Ep 118: How to Nail SEO in 2025 with Greg Brooks

This episode builds a case for the evolution of SEO in a post-AI landscape, urging listeners to adapt by embracing new platforms and focus areas while maintaining authenticity in their content. Experts discuss the transition from traditional search engines to social media, the importance of local SEO, and how to leverage AI for better audience engagement. 

• Discussing the shifts in SEO since the rise of AI 
• Exploring the role of social media as search engines 
• Emphasizing local SEO for geographically fenced businesses 
• Leveraging AI tools for efficient content creation 
• Highlighting the need for authenticity and uniqueness 
• Understanding voice search's growing importance 
• Personalization's role in future marketing strategies 

If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe, comment and let me know if you had any questions.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Evolution of SEO in 2025
• 14:14 SEO Content Strategy Shift
• 22:53 AI & Personalization in Marketing Future
• 28:28 Expanding Marketing Strategies Beyond Search

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:47

Welcome to Tiny Marketing. This is Sarah Noelle Block, and this is a podcast that helps B2B service businesses do more with less. Learn lean, actionable, organic marketing strategies you can implement today. No fluff, just powerful growth tactics that work. Ready to scale smarter? Hit that subscribe button and start growing your business with tiny marketing. Hello and welcome to episode 118. I'm Sarah Noelle Black and you're watching the tiny marketing show, or listening, I suppose. However, you're consuming this show.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Today, we're talking about how SEO has changed. We all know it's changed since around like early 2023, when ChatGPT came out. Everything has changed. It's just been a whirlwind of how we have adapted to search engines. We used to go automatically to Google and we knew how to get on Google too. It was just a matter of having the right keywords in your articles and making sure your title tags were correct and all of that.

Speaker 1: 1:59

But it is completely different since AI has entered the scene and a lot of people have claimed it is dead, that SEO is dead, but that is far from the truth. It's more of it's dead for people who haven't evolved, and I think that that's the case for a lot of things. If you didn't evolve with the emergence of AI, a lot of things have died. If you're listening to this, you don't realize that I just did quote, unquote. They're not actually dead, though.

Speaker 1: 2:33

You have to adjust the way you do things to adapt to the way things change, and that's exactly the case with SEO. So today I have Greg Brooks and he is teaching us everything that we need to know about SEO when it comes to 2025 and the things that matter now. In search, we need to look at the fact that people are using social media channels as search engines. Now, more people are going to TikTok and searching for something than they're going to Google. In Gen Z, more people are going to chat GPT than going to Google than they used to. Things have changed, so we need to adapt the way we use search engines and the way that we optimize our content to be found by these search engines, because search engines are not just DuckDuckGo, bing, google anymore. Now they're YouTube, now they are TikTok, now they're LinkedIn, now they're ChatGPT. There's a whole other way to look at it. So I'm excited to share all of the insights that Greg Brooks shared with me. Let's get started shared with me.

Speaker 2: 3:57

And let's get started. My name is Greg Brooks, Hi audience. I am a CMO and I'm a partner at Search Tides, which is a hub for all things search and SEO and social search the future of how humans look and acquire knowledge online. Search Tides has existed for about 13 years. We've worked with all different types of large companies. We worked with some small companies in there as well and we've really learned a lot of lessons on how marketing channels and specific marketing channels ebb and flow and evolve over time and where they're going to specifically, and some things we think are intuitive and a lot of stuff we think is really going against the grain in our opinions.

Speaker 1: 4:35

Ooh, okay. Well, now I'm curious can you just, can you give me a little, a little teaser on that? What, what do you have that's going against the grain.

Speaker 2: 4:45

I think right now the grain is that Google is collapsing and it its empire, and it's being split up across chat, gpt and perplexity, dot AI and social search across like TikTok and YouTube, and I think, ironically, google has probably by far the best chance to be the winning AI bot. It's called AI overviews, used to be called Google SGE, and the reason is because almost every website in the world blocks chat GPT. They block GPT models because they don't want their data being crawled for no reason, but they make sure that Google can crawl their website and so now you have the number one biggest search company in the world that also has the number one largest data set to train its AI model on that no one else has. So I think people are kind of calling for the end of something, but you know, those rooting for Google's demise might have some surprising news.

Speaker 1: 5:44

Damn Before we get into. Okay, I'm not going to rabbit hole, I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 2: 5:49

Okay, the portal's right here. I'm just saying I'm so good at it.

Speaker 1: 5:54

I'm so good at rabbit holing I'm like, okay, I need to dig right there, but I'm not going to, because today we're focusing on the things that are shifting and what we should plan for in SEO in 2025. And we're specifically talking to those solo marketing departments and marketing or founder-led businesses that are stuck in the marketing role. So they really need to understand what they need to focus on. And, quick and dirty ows, how do you make it work? So the first thing I want to dig in on is AI, because that I have zero clue on how that works with SEO Zero. So I'm a fresh, spongy brain right now.

Speaker 2: 6:41

Okay, well, here we go. I got some. I'll get some quick tips for that. Ultimately, if you're a solo marketer, or you're a founder-led marketer, then, or really a founder masquerading as a marketer, then we just have to be realistic, right? I think the number one thing that you need to decide is if a given marketing channel is worth your time. So I'll just say this right away Search organic search results on Google.

Speaker 2: 7:12

If you are a national search result, so you're not like a location-specific business or stuff like that, as a single person, you're gonna have a lot of difficulty being competitive against larger companies and organizations who have marketing departments, who have SEO teams, who have built out a website over the last 10 to 15 years and have done things like link building and content creation, and you're playing somebody else's game, and so the first thing that I would say is maybe don't do that. Maybe there's better uses of your time if you're somebody who is already in a role that's going to be wearing a variety of hats. Now, if you're in a business that is geographically fenced, then search is going to be a fantastic option for you, because it's not about your overall authority or power or how long you've been in the industry, for it's about your relevance to someone searching Capital R relevance. What that means, sarah, is that where you want to be the best option in a given location, which means you're just competing against. If you're, for example, like a car dealership, you're just competing against the other car dealerships, and that also means that you'd want to show Google or any other search engine that you are the most relevant.

Speaker 2: 8:26

Well, what would that look like? You mentioned Chicago. Well, we'd probably be talking about different neighborhoods in Chicago, if we're being honest, and maybe a major metropolitan area is not the best example to use for a car dealership, so we're going to use a different one. Let's just say, someplace in some sort of outside suburb of Chicago.

Speaker 1: 8:47

We'll say Hanover Park.

Speaker 2: 8:49

Beautiful. So Hanover Park. So I'm a car dealership in Hanover Park. I should be outreaching to the local chamber of commerce or local other business entities that exist around that community, be part of them, interact with them or at least minimally get a link from them back to my website. My local reviews on Google my Business are going to be really, really important. I can go have conversations with people who are in the dealership and ask them about that. I, if I'm selling Audis, I can go, and I can go to the regional Audi dealership and say, hey, can you put a link to my website from your website? So I'm gaining up relevance and doing literally those three things and nothing else is going to take you a lot further on the local side of things than probably most of the other things that people would know and obviously the basic things like meta descriptions, title tags. That stuff's important.

Speaker 2: 9:40

So, in terms of AI and how this all plays into things, let's scoot back to nationally and say, okay, well, what if I'm not a specific location for a business? How does AI impact? How I think about search or SEO? And the answer is what does it look like?

Speaker 2: 9:56

How does your content that you create live and win in a world which 99.9% of content is AI generated and this is not the content of today. Yet we're probably only at 99%. We still got another 10X to go, you know. But really, what it means is we have chat GPT 4.0 right now and if you try to push a button and create a piece of content, it's it's not. It's not great, it's not great. But for chat GPT, 10.0, it might be great, or 15.0. It might be great. So at some point in the future it is going to get easy quote unquote to make good content, quote unquote. So how do you shine through that? You bring the human element. You talk about your unique expertise. You talk about your unique experience. You talk about the things that you know because you've been doing. And if you don't have things that you know because you haven't been doing, I might ask whether or not you should be the person writing about that on the internet, because now you're just only as good as everybody else's one-button-click-push article creation software.

Speaker 1: 12:03

Okay Question. So whenever I'm Googling lately, it's always I get the AI summary first.

Speaker 2: 12:13

Yes.

Speaker 1: 12:13

How do you get your website to be the one cited in that AI summary?

Speaker 2: 12:20

Yes, well, it's a three-step process. Step one and two does, in fact, require us to sprinkle fairy dust in two specific places so that we can make it happen, but once you do that, it's all about understanding that Google, even its AI, even anything on the internet, anything that someone calls AI or machine learning the best way to think about that is as an instruction manual. It's just this robot following an instruction manual, and when we call it machine learning, that means that we don't know what the instruction manual looks like. We didn't write it. We don't know what's in there. It's crazy. We just said get better at this thing and don't blow us up. So that's it and it's going and doing that, but it is following that instruction. It and it's going and doing that, but it is following that instruction.

Speaker 2: 13:04

So when, when, uh, when something from Google or any other website crawls your site, it is inherently not as smart as we think it is. And so what does that mean? Well, if you have a question, put the answer right under the question. If you're writing about a certain topic in the first sentence of your first paragraph, answer and the rest of your first paragraph answer and the rest of your first paragraph provide context about that answer, then the rest of the article should be about further context, or the rest of the piece of content, further context or zooming in deeper into certain areas of the answer, or elaborating on if I'm thinking about this.

Speaker 2: 13:42

I actually need to know these other three things. So I'm going to answer an unasked question which is going to help someone on their customer journey, and what you're doing is, yes, you're providing a comprehensive, basically guide, but on the flip side, you are writing it in the way, assuming that robots, spiders, ai things, whatever's on your website these days aren't actually good at guessing what it's about. So you're like here's a question, here's the answer. That's the number one way to get into the AI overviews right now.

Speaker 1: 14:13

Okay, that's good to know. So anyone who is tempted to be really creative and write engaging content, you have to do Q&A, dumb it down first before you get into the story piece and what you were talking about earlier, your personal experiences, that type of thing.

Speaker 2: 14:35

Sure and just a sentence. You don't have to eliminate your creativity or anything. We're just talking about the end of. I look up a recipe online and you tell me about your grandmother's cabin in the woods, Like that era doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 1: 14:50

Oh no, I absolutely hated that. Every time I have a recipe pulled I'm like I don't care about this story. I just want the ingredients and the order they need to go in the thing.

Speaker 2: 15:01

Right, I mean people don't even realize this, but, like grandmothers also hate stories about their cabin, so there's no winner in any of that.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Everyone was the loser in this situation.

Speaker 2: 15:13

Exactly. So. That's really to answer your question. That is the shift in what's happening. We're getting rid of the fluff, we're getting rid of the information for the sake of information, or words for the sake of words, or video for the sake of video. We use a metric called value per word and value per second, depending on if we're talking about written or video. If you can showcase something in a shorter, more efficient period of time, do that. Number one it's going to be better for the person who's interacting with that content. Number two you actually can't do that unless you're an expert. You actually can't do that unless you can synthesize. Well, even though this is what theory says, in reality this is what's real. So I'm going to ignore this stuff. I'm going to hone in on this stuff, and so you're in. You're, in essence, showcasing your experience and your expertise.

Speaker 1: 16:05

Okay, so short to the point. Showcase your expertise. What's your, your take on inserting personality and stories into the content?

Speaker 2: 16:17

I love it. I mean, at Search Sites, we we divide a search into three different parts of they're, you know, from the bottom up. The bottom is the foundational era, which is all the traditional SEO stuff link building, content creation, technical robots. Who knows what's in there? It's a black box. The second one is where we're at right now.

Speaker 2: 16:36

It's called the influence era, and that's like am I an expert? Am I, do I have trustworthiness? Am I an expert? Do I have trustworthiness, am I an authority, if I'm writing about something that has to do with giving people medicine, should I actually do I have the understanding to provide that advice or financial advice? And then the top of the pyramid is the future. That's where all the AI content era is going to exist, but we're actually calling it the human era, and that is the equivalent of once things start being able to be mass produced in a factory, that you can go buy it at a Kia and, other than nearly destroying your relationship, you could put the furniture together and it'll work. But what do people then go and want? Well, they want handmade furniture, and so be the handmade furniture of content, and that, by definition, sarah, that should have your personality in.

Speaker 2: 17:22

That should have your own personal story in, so really embrace that stuff.

Speaker 1: 17:27

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's going back. That's what I've been telling people is like be more authentically, you and you'll stand out, because everyone else is just becoming more bland as they rely on ChatGPT to crank it all out.

Speaker 2: 17:47

Yes, people always believe that technology replaces, but what it does is it gives more leverage to the two experts, and I don't mean in the sense that we've been talking about. If you know what it is that you're doing, if you're a developer and you use ChatGPT, you're going to be a way better developer. If you're a writer and you use chat GPT, it's going to help you out. We, we use chat GPT. We bring all of our articles through there and we go. Or all of our scripts and we go hey, can you remove the fluff? Remove the fluff, sure, and he goes yeah, no problem. And we're like, oh my heart, but it really. You know it works, it works really well.

Speaker 2: 18:27

Hey, can you go and look at the top five search results for a given keyword and give me a list of all the subtopics that they're writing about? And so I want an outline of that. Okay, well, if I didn't know to do that, chatgpt is not going to help me, but if I, since I know to do that, I'm going to get a more effective use. How about this one? Hey, here's Google's helpfulness guidelines that talk about experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, chatgpt I'm uploading this to you. Hey, here's my article. Hey, can you identify places where I can add more experience or trustworthiness? Can you find some quotes that are relevant, some statistics and data that are relevant? If you don't know that that's just inherently a good thing to do to create high quality, you're never going to get that, but if you know that now your job becomes, you know way easier.

Speaker 1: 19:13

Oh, and so much faster. Yeah, I have become obsessed with creating custom chats and like inserting brand voice guidelines and all of that because it just makes everything faster. But a question that I always ask is is there anything I'm missing? Like I'll upload a piece of content, is there something that this audience would want to know, that I didn't think to say, and usually comes up with something pretty brilliant.

Speaker 2: 19:41

Yeah, I mean, that's so insightful and so okay, how does all of this work in terms of search and SEO?

Speaker 2: 19:46

And so, again, like, if you're on a national capacity, you should care less about optimizing your article keywords for Google and you should care more about meeting your customer on their customer journey Once they become brand aware of you. If you want to go down to the discoverability route, do that on social. So, depending on where your audience is, you can win way earlier in your brand's career on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram, whatever it is, pinterest. You have a way better chance of treating that search bar like an SEO search bar and doing the research to see, if I type in how to you know vacation ideas for blah, blah, blah. What are the types of content that are there, what, who are the creators who are creating that content? A lot of times, it's way easier to get discovered there. So it's really just about understanding where you, where your customers are and where your audience is and then just being really relentless in your prioritizing, gaining in front of them, which is going to be saying no to things that are good ideas for others.

Speaker 1: 20:53

I love that and I want to highlight it in case anybody missed the brilliance of that that social media engines are search engines and that you can build your audience there and you can use SEO to be able to become more discoverable on those platforms. I know a lot of people find me on LinkedIn using the search bar, just using keywords that are in my profile, so you got to take advantage of that.

Speaker 2: 21:18

Right, right, and especially as a one-person marketing department, you have to choose what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, and most of the time, your success comes from choosing what you're not going to do, and most of the time, that means that your success will come from choosing something that you believe is reasonable enough and then spending enough time and concerted effort on it until you push the snowball down from the mountain and you go okay, now this is turning something for me. So I think I think patience and perseverance are both necessary when you are kind of a smaller marketing department team person is really, really about prioritization, which is a trap.

Speaker 1: 22:02

It's really about deprioritization really about prioritization, which is a trap. It's really about deprioritization. Yeah yeah, there's so much power in saying no, that thing's not. For me, it's so easy to fall into this trap of wanting to try all of the things and just seeing what works, but you're going to suck at all of them if you're doing all of them because you won't have time or energy to focus in on that one thing.

Speaker 2: 22:26

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 22:27

So the other thing that I wanted to touch on in this conversation was voice search, which I truly have no idea how SEO works with voice search, so please enlighten me.

Speaker 2: 22:41

Yeah, no, well, you know we've been looking for the person who knows how voice search works. We haven't found them. We'll let you know if we found them. But yeah, I think it works, the same as all of the other searches work. The difference is essentially one of two things is happening. So you're just getting effectively the top search result. That's effectively what's coming back. You're not going to get the rest unless you're specifically asking for it. So voice search is going to be even more top heavy, which means it's going to be even more competitive if you're a national brand or you have no geographical relevance, which also means that on the you know, hey, I'm looking for a restaurant to go eat at, or whatever it is, this is where I'm at. Or hey, you know it's going to use gas stations. I don't think gas stations are doing SEO, it's more of a convenience purchase.

Speaker 2: 23:33

Yeah, exactly so. Relevance locational relevance then becomes more important again on voice search, and that's again things that you actually can do as a single person marketing search, and that's again things that you actually can do as a single person marketing department. So that could be an effect of doubling down. But the future for all of this stuff, sarah, is personalization. Like the one thing that I think enough people agree with with AI is that we don't know, you know, I don't know if we're going to be going through any sort of like. I don't know if we're going to be going through any sort of like. I don't know how much space exploration AI is going to be generating in the next 10 years, but there is going to be this one-to-one effect that exists when you have an algorithm tailoring something to you specifically, compared to a person trying to tailor something to an entire audience, and so you will get more personalized results, which means that brands need to shift their messaging to stand for more things and be more vocal about what their own eye.

Speaker 2: 24:37

We're super product oriented. We really care about product. If you want somebody to respond to your emails four hours after you write them, at any time in the day, please don't choose us, because that's not us. If you want somebody who's just focused on getting you the absolute best product, that is us. If you want somebody to pick up the phone 24 seven and help you out, no matter what your problem is, including if it's with your in-laws, that's us, because customer support is super, super important. Like it's with your in-laws, that's us, because customer support is super, super important. Like it's really about vocalizing those brand values I'm not talking about. Like. Here's our 10 thoughts about the political landscape of the United States.

Speaker 1: 25:10

You know like those values. It's like your differentiator, your values, your mission. Yes, those are the things that will get you to stand out.

Speaker 2: 25:25

A hundred percent, because what AI is going to do is create more consumer choice. We already saw this with content. We had three television stations, then 15 channels, then 50, 500. And now we have millions across social media, because, instead of a whole setup, you just need your phone which, by the way, you have anyways and AI will do something similar.

Speaker 2: 25:39

With the amount of businesses that are out there, it'll be easier for one or three people to start a business that used to take five, maybe 10 people to do, and so that just means there's going to be more businesses in a given area, and that means there's going to be more consumer choice in that area, which means you're going to have to stand out more, so you're going to have to talk about your own values and who the perfect customer is for you, and you're also going to have to know them more and what their pain points are and where they are in the customer journey and where they hang out and, again, all the stuff that you say no to. That is the thing that's going to put you in a position to be successful in the future.

Speaker 1: 26:15

So my big takeaways from this is with AI, if you want to rank with that or be featured in that, it has to be straight QA, QA, QA to even possibly rank there.

Speaker 2: 26:29

The top of the article. Yes, the rest of your article. You talk about whatever. You can get creative, but in terms of like, this thing comes to this website and is going to grab one thing, this is where I need to put it for to grab it.

Speaker 1: 26:41

Takeaway two is social media is also a search engine, so make sure to optimize there. And takeaway three was how important it is to be you. Show your expertise, show your personalities, talk about your values, what makes you different, and that is what will get you to stand out. Is there anything that I'm missing or anything that you want to just end on?

Speaker 2: 27:12

Don't we ask chat GPT that. Let me just pull it up. No, I think that doing all of those things in the context of you are only a human being able to do so many things, and so you have to choose what it is that you do and therefore choose what it is that you don't do, which, especially in marketing. I think that that's really like you can't hear that enough. So I think that's a really nice summary. Thank you, Sarah.

Speaker 1: 27:39

Oh, thank you. Thanks for joining me, and can you, before we wrap up, tell everyone where they can find you, how they can work with you?

Speaker 2: 27:48

Yes, well, you can work with Search Tides at searchtidescom. We essentially help people in one of four very specific marketing channels, two of which are SEO and social search, and you can find me specifically. We're also on LinkedIn at Search Tides. We're on YouTube at Search Tides. I'm on LinkedIn at Gregory B Brooks, if you want to get in touch with me. Yeah, you can hit me up on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1: 28:13

There are people who will be looking for you All right.

Speaker 2: 28:18

Thank you, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1: 28:20

Sarah, thank you for joining me and Greg in this wild ride of SEO in 2025. I hope that you enjoy these takeaways that search engines are not only search engines anymore. We need to look at social media, we need to look at ChatGPT and we need to add more personality and personal stories to our content to really stand out from everybody else. So I hope you listened, you took notes and you're going to take some of what you learned from this episode and bring it into your marketing this year. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe, comment and let me know if you had any questions. I'll see you next week. You love all things tiny marketing. Head down to the show notes page and sign up for the wait list to join the tiny marketing club, where you get to work one-on-one with me with trainings, feedback with me with trainings, feedback and pop-up coaching. That will help you scale your marketing as a B2B service business. So I'll see you over in the club.