Welcome back to a new episode of The Search Session! I’m your host, Gianluca Fiorelli, and this time, I'm joined by someone truly special: Jono Alderson.
If you’ve been around SEO for a while, you’ll probably know Jono for his deep technical knowledge, his forward-thinking insights, and his relentless passion for making the web (and search) better.
In this episode, we dive into how SEO is evolving—from the technical innovations happening at the edge of the web, to the growing need for SEOs to think beyond rankings and embrace brand, strategy, and storytelling.
We talk about the mistakes we've made as an industry, the opportunities ahead, and why the future of SEO might just be about building better businesses—not just better websites.
It’s a conversation full of ideas, provocations, and a little bit of nostalgia, too.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did—let’s dive in!
Video Chapters
Transcript
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi! Welcome to The Search Session—the SEO video series that aims to help you stay ahead of what’s next in search. Whether you're building your strategy or just trying to make sense of concepts you already know but haven’t quite pinned down yet, you're in the right place.
Meet Our Guest: Jono Alderson
Gianluca Fiorelli: Today, we have a wonderful guest. I mean, all our guests are wonderful—but this one is especially wonderful. You probably know him from his years at Yoast. He’s a guy who’s obsessed with technical SEO, particularly speed and all things cutting-edge. Not just the usual “fix this, fix that” kind of stuff.
But beyond that, he has a brilliant mind for forward-thinking, really pushing the boundaries of where search is headed. Today, we're talking with Jono Alderson. How are you doing, Jono?
Jono Alderson: I'm great! Thank you for having me, and what a lovely intro.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Well, you deserve nothing less.
Jono Alderson: Aww, I thought you were going to say, “You don’t deserve it,” which might’ve been more accurate!
Gianluca Fiorelli: I mean, if you want, I can say that too!
What SEO Was, Is, and Is Becoming
Gianluca Fiorelli: So… how’s SEO treating you these days?
Jono Alderson: Ooh, big opening question. That’s an interesting one. I think it’s the same as it’s always been—but also more different than ever. Wow, that sounded cliché, didn’t it?
A lot of the things that used to take up so much of everyone’s time are fading out. What we’re left with now is either brand strategy—for lack of a better term—or technical quality, or PR. And maybe those are completely different disciplines. Maybe that’s what SEO always was, and we just got distracted for a while with guest commenting, link building, and all those tactics. Now that some of that noise has died down, what remains might actually be the real core of SEO.
It’s all super interesting. The field keeps evolving, which is really exciting. And yeah, as you mentioned, I’m still obsessed with technical SEO. I think a lot of brands and websites have overlooked this for too long. They’re delivering poor user experiences—sometimes catastrophically so. And it’s ironic, because they might be doing a great job with content, PR, or building their reputations… but meanwhile, their websites are a disaster.
It’s like the landscape is this barren, dystopian hell—and people are just now starting to realize, “Hey, maybe we should actually invest in making our websites better.” After all, websites are the medium through which we do SEO. They’re how users interact with the web. So yeah, it’s about time we focused on quality there. And it’s really encouraging to see that shift starting to happen.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes—maybe it’s more like a Back to the Future kind of thing. In the sense that, when everything started many years ago—and we were younger, with more hair...
Jono Alderson: Much more!
Gianluca Fiorelli: [Laughs] Yeah. Back then, we didn’t really care in the same way. We made websites because we were passionate, even if they were graphically horrible—like those old Geocities sites, for example.
But we were creating from the heart. We weren’t thinking about things like, “I need to include this keyword,” or “I have to follow this formula.” We weren’t stressing about publishing 15,000 blog posts to stay competitive, or worrying about content decay and all that blah blah blah.
Now, whether we like it or not, the evolution of search is pushing us to reconsider what we’re doing. And for those of us in the older generation—let’s be honest, we are the older generation of SEO—this feels familiar. There’s a sense of coming full circle, and it’s something we can relate to.
Maybe it's more difficult for the younger generation—or let’s say, the “millennials of SEO.” The ones who came into the industry when SEO was already more established, with fixed rules and best practices. But now, some of those “best practices” aren’t so great anymore. And for them, that shift might be harder to navigate.
T-shaped vs π-shaped SEO Skills
Jono Alderson: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. That journey—through Geocities, through the birth of the web—taught us a lot. We were learning and cutting our teeth at a time when there weren’t any rules. The web was much less commercialized, much less mechanized. That environment forced us to think from first principles, to stay curious, to question things, and to experiment.
I mean, I fell in love with CSS. I had to figure out MySQL and work with databases. I had to learn how clients and servers interact. You had to be good at all of it in order to succeed. We even used the term “webmaster,” which—understandably—is now considered problematic for several reasons. But there’s not really a good modern replacement for that concept. Still, that’s what many of us were: webmasters. And over time, we evolved into SEOs.
I don’t think that kind of journey happens much anymore. Today, designers learn design and become designers. Developers learn to code and become developers. But you don’t see as many people taking that full-spectrum path—getting curious and learning a bit of everything along the way.
That said, maybe AI is changing some of that. Maybe you don’t need to go quite so deep in every area anymore. Maybe you can backfill those skills with tools like ChatGPT and large language models. So yeah, I think the next generation of SEOs is going to be really interesting to watch.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Indeed. While you were talking, I was picturing in my mind that classic concept—the so-called T-shaped model. For a long time, that was the paradigm: you need to know a bit about everything, but then go really deep in one area and specialize.
Jono Alderson: Some of us have called that out and said, “That’s actually a problem.” Because it’s not always enough, right? You’ve got to—
Gianluca Fiorelli: —Right, no.
Jono Alderson: I mean, are you really a marketer?
Gianluca Fiorelli: In fact, I wanted to bring that up—because I know you were there, maybe… oh, eight years ago? At that Inbounder event in London, when I presented my idea that maybe the T-shaped model wasn’t quite enough.
I suggested that the model should actually be shaped more like the Greek letter π (pi). The idea being: okay, sure, you can’t know everything, and that’s fine. But you should still have a solid foundational knowledge of all the disciplines that surround website marketing.
Then, from there, yes—you specialize. So if you’re an SEO, of course you go deep into SEO. But you should also develop deeper expertise in another complementary area. For some, that might be branding. For others, it could be content—not necessarily “content marketing,” but content as a discipline in its own right.
Jono Alderson: Definitely. A designer who can also write, or a developer who’s also an expert in security—or even a lawyer who’s great with databases—those are the golden people with the golden skillsets. Absolutely.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, exactly. And I think there’s still a lot of confusion—maybe less so now, but still present—especially with how SEO is being framed in the current AI-driven era. There's this push to redefine SEO as something like “GEO,” “LLMO,” or whatever acronym comes next. Honestly, I can’t even fit all those letters in my mouth anymore!
How to Keep SEO Relevant to Businesses
Gianluca Fiorelli: Sure, using AI as a tool can give you a competitive advantage—and that’s valid. But it doesn’t really address the bigger question of how SEO continues to stay relevant to a business.
So how do you sell SEO in this new landscape? It's not enough to just understand search or to track its evolution. You also need to understand how SEO connects to other business functions—those extra legs of the "π model," if you will. SEO can and should support brand strategy, messaging, international expansion, audience analysis—so many layers of marketing.
How would you define that shift? And what would you suggest to this so-called "younger generation" of SEOs so they don’t get stuck in the AI hype—or stuck in the outdated, traditional view of SEO either? How can they grow into something more—into truly better SEOs?
Jono Alderson: So, I think the thing everybody tends to forget—or at least gloss over—is this: there are a thousand other people out there who look just like you, with the same job title, using the same keyword research tools, producing the same spreadsheets, and commissioning—God forbid—the same generic articles on the same mediocre websites.
Now, sure, the AI revolution and all these incredible tools can absolutely help us. They can upskill us, support us, help us move faster. But if they're used the same way by everyone, then all that really happens is that the overall volume of content increases. Everything speeds up… but we don’t actually create more value. At least not intentionally.
How Relevance Engineering is Becoming the True Job of an SEO
Jono Alderson: That’s the challenge I think we, as an industry, really need to focus on. If we assume everything is becoming more commoditized—which it is—and the cost to enter or disrupt a market keeps dropping, then the only thing that really differentiates one brand from another is this:
What do they truly do differently?
What’s their story? What do they believe in? How are they distinct? These aren’t traditionally considered SEO questions. SEOs have often been brought in to do the last bit—to “paint the pig,” so to speak. But we don’t ask: how was the pig raised? What was the quality of life? And that’s the deeper layer we need to get to.
It’s still rare for SEOs to be involved in product development, pricing strategies, or brand positioning—yet that’s where the impactful conversations need to happen. Otherwise, you’re just left with a mediocre product, promoted on a forgettable website, filled with 100,000 AI-generated articles that ultimately say… nothing. Because the core offering isn’t different or better than the competition.
So yes—both the old-school SEOs and the newer generation need to retrain themselves. They need to start thinking about how they can materially impact relevance.
I really like Mike King’s take on this. While I might not agree with him on everything, I love how he frames it using the term relevance. He talks about relevance engineering—and yes, that’s another “R” acronym—but I think it’s a powerful concept.
A better version of SEO, or at least a better way to describe what effective SEO looks like today, is going into an organization and asking:
How do I help make our content, our product, our messaging more relevant—to a specific search, in a specific context, for a specific market?
That’s a much harder question. It touches everything: packaging quality, pricing, store hours (what if we’re closed when demand peaks?), even reputation management for the CEO. All of these factors now influence how relevant a website or product is in search.
That’s where we should be playing. That’s what we should be engineering.
And honestly, I still think we can call that SEO. We don’t need new acronyms. The market will continue to ask for "SEO." But the good version of SEO—the grown-up, evolved version—looks far more sophisticated than what we've done in the past.
And I find that quite exciting.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, exactly. That’s why, when we talk about in-house SEO, we should also say that in-house SEOs should insist on being in the room for key conversations—even if those meetings don’t sound particularly “sexy.”
You know, those company meetings about positioning, branding, business models… especially if you’re in a senior SEO role. You need to be there.
And the same applies, maybe even more so, to agency-side SEOs or consultants like us. Our questions shouldn’t just be, “What’s your technical stack?” We should also be asking:
“What is your business really about?”
“What’s your history as a company?”
“Who are your perceived competitors?”—not just your organic competitors.
And most importantly: “What are your business objectives?”
I don’t want to hear, “We want to increase our organic clicks.” That’s not enough.
Jono Alderson: Yeah—because ultimately, the real objective is, “We want to make more revenue.” Of course.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly. But to help with that, I need to understand how you plan to grow. What are the targets you’ve forecasted? What kind of growth are you aiming to fulfill?
Why Differentiation Matters More Than Ever
Jono Alderson: A lot of businesses are going to struggle with this—because, honestly, they don’t have a good answer. They’re not clearly differentiated. They’re not inherently better than their competitors in any meaningful way.
And historically, they haven’t needed to be.
You could open a bakery on a busy high street and sell cupcakes, just because of your location. That was enough. But things are changing. Competition is increasing, AI systems are becoming more influential, and they’re starting to define what “good” looks like.
That’s the world we’re living in now—especially online, especially in search. Suddenly, there’s no guarantee of success. No guaranteed access to the market.
So many real-world businesses have succeeded simply by being in the right place at the right time, with the right price point, a decent-looking logo, and an inoffensive mission statement. But that’s not going to cut it anymore—not when you're competing in a space where there’s often only one winner.
At best, platforms like ChatGPT or Google might recommend two or three options. But the era of users scrolling through 10 blue links, doing their own research, and cherry-picking? That’s fading fast. These systems are deciding for the user. They’ll choose the best, the cheapest, the fastest, the closest, the most interesting or meaningful brand.
And if you’re eighth-best in any of those categories, you’re not even in the conversation.
That’s why those harder, deeper conversations are so important—whether you’re in-house or on the agency side. When a client says, “We want keyword research,” or “Can you tweak our page titles and fix our 404s?”—we need to be the ones asking the bigger question:
Why should anyone choose to buy from you?
And not just because of price or availability—unless that is your strategy. But if that’s your play, you’re going head-to-head with Amazon, Google, Temu, and others. It’s a brutal game to play.
Strategically, most businesses would do well to invest in a differentiated value proposition. And for many of them, that means years of tough conversations ahead. For too long, they’ve gotten by without it. But now, they have to figure it out.
And once they do, that clarity will shape everything—organizational policies, content strategies, hiring decisions, how they train their call centers, their return policies… all of it.
Those are now the battlegrounds where SEO plays out. That’s where we compete.
It’s a huge challenge—but it’s also incredibly exciting. Because it’s meaningful. It’s far more impactful than saying, “We published an article and got six backlinks from some dodgy scheme.” Instead, we’re helping organizations truly stand out, connect better, and matter more.
That’s a much better thing to be doing.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, absolutely. It's way more interesting. Like I always tell friends and clients—it’s definitely more exciting than talking about how to optimize a title tag.
Jono Alderson: [Laughs] Yeah.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I mean, I didn’t spend nearly 15 years studying and more than 20 years working in SEO just to still be talking about where to place a keyword in the title tag.
Jono Alderson: Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And honestly, I think that this inability to stand out—or to properly position a business in terms of relevance—is very often tied to how people in our industry approach things like keyword research.
Did We Approach Competitive Analysis from the Wrong Perspective?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Because typically, keyword research starts with a keyword gap analysis:
“What are the keywords our competitors are ranking for that we’re not?”
And that leads to this kind of feedback loop, where you're just chasing whatever keywords your competitors are already ranking for. You end up thinking, “Okay, this website is doing well because they’ve published content on these topics in this way, so we should do the same—or try to do it bigger or better.”
And that mindset led directly to the popularity of things like the skyscraper technique—which, let’s be honest, is often just a more polished way of copying what others have already done and trying to outdo them.
Jono Alderson: Which nobody actually did, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Nope.
Jono Alderson: No one really improved anything.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly. I think the websites that really succeed are the ones that do conduct competitive research—but do it the right way.
Yes, it’s important to analyze where competitors are ranking and understand the landscape. But instead of just copying what others are doing, the key is to ask:
“Why?”
Not what content they’ve created, not just how they’ve structured it—but why are they standing out? What really differentiates them from everyone else?
And from there, the next question should be: “What can I do to be visible for this query set in a way that nobody else is?”
Jono Alderson: Yeah.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Sure, that’s a harder path. But it’s also far more rewarding. Maybe it’s easier for me to think this way because of my background in media and television.
When I was working in that world, we had to ask ourselves the same kinds of questions: “All the other channels are airing these big-name shows—what can we broadcast that gives us a unique voice?”
So we started buying the rights to shows like The Office, Sex and the City, Father Ted—things that weren’t mainstream hits in Italy at the time, but were cult favorites in the UK and the US.
And it worked. Maybe we didn’t have the biggest audience—but we had a fanatical one. A loyal following that knew we were offering something different.
That’s the mindset I think SEO should borrow. Be distinct. Be brave enough to not chase what everyone else is doing.
And of course, all the other things you mentioned earlier matter too. Like when you brought up something as seemingly mundane as a return policy—especially in eCommerce.
It’s funny, but it’s also true: If your return policy is unclear, or if it’s just bad, you might not qualify for Google’s “Outstanding Merchant” label. And that’s a huge ranking factor in Google Shopping and Google Merchant Center.
Sometimes it’s not about keywords at all. It’s about trust, transparency, and usability—things that Google can assess and that influence how visible you are.
Jono Alderson: Absolutely. And beyond that—even more viscerally—if you’ve got a bad returns policy, you’re going to end up with a bunch of people on Reddit complaining about your brand.
So, when someone Googles your brand name, one of those Reddit threads might show up in position two or three. It’s highly visible—and it will influence whether someone clicks on your result, even if you're ranking number one. And if they do click, they’re entering your site with skepticism. They’ve already seen the reputational red flags, and they’re nervous about buying. That bias carries through the whole experience.
But the inverse is true too. If you offer a great experience—if your returns policy is transparent and fair—you’ll create brand evangelists. People who celebrate you on Reddit. Who share positive experiences. Who talk about you, recommend you, and amplify you.
That’s where communities are born—when people genuinely like and trust a brand. They tweet, they retweet, they leave comments, they endorse you. They link to your site—not because you asked them to, but because they believe in what you’re doing.
And all of that is SEO.
Especially in a world where traditional, explicit links may matter less than mentions, references, and behavioral signals. All those Reddit posts, tweets, and discussions become the new SEO currency. That’s what LLMs and search engines use to assess:
“Is this a good fit for this search?”
So instead of obsessing over tiny technical tweaks or another round of content updates, maybe we should ask:
How can we surprise and delight our customers?
Because that leads to real behavior change—authentic signals that ripple through the web. And that is what modern SEO thrives on.
You also mentioned inventory earlier, and that’s a great point. Maybe differentiation comes not from how we present products, but from what we sell in the first place.
Why don’t more SEOs say, “Hey, we’ve got 28 product categories on this eCommerce site… maybe we should stop selling five of them so we can focus on the ones that actually matter”? Or, “We’ve identified a related category that aligns with our audience—maybe we should expand into that.”
Because through keyword research and user analysis, SEOs often uncover opportunities the rest of the organization isn’t equipped to see. You might spot ways to boost revenue, attract happier customers, and generate those behavior-driven signals that move the needle in Google, ChatGPT, and beyond.
To me, all of that is SEO.
It’s always been SEO.
We’ve just been… lazy. Or distracted.
And your earlier point really hits it—so often, SEO engagements kick off with the same three boxes to tick:
Keyword research.
Technical tweaks.
Some link building.
But those are just artifacts of how we've packaged and sold SEO over the years. We've defined its scope in a way that boxes us in.
There’s nothing stopping us from redefining that. The next time a client says, “We need some SEO,” we can respond:
“Great! Then I’ll need to talk to the person in charge of the customer support team’s training budget.”
“I’d also like to meet with the people managing your returns policy.”
Why not? There’s no rule against it—except inertia. That lingering momentum of old habits. But the longer we delay having those bigger conversations, the harder they become.
And that, I think, is what will truly separate the winners from the losers: Where—and with whom—are we able to have those deeper, transformative conversations?
The True Competitive Advantage of SEOs
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly. I think one of our real competitive advantages as SEOs—compared to other marketers, like social media marketers—is that they tend to operate in the moment, they respond to what’s trending right now.
But we—we deal in something deeper. Not just what’s happening now, but what’s likely to happen next. We’re custodians of how people have searched in the past. We know the history of search behavior. We understand the full story of a user's journey—past, present, and likely future.
And that is our strategic advantage.
The idea of the search journey is more important now than ever. I still remember back in 2018, at the Inbounder conference in Madrid, when people first started seriously talking about zero-click SERPs. And now? It’s so common it’s not even mentioned anymore—it’s just the norm.
But it illustrates the point: you can’t just aim to rank and expect clicks to follow. That’s not how it works anymore. To even have a chance at a click, you need visibility—and that visibility has to stretch across the entire journey.
People might discover you in Google, sure—but they might also stumble across you in a long-form, conversational query in ChatGPT. And if you show up there, that might be the spark that gets someone searching for you again. They dig deeper, and eventually, maybe they come back to you directly—typing your URL, visiting your site without a middleman. That’s the power of full-journey visibility.
This is the shift: From SEO as "Search Engine Optimization" to SEO as "Search Journey Optimization."
Jono Alderson: Yes, exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: A few weeks ago, I had a great conversation with Amanda Natividad from Sparktoro, who’s well known for coining the term Zero-Click Marketing. And I think there's a really valuable intersection there. SEO has sometimes—maybe even consciously—isolated itself from the broader world of marketing. But now, we have an opportunity to reconnect and collaborate.
Because if we want visibility in LLMs, in conversational search, in emerging channels—we need to move beyond link drops and blue links. We need to think like marketers.
We need to market our brand, our values, our proposition—whether it's in a LinkedIn post, an X post, Threads, or even a TikTok video.
And no, we might not always be able to stick a clickable link in those formats. Sometimes the link has to go in the comments. Sometimes there's no link at all. But it doesn’t matter—because we’re playing a longer game. We're building memory in the minds of our audience.
And let’s not forget—LLMs are like the cookie monster. They consume everything. Every post, every comment, every mention—it's all part of their training data.
So the more we feed the ecosystem with rich, brand-driven, value-aligned content, the more likely we are to show up—not just in traditional search, but in generative AI responses, in answers, in recommendations.
That’s the opportunity.
It’s about influence, presence, and memory—not just links and rankings.
Are SEOs Acting Like Snobs?
Gianluca Fiorelli: And maybe this is finally a bridge between SEOs and other marketers. A chance to work together on something bigger than just the SERPs.
Even if, let’s be honest… we can’t completely deny it—SEOs are a little snobby.
Jono Alderson: [Laughs] Yeah—and I think now’s a really good time for SEOs to eat some humble pie.
Because honestly, other marketing channels—especially brand marketing—have always understood what we’re only just waking up to now.
There’s a strong argument to be made that we’ve miscategorized and mistreated SEO as a performance channel for far too long. Historically, we were able to just about wrangle the machine:
Spend this much budget.
Research these keywords.
Publish this content.
Buy these links.
Get this many visits.
Convert X percent of those into customers.
And because that worked (kind of), the entire conversation became focused on this one goal: “How do I rank first?”
So that when someone searches a term, we’re right there at the top, and we make the most of that opportunity.
But that machine is broken now.
Zero-click searches were just the beginning. The rise of AI agents, conversational interfaces, LLMs—that’s the next chapter. And whatever form that takes, the idea that someone searches, clicks your website, and buys something in a neat linear path? That’s just not how people behave anymore. And it certainly won’t be how they behave in the future.
When we look at how other marketing channels have operated, it’s clear they understood something fundamental all along.
Think of brand marketing: they spend money on TV, billboards, radio—not because it drives an immediate click, but because they know that repeated exposure, across multiple touchpoints, increases the chance that someone will remember their logo… or trust their jingle… or choose their product when faced with five alternatives.
That’s science. That’s psychology. That’s how real people make decisions.
It’s not all direct response. There’s still a place for that, of course—but I don’t think SEO should be treated primarily as a direct response channel anymore.
I've been saying this for what feels like a hundred years: there's a better flavor of SEO. One that blends performance with brand thinking.
So let’s say someone’s searching within our problem space. Maybe we don’t rank #1 for their query—but maybe what does show up is a trusted review that praises us. Or a YouTube video on our channel. Or an interview with our CEO on LinkedIn.
That’s a win.
Because users don’t make split-second decisions. They're on a journey. They're evaluating. They’re reading our competitors’ sites. They’re forming opinions—sometimes consciously, often subconsciously. And everything they see—every brand touchpoint—shapes whether they include us in their consideration set… or eliminate us.
So yeah, let’s eat that humble pie. Let’s be a little less snobbish. Let’s learn from other disciplines.
Let’s help people.
Let’s tell stories.
Let’s be relatable.
Let’s stand out.
Let’s make noise that matters.
This isn’t just about getting a backlink so we can rank a little higher and hope someone clicks and buys. This is about shifting strategy.
And the exciting part? This is exactly the kind of behavior that LLMs are trained on.
When we create content, tell stories, and have meaningful conversations in the same places our audiences spend time—Reddit, social, forums, blogs—that’s what these AI systems are crawling, indexing, and learning from. They internalize not just facts and links, but brand presence and behavior.
So all of this “non-SEO” stuff—our brand work, our content strategy, our reputation building—suddenly becomes SEO again. Because it influences how LLMs and AI search agents talk about us. Whether we get recommended. Whether we show up at all.
In that world, the best kind of SEO is branding.
Yes, there’s still room for direct response. Bottom-of-funnel content and tactical ranking improvements still matter. But those become supporting pieces—not the whole picture.
In the grand scheme of things, they’re just tactics.
The real opportunity is thinking bigger.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, yeah—exactly.
Now, shifting gears slightly, but not too much... I have a question for you.
In one of your recent presentations—I think it was at WordCamp—you talked about a trend that really caught my attention. And maybe it's tied to what we've been discussing: the idea that SEO has been misunderstood for years.
E-E-A-T: Why So Many SEOs (and Businesses) Still Get It Wrong?
Gianluca Fiorelli: In a way, it feels like Google has been trying to tell us exactly what you’ve just said—but in a very poor way. Because let’s be honest—Google is notoriously bad at communicating almost anything clearly.
Jono Alderson: Yes, I think that’s fair.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And yet, because we SEOs always seem to wear our metaphorical tin foil hats, the moment Google says something, we start spinning theories.
Jono Alderson: [Laughs] Yeah. How do I reverse engineer this? How do I turn this into a checklist?
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, we end up thinking, “Oh! That must mean there's a new hidden ranking factor!” And suddenly we’re all chasing ghosts again.
But maybe—just maybe—SEO is actually simpler than some people like to make it out to be.
Jono Alderson: Oh, definitely—you're absolutely right.
I still think SEO is hard, of course. But yes, in many ways, it’s simpler than people try to make it. Take Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines, for example. They’re a perfect case study in how bad Google is at communicating this stuff. They consistently miss the mark when it comes to tone and clarity.
The problem is—they know full well what the SEO industry's tactical response will be: “How do I mechanize this?”
And honestly, that’s understandable! There are lots of good reasons why SEOs respond that way. But Google still does a poor job of anticipating that mindset and adjusting their messaging accordingly.
They could just say, “Create good content.” And yes, that sounds vague and unhelpful—but ironically, it’s also the correct answer.
Because everything else—E-E-A-T, helpful content, trust, authority, authorship—they’re all just manifestations of what it means to be a trustworthy brand that publishes useful content. None of these things are secret ranking factors or magic checkboxes. They’re just… the results of doing the right thing.
Danny Sullivan gets a lot of flak for repeating the phrase “create helpful content,” but so much of it really does come back to that. It’s simple. It’s even simplistic. But it’s also extremely hard—and that’s why people don’t like hearing it.
Businesses are generally not designed to produce helpful content. They’re designed to attract—or sometimes even trick—you into visiting their website or walking into their store, so they can control the narrative and the experience you have, and hopefully close a sale.
None of those models account for the new reality we’re in—where, in order to reach and influence an audience, you first need to prove—almost to an omniscient god—not just that your product or service is good, but that your entire proposition, and the experience people have when engaging with you, is a good fit for that audience.
And not only that—it also has to help them. It has to enable them to self-serve, to solve their problems… even if that means they never end up buying from you at all.
And all of this? It needs to happen well before the point of purchase.
That’s a radical departure from how most businesses operate. And it’s a huge ask, especially when it comes to resourcing and structure. Like—how many plumbers do you know who spend half their time producing incredibly useful, educational video content to help people fix their own boilers?
But if you want to rank first, influence LLMs, and beat Google as a plumber—that’s what you have to do. And that’s in addition to being a great plumber, having the right products, the right pricing, and the right value proposition.
Most businesses are simply not built to do that.
And that’s what makes this moment so interesting. Because as we look toward the future, we’re seeing a clear divide: legacy, established businesses that continue to trade on brand equity and existing advocacy—they’re going to struggle to adapt to this new model.
A lot of what the SEO industry does, I think, is try to force businesses to adapt to this new reality—to say, “Please, produce some helpful content.” And that’s hard. It really is.
But smaller, more agile startups—especially those that don’t yet have an established brand or built-up trust—can do this. They’re often in a position to define their business models from scratch, or at least pivot quickly. They can experiment in ways that naturally incorporate this mindset—ways that build virtuous circles around their content, their marketing, and their brand presence.
And I think this is a profoundly interesting moment—not just for SEO, but for capitalism as a whole.
We’re seeing a real split: on one side, you have large, established brands, still trading on legacy equity. On the other, you have new, disruptive startups. And we’re already seeing the evidence play out—through subscription model revolutions, Gen Z-fueled TikTok brands, DTC e-commerce success stories… all of these thriving businesses are built on being personalized, helpful, useful, and friendly in ways that older, more traditional companies often aren’t.
And it’s not that they can’t be—it’s that they’ve never had to be. That’s the shift.
So maybe the next generation of SEOs will do for brands what the digital transformation folks did back in the early 2000s. But this time, instead of moving companies online, they’ll help transform brands into something helpful. Into something trustworthy, relevant, and meaningful.
And honestly, I don’t think Google has done a great job of explaining all of this—why it matters, or how to make that shift. It’s a big, profound change, and their communication hasn’t caught up to the scope of it.
But I do think that’s what they’re trying to get at.
And I think they’re right. E-E-A-T might come across as vague or trite—it might feel like it only serves Google—but ultimately, I think it’s pointing us in the right direction.
It’s the right answer.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, exactly. And actually, I want to give a little tip to our listeners—and to anyone watching or reading this:
Maybe don’t stress so much about what Search Liaison says on Twitter. Instead, go read the official Google blog—specifically the one where Google talks to businesses, not developers.
Because the truth is, Google has never really created anything like seo.google.com or an SEO-specific platform. They lump us in with developers. Everything aimed at our industry is filtered through a technical lens—structured data, crawling, Core Web Vitals, etc.—but it rarely touches on the cultural or strategic side of things.
If you really want to understand what Google is trying to promote, what they think good looks like, go to the blog where they speak to business owners. That’s where they actually communicate more clearly—and where their messaging is much more aligned with how search is evolving.
So that’s my recommendation: subscribe to that blog. Follow it. You’ll see the patterns. That’s where they talked years ago about micro-moments. That’s where they framed ideas like the messy middle.
And it’s funny—because suddenly someone discovers messy middle and says, “Hey! There’s this new thing called The Messy Middle!” But Google’s been quietly talking about it in those business blogs for ages.
Jono Alderson: I have a printout somewhere of that “Messy Middle” study—I think it was such a great moment. I’m not sure where I put it, but I believe there’s a new chapter of that coming soon. It might have already landed, actually. The "Messy Middle" was, ironically, the second chapter of three, and there’s another one on the way—or maybe it’s already out. I’ll have to go find it.
But yeah, I thought that research did a really good job of articulating the complexity of user journeys. It’s not just “rank first, get the click.” It’s about influence—and often, that influence happens subtly, across multiple touchpoints. Your website might be one of them… or it might be none of them. It might be TikTok. It might be Reddit. It might be a YouTube comment or a review on a marketplace.
But it’s about making small nudges across that whole journey, hoping you gradually guide that person toward your brand—maybe even toward your website eventually.
I think that’s a really grown-up way of looking at it.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah—and when we talk about experience, especially in the context of E-E-A-T, there’s something I always think about.
Experience, literally speaking, means you should have direct experience with what you're talking about. But that’s really hard in practice. I mean, sure—if you’re a small business, maybe you do have direct experience with everything you sell. That’s more manageable.
You mentioned plumbers earlier—the kind who go viral on TikTok with stories like, “I had to clean up this absolutely horrible mess,” and they show the process. That’s real experience. That’s what Google wants—authentic, first-hand storytelling.
But what does that look like at scale? Is Google expecting a national chain of plumbers to ask every single plumber to create TikTok videos and publish them online? That’s just not realistic.
However, as SEOs, what we can do is take on the heavy lifting. When we’re building a content strategy or creating materials, we don’t necessarily expect, say, an engineer to write a blog post from scratch.
Jono Alderson: Yeah.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, what we’d have is a specialized technical writer—someone who understands the subject matter well, even if they don’t have direct hands-on experience. But then, the engineer—the one with the experience—should dedicate at least one hour per week to collaborate.
And that hour? It should be paid for by the SEO budget of the company.
Jono Alderson: Nice!
Gianluca Fiorelli: That time would be used to review and validate the content we’re producing. Because otherwise, what happens is… engineers might take weeks to even consider reviewing a single article.
And I say this from direct experience. So if we want to ensure that content is both accurate and experience-backed, we need a structured process for that collaboration.
Jono Alderson: I like that a lot.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly—because this way, you’re not faking it. You're not pretending to have experience you don’t. It’s like something we've already seen tested in the medical space: a technical content writer, specialized in health topics, writes the article, and then it’s reviewed by a qualified medical professional.
Now, let’s be honest—yes, that kind of “review” has often been faked on many websites. We know that.
But if you’re honest with yourself—and with what you truly want to offer your audience—this process works. That combination of editorial quality and real expert oversight creates trustworthy, valuable content.
And another thing, shifting over to your more techie side of things...
I think “experience” is sometimes misunderstood. If you go back to the official definition of E-E-A-T, when Google talks about experience, it’s not only referring to personal or first-hand experience.
They also mention the experience of using the website itself.
Jono Alderson: Yep. Yep.
Which is always bad—because most websites are awful.
SEO on the Edge
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes—exactly! And that’s why I want to shift over to your more nerdy side, Jono.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the evolution of search and the rise of AI—but sometimes, what's getting overlooked is the huge evolution happening on the technical side of SEO.
You’ve always been a strong advocate for everything happening at the edge—literally! And a strong supporter of brands in that space, like Cloudflare.
So, just quickly:
What do you think are the most interesting developments in that area right now?
And what do you see as the next big thing coming on the technical side of SEO?
Jono Alderson: Nice—okay. A few interesting things to talk about.
First off: everyone hates JavaScript-heavy single-page applications, right? React is an incredible toolkit for building complex, stateful applications—but it’s absolutely terrible for building websites.
Back around 2010, when Angular first launched, something shifted in the web ecosystem. Suddenly, a whole generation of software and app developers had a framework they could use to build for the web. And slowly, we stopped calling things websites—and started calling them apps.
We stopped using PHP and server-side logic. And instead, we started building these tangled, JavaScript-laden monsters with React and other frameworks. As a result, the web has become slow, bloated, and… frankly, kind of awful.
Part of the blame falls on a common phrase you’ll hear during the design process—usually from a CMO or someone high up:
“Make it feel like an app.”
We’ve all been spoiled by the mobile app ecosystem. Everything is smooth and seamless, with slick page transitions and responsive buttons. Meanwhile, on the web, you click something and it’s clunky and jarring. So, in response, we started hiring JavaScript developers instead of PHP developers. We moved to single-page app (SPA) architectures. And that’s how we ended up with these SEO-hostile monstrosities.
Honestly, for a lot of us in SEO, trying to unpick these tangled systems has become a full-time job.
But—good news—I think that might finally be starting to change.
One of the most exciting developments right now in the world of web standards is the recent support for the CSS View Transitions API.
What it allows you to do—with just native CSS and a tiny bit of JavaScript—is create those same smooth, app-like transitions between pages. So when someone clicks a link or a navigation element, you can rotate, fade, slide, or animate content in and out—without needing to build a bloated single-page app.
You get that sleek, app-like experience… but with all the benefits of traditional, fast-loading, SEO-friendly web architecture.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah—it's the classic, age-old argument we’ve had with developers!
Just a small example, but a really telling one: “Please… don’t build the main navigation with jQuery. Just use CSS.”
Jono Alderson: Yep, yep—every time. Every single time.
And it’s become the go-to toolkit because, honestly, the wrong people are being hired to do the wrong job in the wrong way. But that problem is so deep-rooted—so endemic to the way we build for the web—that it’s become the norm.
So now, the idea that we can finally push back a bit and say:
“Hey, that one last good excuse for building your marketing or portfolio site with 20 megabytes of unnecessary JavaScript? It’s gone.”
That’s exciting.
Because now, with modern CSS and new web APIs, you can do most of that stuff natively—without bloated frameworks. And that’s pretty cool.
Another interesting development I’ve been talking about a lot lately is Speculation Rules. It’s a feature in Chrome (and increasingly supported elsewhere) that allows the browser to start preloading the next page as the user hovers over a link.
Now, we’ve had similar functionality for a while—but it always required third-party scripts, JavaScript hacks, plugins… and now? It’s becoming a web standard. Browser-native. Built right into the platform.
And it’s especially useful as a kind of hack for improving Core Web Vitals.
Because Core Web Vitals measure the performance of a page as the user experiences it. So if a user moves their mouse over a link, and Speculation Rules preloads that destination in the background, then by the time they click… the page feels instant.
It’s already loaded.
It’s lightning fast.
And your metrics look amazing—even if it would’ve taken a second to load otherwise.
What’s really nice about Speculation Rules is that, in practice, it’s just six lines of code you can copy and paste into your site—and it just works. Sure, you can customize it, tweak features, and tinker with advanced options—but the basic implementation is super simple.
What’s even more interesting is that Google has already started using it on the search results. I believe the first three results in a typical SERP—and maybe some other components—are now preloading automatically before you even click them. So there’s this passive speeding up of the web happening behind the scenes, and that’s really exciting.
What else? What’s cool in technical SEO right now?
You mentioned edge, and there’s a lot going on there too.
One of the foundational ideas in web development that might soon become obsolete is this:
You need a physical server, hosted in a data center, maintained by a company with racks and cables and probably a few engineers with beards wandering around. Somewhere, your website lives on that hardware.
But now, that whole model is being challenged.
I’ve been watching what Cloudflare is doing—along with Fastly, Akamai, and Amazon to a lesser extent—and we’re in the middle of a revolution in how websites are being served to users.
Instead of someone typing in your URL and that request pinging a server in a data center far away, that request now increasingly hits something on the edge.
For example, Cloudflare has a data center in Manchester, about two hours from where I live. When I type in my website, the request is served from there. Not from a central server halfway across the country or world. That means the site loads lightning-fast—almost instantly.
And what’s happening in that edge delivery isn’t just speed. There's a whole suite of security, performance, and accessibility enhancements happening in transit.
Suddenly, I don’t need traditional web hosting anymore. I don’t need to pay a hosting provider to worry about uptime on a physical server in a room full of wires.
My site is now ephemeral and distributed.
This is the dream we were promised with “the cloud” decades ago—and now it’s becoming real, at scale, on the web.
There are a bunch of technical implications here, but I think the business implications are even more exciting.
Everything gets cheaper, faster, and much, much easier.
You can now do things like:
“Let’s run an A/B test—but only if it’s raining where the user is.”
Or:
“Let’s redirect users who’ve added something to their cart—but only if it’s a Wednesday, only if they’re in Germany, and only if they’ve seen our About Us page.”
That kind of logic used to be really difficult to implement. You had to hard-code it into your application, running on a centralized server, hosted somewhere in a traditional environment.
But now? That’s the kind of thing you can run at the edge, near the user. It makes everything more responsive, reactive, and flexible—and that’s super cool.
And the best part? We’re only at the beginning of this evolution.
There’s so much shiny new kit out there right now. You can host entire databases in edge centers. You can do clever things with images and analytics, all processed on the fly.
It’s all becoming ephemeral, distributed, and fast. And that’s a really exciting place for the web—and SEO—to be heading.
The New Technical SEO Specialist
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, in a way, the evolution of the technical side of SEO is actually freeing us.
Sure, it might come with a steeper learning curve—it’s no longer just about knowing a coding language or a few best practices. The edge is getting sharper, so to speak. And maybe that means the role of the technical SEO becomes even more specialized—perhaps even evolving into its own distinct discipline.
We might end up with dedicated technical SEOs working closely alongside other SEOs who are more focused on content, strategy, and storytelling. Obviously, all of this has to be coordinated—because we need both sides working together.
But I think the future we’re heading toward is this: Yes, the technical side may become more complex—but it’s going to enable more creativity.
It’s going to make our lives easier on the creative and strategic end. It’ll open up opportunities to do things we’ve always wanted to do—things that, until now, would’ve taken too much time or too many resources to justify from a business standpoint.
Jono Alderson: Yeah, definitely. And honestly, that’s how I often end up working.
I’ll collaborate with someone who’s focused on content strategy—someone who understands the audience, figures out what we should publish, when, where, and how to promote it. Meanwhile, I’m the one tinkering with HTTP headers, rewrites at the edge, and all the deeply technical pieces.
And there’s a really nice balance in that.
Ideally, both sides understand the bigger picture. But as technical SEO continues to grow, it’s becoming a much broader discipline.
It now encompasses things like performance, accessibility, security, and even aspects of network infrastructure. Then throw in service workers, PWAs, rendering models, and other moving parts… and yeah—it’s becoming a seriously deep specialty.
That said, a lot of what I end up doing—while it’s technically under the SEO umbrella, and funded by the SEO budget—isn’t strictly “SEO” in the traditional sense.
I’m dealing with things like:
How an HTTP header should behave in a given scenario
Why a caching rule isn’t working properly
Or spotting a security bug based on how a page is responding to specific requests
I often find these issues by looking at how search engines like Google are crawling, indexing, and interpreting things—but once I dive in, it’s clear that these are web standards issues. Not SEO in the old-school sense.
So yes, the work delivers SEO benefits—but the real focus becomes: How do we build and maintain a good, solid, reliable, high-performance website?
And SEO becomes more of a side effect of doing that well, rather than the core goal itself.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I’m just looking at the time—and wow, we’ve already been talking for almost an hour!
Time really flies when we’re deep in a conversation about things we love. I’d happily keep going for another hour, but I’m not sure if our audience would stick with us quite that long...
Jono Alderson: Yeah, we might have to keep it skeletal from here!
Gianluca Fiorelli: [Laughs] Yes, yes. So let’s make a promise to ourselves—and to everyone watching or reading:
We’ll definitely have a second conversation with Jono sometime in the future.
Jono Alderson: That would be nice!
Rapid-Fire Fun: Get to Know Jono
Gianluca Fiorelli: Before we wrap up, I want to do what I always do with my guests—a quick round of fun, rapid-fire questions. Nothing intense, just some light ones to get to know you a bit more—beyond SEO.
This is the kind of stuff that helps people picture the kind of person they’d enjoy having a chat with over a beer.
So let’s get started!
First one—sticking with SEO for just a moment: What made you decide to become an SEO? Why not something else?
Jono Alderson: Ooh. I was a bedroom web developer, building small websites for butchers and bakers. And I got obsessed with this question: What does perfect look like?
This was before technical SEO really existed—I think it was before there were any real rules. I spent a lot of time just asking myself, Should it be like this? Or like that?
And I became really focused on the idea that minute, granular attention to detail, and a desire to chase perfection, is actually hugely valuable—especially in a world where conventional wisdom says, “Don’t chase perfection.”
So nobody does. And that means everybody’s website is garbage.
But if you just chase perfection a little bit—even knowing you might not get there—and aim for best instead, you end up miles ahead of everyone else.
And I thought that was pretty cool.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And if you’re honest enough to tell us—what would you say is one of your flaws, Jono? What’s one defect Jono Alderson has?
Jono Alderson: I won’t settle for anything less than perfection.
I think I get frustrated by mediocrity, and even just the average, right? I do understand that businesses and people have constraints—budgets, timelines, priorities—but I think we’ve built this weird ecosystem where we’ve normalized dysfunction.
Like… if you walked into a physical retail store and it was on fire, had exposed electrical cables, was half-flooded, and the products were impossible to find—you’d have a visceral reaction to that.
But that’s exactly the state of the web. And we act like it’s fine.
We’ve accepted that 404s are normal. That it’s okay to wait eight seconds for a page to load. We’ve normalized poor user experiences.
And that makes me deeply frustrated.
I get very, very annoyed that we’ve made this level of brokenness acceptable. And I’m in a constant battle with myself not to just shout at the world that we can do better—that we should be doing better.
I know it’s not always realistic. I know it’s a narrow, perhaps overly idealistic view. But it still frustrates me that we’ve allowed things to get this bad.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And what’s something Jono likes to do when he’s not in front of a computer?
Jono Alderson: I’m always in front of a PC!
But—I read a lot of sci-fi. I play a lot of games… also on my PC. I watch a lot of sci-fi movies and shows too.
I travel a lot—or at least I used to. As you know, we used to be on pretty much the same flights, going to the same conferences. That’s slowed down a bit recently.
But I really enjoy seeing the world. I love the old world—places with architecture, history, stories. I love eating interesting food in weird places, and spending time with friends in beautiful surroundings, enjoying a lovely view.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And last question—since you’re a big sci-fi fan like me, here’s a literary one: What’s the latest sci-fi novel you’ve loved and would recommend?
Jono Alderson: Ooh, the latest one I loved… I’m not sure what the very latest was. But if you head to my website, jonoalderson.com, I’ve got a Recommendations page with a whole bunch of books listed. It includes some of my long-time favorites across sci-fi and fantasy. There’s loads of interesting stuff there.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Perfect!
Jono, it’s been a real pleasure having you here—such a deep and fast-paced conversation, as always.
And to everyone watching or listening: don’t forget—just a small gesture, just one quick click—subscribe to the podcast. It really helps, and we’ve got a wonderful road ahead thanks to your support.
Thank you again, Jono.
Jono Alderson: Thank you so much for having me—it’s been an absolute treat.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Bye bye!
Jono Alderson: Bye bye bye!
Podcast Host
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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