To help aid your own study material, here is the

word track for the whole The Future of SEO

section of the course.

Section 5: Overview:

In this section, we'll be exploring Google's

artificial intelligence and machine learning. I'll be
letting you know everything you need to know
when it comes to Google's AI and machine
learning and how you can prepare your website for
both of these elements. I'll also be giving you my
predictions when it comes to the future of SEO. I
have made a few SEO predictions in the past and
quite nicely, all of them have actually come to
fruition and have been spot on. So I'm very
confident in my predictions and the main reason
why is because my predictions are based on
Google's main goal, which we're about to find out
in this section of the course. So let's not waste any
time and let's get straight into it.

Section 5: Googles Artificial Intelligence &

Machine Learning:

Google's artificial intelligence and machine

learning. Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, and
its impact on different industries have been a
really hot topic of discussion for the past few
years and to be fair, all with good reason. The
digital marketing industry in particular is facing
fundamental changes due to revolutionary new
intelligent technologies coming out every year.
SEO has gone through many transformations over
the year from updating hour, from targeting
spammy links, VIN content, and so on. In fact,
there are roughly 500 to 600 Google updates
every single year.

Safe to say that this industry isn't really new to

change whatsoever. And while the core SEO
principles remain the same, which of course is
going to be keyword research, having high quality
content on your website, on-page SEO, link-
building, etc., etc., a lot of theories have emerged
about forthcoming shifts in SEO strategy,
particularly based on AI and machine learning.
This video is aimed at shedding some light on
exactly what all of this AI, machine learning and
jargon actually means in layman's terms that all of
us can actually understand exactly what is going
on out here.

Because I do see a lot of people worrying about

this and saying things online, such as oh no, AI and
machine learning is coming. SEO is dead or even
things such as we don't stand a chance against
the machines. I even saw one last week actually,
which said Google's artificial intelligence is going
to finish SEO and everyone will have to pay for
Google ads. I mean, which is quite funny from my
perspective because of course, I understand what
it means. And by the end of this video, you will
also understand exactly what this all means, and
you'll probably laugh at these statements as well.

But before we dive into all of the details, let's start

off with the basics, which is what is AI and
machine learning. Well, AI, or artificial intelligence,
is a branch of computer science that deals with
building intelligent machines that can think and
respond like humans. Machine learning on the
other hand is actually a subset of AI. So it comes
under artificial intelligence and it enables
machines to automatically learn and improve it
from experience. So basically you have AI at the
top, which is this amazing thing that allows
machines to think and respond like humans.

Then you have machine learning, which is basically

the brain of AI and allows that machine to always
improve its systems and processes going forward.
So now we cover the basics of AI and machine
learning. It's safe to say that you can completely
ignore that person on Twitter who is sitting there
eight hours a day tweeting that machine learning,
AI, they have no relation whatsoever. Now you're
probably wondering, well, how does AI and
machine learning actually relate to SEO? But one
thing I want to highlight before we dive into that is
that I want you to remember this one really, really
important thing, which is Google's main focus is
the user.

So whenever you see anything to do with AI or

machine learning in relation to SEO, the main aim
is to always make things better for the user. If you
can remember that and get a grasp of that
content, it's going to make everything make a lot
more sense from penalty systems to topical
relevancy to semantic savvy AI, all of these efforts
are focused on the pure goal of making sure the
user has the best experience, as of course,
Google's main focus is the user. A lot of SEO
experts would have freaked out in 2015 when
Google introduced a new addition to the algorithm
called Rank Brain, which, if you didn't know, is a
machine learning algorithm that helps Google
process search results.

What Rank Brain does is utilize the power of

artificial intelligence to understand and respond to
user queries in the same manner as a human
would. For those who don't know, before Rank
Brain, so before 2015, 100% of Google's algorithm
was actually hand-coded. So what would happen
is that Google engineers would implement a
change to the algorithm that they think would
improve results. They will then leave that for
maybe a week, two weeks or whatever the
duration is. They would then review the data and
decide whether they would leave that change or
revert back to the original algorithm. Now with
Rank Brain, this is all done automatically.

So all the hype you see online about machine

learning is coming to Google, SEO is going to be
impossible, it's all absolute rubbish. It's already
been here since 2015. Another example of
machine learning being used in Google, which is
actually another one or the algorithms labeled
Google Bert, well, Bert was released in 2019. So
it's been around for a decent chunk of time too.
And what Bert does is try to understand the intent
of the searcher by focusing on concepts and
topics rather than individual keywords. It does this
by itself with no human input. So once again, it's a
machine learning algorithm and it's been with us
since 2019.

To give you an idea of how Bert works, well before

the Bert update, if you carried out a search for, can
you get medicine for someone pharmacy, Google
would have returned to site which talks about
prescriptions. As you can see from the image on
the left-right here, getting a prescription filled,
medicine plus medical encyclopedia. However,
after the Bert update, Google now returns a
website, which is actually answering what you
searched for. So we searched for, can you get
medicine for someone pharmacy, which of course
Google understands this search to actually be
related to, can you get medicine for someone at a
pharmacy, AKA can you get medicine for someone
that isn't actually you.

And what does Google do now after the Bert

update, well it returns an article, which is all about
can a patient have a friend or family member pick
up a prescription, which is a perfect match based
on the search intent. And the way that Bert does
this is by understanding the deeper meaning
behind keywords, AKA the topics and the
concepts behind them, and then matching them
up with the best results. Now don't panic. I'm not
saying keywords are useless because trust me,
they certainly are not. But what I am saying is that
how these expanding AI technologies will impact
SEO is basically a continuation.

That's the keyword here, a continuation of a trend

that's been happening in search rankings for years
already, which is a focus on relevance, quality and
the value of your content. And there are ways we
can convey relevancy by utilizing advanced SEO
strategies like increasing your site's topical
relevancy, using LSI keywords as showcased in the
course, quality content and the value of your
content. Well, this can be replicated by reviewing
the top ranking websites in Google, taking a look
at their content may be using a tool such as surfer
SEO once again, as a showcase in the course, then
you get an idea of exactly what type of content
you should be putting out there in relation to your
headings, keyword density and so on.

Not so long ago, artificial intelligence was a mere

sci-fi concept that if you mentioned it in the
meeting, you would literally get laughed out of that
meeting. But today in Google, AI and machine
learning are already in full effect. People simply
just don't realize it. Yes, machine learning and AI
technology are transforming ranking factors, but
only to better reflect the needs and expectations
of human searches. The goal is still and will always
be the same, which is optimized for the best user
experience. And as long as you do that, you
literally have nothing to worry about.

I hope this video helped demystify the whole topic

for you as no doubt you're going to be hearing
these two terms more and more as you continue
into your SEO career. Most likely, you're going to
be hearing these terms from people who actually
don't really know what they're talking about. But
hey, that's their problem and not yours because
you now know exactly what is happening and you
know what trend Google is taking as they further
invest into the artificial intelligence field. I hope
you really enjoyed this one and I'll see you in the
next one.

Section 5: The Future Of SEO - My Predictions:

In this video, I want to go over my predictions for

the future of SEO. It's important that I stress, as
well, that these are purely predictions, there isn't
any guarantee that these are going to actually
happen. However, as I've been involved in an SEO
industry since 2013, I've already seen a clear trend
in the way things are going and I believe this trend
is only going to get stronger over the coming
years. So without further ado, let's get straight
into my predictions.

So there's six in total. My first prediction is that

user experience is going to become a top ranking
signal. Google has become more intuitive, taken
into consideration user engagement when
assessing a site's ranking. User experience has
already been a top priority for Google for some
time now and essentially Google looks at four main
signals when determining how well a site is from a
user perspective. Those four things include
organic CTR or click-through rate for the longer
version of CTR. And essentially what CTR is, as
you probably already know, this is the number of
people who click on your website in comparison to
the other search results on Google. The second
thing is dwell time, so how long a user spends on
your actual website. Then we have bounce rate,
which is how many users leave your website
immediately after arriving on it. And then lastly, we
have pogo-sticking, which is basically how many
times a user clicks the back button to return to the
search results and try out a another website. So
these are already important things in Google's
algorithm. However, as time goes on, I can only
see these getting more and more important and
given more weight in the algorithm.

As remember, Google's main goal is to ensure that

users have a great experience and a big
contributing factor of that is a site it returns to
users. So if your website has a very low CTR or has
a very low dwell time and a very high bounce rate,
and you have a lot of pogo-sticking going on on
your website, then you definitely want to go ahead
and fix these the further you go into your SEO
campaign. And of course the longer you're
actually doing SEO for. In addition to this, you also
want to make sure that your website is easy to
navigate and accessible on all browsers and
devices.

Prediction number two relates to links, and it is

your links will need links. So we've already covered
this in great detail in this course, but essentially
this refers to link building and it's just me
reinforcing how important I think this will be in the
years to come. The main reason why that is, is in
the natural world backlinks naturally attract
backlinks. If you have 100 backlinks to your site,
for example, and out of those 100 links, none of
them have backlinks pointing to them then you're
going to stand out like a sore thumb. As what site
out there has that, well, it's a site managed by an
SEO, which of course we don't want to make that
obvious to Google. So link building is definitely
going to increase in importance as Google
continue to tweak the algorithm, ensuring that it
only returns quality and natural sites.

Prediction number three is pillow linking will

become a must. At present you can get away with
not pillow linking in non-competitive niches,
however, I expect this to change over the coming
years and for Google to get a lot more strict in all
industries and all niches with the pure reasoning
of the all natural sites have pillow links by default.
So definitely make sure you check out your anchor
text ratios and that your back link profile is
diversified, and that you're not only building
backlinks to your site, which is using exact match
anchors.

Prediction number four is no-follow links will be

given more priority. So Google specifically states
that no one should build a link to the website with
the goal of trying to increase the rankings. So to
try and counteract this and get people to stop
focusing so much on links, I believe they're going
to give more weight to no-follow links, so the ones
that do not pass on any SEO value. Which in theory
is quite interesting because the more weight they
give no-follow links, then the more people are
going to focus on no-follow links. So that's a quite
interesting one, for sure. However, as stated
already, you should definitely have a mix of both
no follow and do-follow backlinks in your backlink
profile as that is what I teach as you'll already be
aware from my SEO training course. So as long as
you are doing that, then essentially you have
nothing to worry about. The main takeaway here is
that you want to make sure that your backlink
profile does not consist of just 100%, no-follow
links.

Moving on to prediction five, which is topical

authority will be given more weights. And just to
clarify, topical authority and topical relevancy are
basically the same thing. And what Google will do
go forward is only ranking the websites that have
the most topical authority and cover every topic
related to that niche. The more authoritative a
website is, and the more comprehensively it
covers a whole topic to deal with that specific
niche, then the more likely it's going to be the best
match for that user. In comparison to say a small
dinky site that barely has any content on it in
relation to that specific niche, regardless of how
well that site is optimized or how many backlinks it
has. Going forward, topical authority, aka the big
sites out there, which have the most content on
them, are going through the ones winning when it
comes to SEO going forward. So I highly
recommend that you do really, really
comprehensive keyword research. Make sure you
are targeting all of the keywords, you're including
your LSI keywords in there as well to obviously get
your topical relevance further increased. Your
optimizing, all your pages as best as possible,
which of course you can do that by using Surfer
SEO as showcased. But essentially you want to
make sure that your website is covering the whole
topic.

Moving onto our last prediction, which is

prediction at number six. This one is all to do with
site speed. And my prediction for this is that site
speed will become even more important. At
present sites must load within in three seconds,
otherwise, they can experience a negative impact
on rankings. However, I can see this going down to
2 to 2.5 seconds. The main reasoning behind this
prediction is that as our mobile devices continue
to get faster with 5G coming out 6G, 7, 8G coming
out in the future, we're going to be demanding
things much, much faster and we're going to
become less impatient and have less tolerance for
waiting for websites to load. Meaning that three
seconds whilst it is pretty fast now, in the future,
this is only going to come more and more
important and users won't be happy to wait
anything more than a couple of seconds for a
website to load.

So that is my six predictions. In a nutshell, I'm

pretty confident about all of them as they all
essentially relate back to Google's main goal.
Which as you already heard from me over a
hundred times in this course is ensuring that it
provides the best experience possible for all users
using the search engine. All six of my predictions,
that line up exactly with all the strategies I'm
already implementing myself, as I really do believe
that this is exactly the direction where SEO is
heading in the future. Whether that is by Google,
adding more machine learning algorithms in the
mix or by taking a deeper dive into artificial
intelligence, it doesn't really matter as the main
goal is always going to be the same for Google. If
we can focus on the steps we take to edge our site
closer to this goal that Google has, then we will
undoubtedly have a site that is ranking for many,
many years to come. Thanks for watching.

05 - The Future of SEO.pdf