate payoff as solving issues and unlocking opportunities translate into more traffic.
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๐ The big win is the compounding return on improved efficiency. If your technical audit means you squeeze just 10% more out of your efforts, you're effectively getting 10% more value out of every single piece of content you write, forever ๐คฉ
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*On very rare occasions there may be same huge blocker than unlocks traffic, but these situations are very rare!
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Intent volume is reality. What you remember, that is the illusion.
I've talked about how unhelpful "search volume" is in many cases for years, and it is doubly true for AI prompts๐น
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With prompts being longer and more complex than traditional searches, ๐ข๐ง๐ญ๐๐ง๐ญ ๐ฏ๐จ๐ฅ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ is more important than ever. โฌ
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This is actually one the reasons why queries in People Also Ask data are regularly "zero" volume is because they tend to be longer queries with more words (I get asked about this ALL THE TIME running AlsoAsked). When a query is 7-8 words long, it naturally means there are many ways to reconstruct that same query intent in another way. For instance:
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โ Best earplugs for someone with tinnitus
โ Which earplugs are best for someone with tinnitus
โ Best earplugs for tinnitus
โ What are the best earplugs for tinnitus
โ I have tinnitus what are the best earplugs
โ Best earplugs for person with tinnitus
โ Which earplugs are best for people with tinnitus
โ etc...
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7 search terms: 1 search intent
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It would be easy to rewrite this query in 30 different ways, so even if each question only got 10 searches per month (which would likely report "0"), this one question would have a monthly search volume of 300 searches
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I'm going upstairs, I want to talk about my intent shift
The 5-minute tip that won me the Tech SEO Summit award last year was how to automatically monitor intent shift & content gaps ๐
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With a combination of:
๐ AlsoAskedโ
๐ธ Screaming Frogโ
๐ค ChatGPT
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It is possible to crawl all of the content on your website, pass the topics to AlsoAsked to get related intent questions, then use ChatGPT to determine where you have gaps or intent has shifted.
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Tech SEO Summit is a fantastic conference and I will definitely be attending this year! ๐ฃ
โHere's the full post and presentationโ
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ChatGPT is still a kid. A little kid sick and trembling in the middle of this huge universe.
Don't bet against Google. We've had a raft of "AI experts" telling us that people are going to stop using Google, and it will all be going to ChatGPT. โคต๏ธ
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Apart from the actual reality of traffic, this data from Similarweb shows that OpenAI's GenAI traffic share is quickly being eaten into by Google's Gemini.
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While influence may be moving away from company websites and centralised (arguable a bad thing for consumers), I would be surprised to see this change slow down. Google is still highly profitable and OpenAI is reliant on investor funding, which will be a lot less appealing on a downward share trajectory.
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