James Bavington

"SEO is dead" We are still doing the same fundamentals we were doing 12 months ago. The only difference is a slightly greater focus on PDP pages and merchant feed optimisations. AI achieves speed to market, but it doesn't magically make you rank higher. cc: Jason Mun Ash Fuller Nicholas Tie Sereena Furse Leslie Tan Judy Kim Darren H. Huang #seo #geo #chatgpt #searchengingoptimisation #results

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Fab to join the State of Play panel last night on the future of SEO Worried about how AI might affect SEO? Key things we're thinking about right now at eight&four: 1) AI hasn't and will not 'kill' Google The actual big story going on in Search isn't LLM stealing market share, it's expansion & fragmentation of search surfaces... Datos’ Q2 report showed YouTube has tripled YoY, Pinterest search doubled, Reddit search +30%. Meanwhile, LLM prompt growth is modest (and early evidence seems to indicate the more people use the LLM's, the MORE they then use Google...!) So - don't get too focused on AI panic, instead stand back and think about how to build distributed influence across as many search surfaces as possible.. this means SEO teams need to be partnering with social teams, PR teams, paid teams - breaking down these baked in digital siloes internally (it's why we integrated a PR & comms agency into eight&four this year - to drive that integrated thinking for our clients) 2) If an agency is trying to panic you, walk away ESPECIALLY if they're trying to sell you a "GEO Ranking dashboard" 🙄. As always with any AI hype, step back, think critically, trust your professional judgement. Replace GEO theatre with clear roadmaps to assist with LLM inclusion, adapt owned content entities to support answer generation (in LLM's, or new AI features being implemented in Google - AI mode, Overview etc.). And yes, take those traditional SEO techniques (technical, schema, IA) into Reddit, YouTube, TikTok! 3) This is a huge opportunity for "SEO" Any hype cycle brings one clear benefit to marketeers - ATTENTION. Use this window of attention SEO is currently getting to make powerful changes to the way your organisation values and prioritises world class content strategy. Reclaim that consultancy seat. Authoritatively push for more effective content investment. 2026? Let's break down silo'ed digital channels, and work effectively together to drive DISCOVERABILITY for our brands. One integrated team, different specialists, working together to show up for our customers, with the right information, in the right places. Fortune favours the brave - go get it!! 🔥🔥🔥 Big thanks to Jessica R. for the invite, and fellow panellists Andrew Fox Helen Pollitt Jessica Atkinson João Filipe Pereira Mark Evans for a great chat 🙏

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The JBH Link Mapper. What it is, what it does, and how it works for SEO and Digital PR (and GEO). Of all the tools I've been involved in building at JBH, the LinkMapper is one of my favourites. The reason it's my favourite is that it displays inbound links exactly as they should be displayed. This builds on the work by Albert-László Barabási in his famous book, Linked. The link mapper shows you the pages that act as hubs. These are popular pages of a website that gain links, and hubs show popularity. Ideally, your business's core assets should be the most popular. The problem is we live in an era of attention starvation. As a result, many of a brand’s core services, products, or category pages are starved of the necessary links and brand mentions they need for success. Which is where digital PR comes in. Digital PR is the manual process of generating links and brand mentions. And highly skilled digital PR builds these links and brand mentions to the core pages of a business, which are starved of link equity. In some highly competitive environments, adding new links and brand mentions gives almost instantaneous ranking increases leading to revenue. But that's not all. We've seen that the impact of brand mentions and links also leads to near-immediate revenue increases. The reason for this is that in the market, prospects are exposed repeatedly (through high-quality journalism) to a brand's positioning and expertise. Essentially, you're using digital PR to remind people you exist. This is like advertising, content marketing and link building rolled into one. As we move into an AI-powered search era, we already know that digital PR drives almost 75% of success in GEO (generative engine optimisation). The link mapper enables our team to quickly identify and visualise low-quality hubs by categorising links based on domain authority. Using a colour-coded system that works on domain authority, we can see pages that have lots of high-quality links and pages that have weak ones. Because the internet is a free-scaling network, links dissolve over time. Websites get deleted, links get deleted, web pages get deleted. This means you need to regularly update the brand mentions and links related to your brand's most valuable or key assets. Additionally, creating separate assets that become hubs of popularity in their own right can help drive internal links to your core page. An old-fashioned but still hugely successful SEO technique. The map serves as a quick signpost, allowing you to understand the ecology of your website. And it allows you to understand the extent of publicity your brand has gained. In other words, it allows you to quickly gauge your business's 'popularity', as more popular businesses tend to attract more links. I'm going to be writing a more detailed post on this for my newsletter this week. I think you'll love the deep dive. Stay tuned.

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SEO isn’t about ticking boxes. It’s about sequencing. You can build 100 links, publish 50 blogs, or optimise every title tag… But if the fundamentals aren’t in place, growth will stall. SEO has never been one-size-fits-all. One single tactic alone doesn't maximise visibility. It's all about a compounding strategy, layers working together in the right order. Yes, there are common priorities across industries… but there’s no magic lever you pull once and watch rankings explode. Even the most experienced SEOs don't always get it right the first time, because it’s a process of testing, refining, and compounding. So if your marketing feels busy but not effective, the issue probably isn’t a lack of effort; it’s sequencing. The best agencies don’t just do more, they do what matters most, in the right order. That’s the difference between a trickle of progress and consistent growth.

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Signals, Tracking and Attribution... what’s the difference? 🤔 In B2B marketing, these three concepts are often used interchangeably. But they’re not the same, and understanding the difference is quite important. 👉 Signals: the raw interactions Signals are the traces buyers leave behind. A website visit, a webinar sign-up, a LinkedIn ad click, or an email open, all of these are signals. They show intent, interest, or activity. But on their own, they don’t tell anything besides something has happened. 👉 Tracking: how we pick up on those traces Tracking is how we capture and organize those signals. With the right setup (whether in HubSpot, Dreamdata, or another stack) we can tie signals to a person, an account, or an activity. Good tracking ensures we don’t just see isolated actions but a more connected journey. This is also when signals become much more interesting and why an increasingly amount of companies are investing in tech that can help sales & marketing pick up relevant signals from ICP fit prospects to hit more great timings and close more deals. 👉 Attribution: making sense of impact (and likely the most misunderstood and complex of the three) Attribution is about assigning credit to the right channels and activities. Did the webinar influence the deal? Was it the LinkedIn ad? Or the sales call? Attribution models help you answer these questions and decide where to invest more resources. Multi-touch attribution is one of the more popular ones and can allow you to attribute more accurately across many different sources, people and activities, and over a longer period of time. So, the next time this is a topic of discussion, make sure to divide the three as they are different from one another. Happy data hunting peeps 🤺 #CertifiedMarketingExpert #b2b #b2bmarketing #b2bsales #data

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