Why FOMO is bad for SEO

0:00The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit I Hear Everything dot com. Welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast and I Hear Everything Production. In this podcast, we'll share the news, knowledge, and strategies you need to navigate the ever-changing world of SEO. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton. Nearly 60% of Google searches in with no click. That means that the majority of searches never sends traffic anywhere, and yet every time Google launches a core update, expands AI overviews, tweaks discovery, the SEO industry goes into panic mode. Budget shifts, strategies get rewritten,

1:02teams react before they actually measure and calculate what should be done. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Most enterprise platform problems aren't caused by the newest AI feature. They're caused by poor fundamentals, crawl inefficiencies, weak internal linking, ignoring server logs, and technical debt. So how do you separate real signals from industry noise? My name's Tyson, and joining me today is Caspar Seminsky, senior director at Search Brothers and former member of Google Search Team. Today, Caspar, you're going to be talking about the latest changes in the industry and how you can take that into practice, especially in the enterprise arena. With that, Caspar, welcome to the podcast. Tyson, thanks for having me. And thank you for accommodating my wish to talk about my favorite topic, namely Thermal. And it's been a lot this last, like, I don't know, several, I mean, then maybe like year, year and a half, it felt like it's really peaked eye intensity. And like, what are the most intense, I guess, like versions of FOMO that you're seeing in the industry right now of this?

2:07Like, oh my god, I have to abandon things. Like, it's just, where do you think, I guess, where's it coming from, where's the most intense, like, version of it? Well, I suppose, and we have seen this over the, you know, a couple of years, let's say the last 10 years, time and time again, and different variations. There was, of course, the scare with regard to mobile. There was the scare with regard to voice search, kind of taking over. And there was EAT and so forth. We could, you know, we could talk about so many of those instances where essentially the message across board felt like SEO, the search industry is about to be revolutionized or even worse, SEO is dead. And we heard this. And I pretty much, I've been around in the industry for 20 years by now, I believe it or not. And I heard so many times that SEO was dead, I can't even count it.

3:09But it's actually true. And I really feel about the same way as SEO highlighted that for the last year and a half, almost two years, it was slightly different, though, because LMS really brought a noticeable change to the industry. And in both regards, right, there was finally a, with a fresh wind with regard to chat GPT and other alternatives in Gemini and so forth. So users could look for an alternative version of whatever the query was. And separate from that, of course, LMS. You'll notice I would rather talk about LMS than AI. They did offer and do offer great opportunities in terms of efficiency increase and cost reduction. With that, of course, there is the risk and that ties neatly into FOMO because merely applying new technology because it's new fancy and a lot of people seem to be talking about it and maybe your competitors seem

4:13to be highlighting that they're actually utilizing AI or LMS. That's not necessarily the course of action that rains the best results. So if you're asking me, when was the time that FOMO was really most pronounced? I would say LLMS are probably a very good candidate for the reason why a lot of people felt like, yeah, we're afraid of missing out. Not necessarily for good reasons in my book. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's some like, probably self-serving like disruption element in there, but I would agree with you and it's like I kind of view it almost like an iceberg where it's like you have this core majority that's still maybe like under the surface of what's visible to most people. And especially when you're working with an enterprise, that upper portion that's out of the water is largely like what people are, you know, perceiving and that's what

5:17you're dealing with from a managing stakeholders, managing like buying within an organization, but the large core to me is still very much intact and yeah, maybe there is like significant shifts coming from it. But yeah, I always like, I guess I've been leaning more towards this like, yeah, there's impacts in my like maybe prioritization sometimes or certain, you know, 10-20 percent of activities where I might think of how I compete or pages that I might prioritize, but yeah, that like architectural structural foundation to me is still very much there. And not just that, you know, as far as I'm concerned, it really comes down to the individual service, right? If we happen to have a boutique website, it doesn't necessarily require the same kind of optimization. And I'm going to say something that is really unpopular, not every website

6:21does require optimization to begin with, right? Because you may be offering and, you know, in very competitive environments, yes, gear optimization is critically important for the sales funnel, but there is also a scenario where we're talking about websites that cater to local audience, which were expanding any kind of resources, speed of money or time, isn't really going to make a tangible difference now. But of course, our conversation revolves primarily around large services in a very competitive environment, or at least medium-sized platforms, where there is a real chance to make a serious difference. I want to emphasize this faster, just, yeah, it doesn't need to be AI-driven, it doesn't need to include the latest newest buzzwords on the landing pages. It actually just needs to load faster. And this is something we were talking a moment ago about constants and things that

7:26do not really change. Well, everything else, relatively comparable, Google's always going to pick and choose the platform that is faster, not because they love it, not I think the users prefer it. Right? So, there we go. This is something that hasn't changed over the last 10, 15, 20 years, and this is something really worthwhile, expanding your resources on. And resources is something that's very much on my mind, just because I grew up in an area that's famous for being cost-effective, I grew up in sort of Germany. No, it's something else. Resources are finite. Every organization's resources are finite. So, it's really important to kind of like put the money where it counts, right? And if it's applying AI solutions in order to generate content, which may or may not be useful or beneficial, if it's SEO supplemental content, chances are it won't be, that's kind of a waste, right? And frequently another topic, and this is actually something that

8:26we probably can talk about as well, because while having these innovations and while witnessing these changes in our industry, at the same time, really old-school SEO seems to be driving, which is, which is really a perplexing. So, we have those large organizations expanding considerable amounts of their budgets on link building or link buying, which is also the gets. And this is a similar example of expanding your resources that akin to buying a lottery ticket, it may work out, but it also, you know, it may not, or actually it may trigger a Google penalty. So, the decision-making process, how prioritization is ultimately decided, that's critically important. This is where a large part of our work comes through. This is purely educational, before collecting any data that allows for actionable advice. In some ways, I feel like those elements, in a lot of ways, are like the table stakes, where it's

9:29like to get a seat at the table you're having to go through those areas, but they are, oftentimes viewed as the less interesting, less flashy. It's like a lot harder to hold the CMO's attention talking about crawl efficiency than some new content strategy angle. And so, it's like there's, you know, some I think just natural barriers to it, but it is like your entrance fee to then build upon everything else for. I'd like to dive a little more into kind of, like, one like the enterprise world, because I think some of these things you're saying as far as you know, crawl logs, crawl efficiencies, even websites that have more of like an impact or potential for organic. Yeah, if you're a brand new, like kind of local business or startup, I agree with you. It's like, yeah, SEO is not going to be the first point, and there may not even be

10:30a huge opportunity, depending on the business type, or even like stage of company. But at that enterprise level, it's like to me, a whole new arena, and oftentimes a piece that it's overlooked more often than you'd expect is just like indexation health, crawl efficiency, where are these different systems spending their time and where are they not? And is that aligned with what I want from like a business strategy perspective? So, maybe if you could elaborate a little bit more on how you look at that and how you gauge if that's an area that has substantial opportunity for a business. Well, I think it's an exciting question, because SEO in a lot of ways is about risk management, right? On the one that the objective may be to keep the road, not the boat steady, avoid rocking the ship too much. On the other hand, you would like to kind of like

11:33pick up pace and go up into the right hand and increase visibility. So, how do you do that? With large websites where frequently, not always, but frequently, there is already an awful lot of optimization going on and overall, there is really no low-hanging fruit. And in this regard, and thanks for the core poll, because this is really what this server locks, right? The server locks is a topic we're talking about here. The vast majority of organizations out there, large organizations with really considerable possibilities, or financially, but also from a technical argument perspective, and they do not safe and preserve server locks. This is something that is unfortunate. And if anybody listening needs convincing, think about the exit strategy where having server locks is actually going to allow to drive up the price upon signing a letter of intent. And this is standard operating procedure at that point in time

12:37for reviewing server locks in order to actually verify and validate the value of the service that is on the table. But obviously, we're not talking more of the exit situation. We're talking about this. So, how are server locks useful? Now, the individual server lock is of no consequence whatsoever. If it's aggregated for the entire website for a considerable long period of time, I like to refer to perpetuity as in start collecting day one, as many large organizations have done way back at Google being a very good example, right? Starting server, saving and preserving server locks and never delete anything. If you start doing that, and if you collect for a considerable period of time, say six or 12 months or even longer, that's actually a treasure trove of data. It allows you to see where the prioritization lies if it's regard to crawling on Google's end. And this is important because what Google algorithms may consider a top priority or the top priority section of your

13:37website may or may not align with what you actually want to be ranking index and ranking and performing. Now, investor relations may not be your top priority. Now, of course, I'm making things up as I go here as just for the sake of the example, but it just really happened. There's other information that server lock offers, which is not easily found elsewhere, which is status codes responses, right? How do our servers respond? Are 200 okay responses referring to actual landing pages with content on them? Or are these possibly software fours, which is a huge issue for retail website? I can't stress that enough, right? And you can actually see whether in server locks, you can deduct whether 200 okay, software fours are being returned because you can of course check also the volume, the volume of bytes transferred. And if it's very low, it's fair to assume, you know, it can investigate further, but it's fair to

14:38assume there is no content behind that landing page. And having software fours, which we can, you know, we can circle back to that, but fair to say that's going to kill your user signals, and that's going to keep your rankings ultimately. So you don't want that to be happening, right? And there is, of course, an awful lot of other things that allow for deep insights otherwise unavailable and do the issue with server lock really is, if it's not safe and preserved, it's lost, right? Whatever hasn't been recorded today is lost forever. I completely agree. And it's also I feel like we're noting too that there are some unique characteristics to the industry and like one thing that I really value about it is that people are, there's more of a willingness to share information. And I think some of it stems from it's like everyone fell into this industry from one facet or another. And it's not at least as far as I still know, there's no like actual like degree

15:41or program like you might get a class or two at most. But it's like something that we all fall into and learn in practice. And I think partly from that you have this more openness and this more like willingness to give a lending hand or share information that I don't know if you see it in the same form or the same level and a lot of other like industries and areas. Well, my view is probably a little bit limited in the sense that I myself just in the search industry, you know, and I did have a job before joining Google and did something else entirely, but it was a very large industry. And so you may know a couple of colleagues, maybe a couple dozen colleagues, but that, you know, it was impossible to know all the major faces that kind of like, you know, developed this very direct, very, very real relationship, even if it sometimes only begins online. It happened to be run into those people at some point in your career.

16:44I think it's great that we are such a relatively speaking small industry. I like to think everybody knows everyone and it's probably easier to be nice to each other, to be friendly to lend a hand. And on the other hand, the industry is, you know, the services rendered even though they tend to be comparable at times, the demand for our services is so large that there is no fierce competition in the sense of cultural competition where everybody feels like the other guy might be taking away the contract or the client. So in a lot of ways it's really a privileged position that we find ourselves in. For my part, I'm certain you're very, very grateful for the opportunity to do what I'm doing. I think it's great when you want to do anything else. Yeah, it does feel like it's still a rising tide where it's not like a zero-sum game that we're like, finding each other in a lot of ways. And I mean, it's been kind of like our approach would

17:48be visible. It's way more beneficial also to be partnering with other people and do projects together. And like, you know, it's the same way where sometimes you get friction between those internal and external teams. And it's like, yeah, there's no need for that. Like, we are going in there to help them. Like, if anything, like, we want to make them successful. And like, hopefully, and I've told this to our team in numerous rounds of times. Like, one of the best most rewarding things you can do is help your client, like an internal SEO team member or something, get a promotion. It's like, that means one, the business impact is positive, their careers progression. Like, that's probably like one of the best things or best signals that we could get of being successful as a supporting. Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor previsible. So you're looking for SEO help. And you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google.

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19:55For more information, go to previsible.io. That's previsible, P-R-E-V-I-S-I-B-L-E.io. Right. Isn't it? And one of the best ways to find the more clients because people move around successful people move around. They do get hired for new gigs at different companies. They already know you. They know about the kind of level of results that you can deliver. Yes, there's going to be an internal debate about hiring the next agency. They will recommend the people that they know they can work really well with. So I think this kind of, you know, this is an opportunity to circle back to the point I'd like to approach previously that it is really important to be respectful because it's a huge privilege to work for a client, to learn about their operation, to kind of understand their pain points. This is not public information. They entrust us with so much information that is critically

21:00important to the survival and to the existence of those companies. It is really something to learn from that. It is also important to remind ourselves that we get better with every new project. Because rather than staying with one company or one industry for a prolonged period of time, which is of course an opportunity to learn as well, having an insight into a lot of different industries or different platforms from the same industry over time, that's incredible. That almost allows you to develop kind of like a spider sense. You already know what you're looking for when you start digging into data. So I feel like with every single new engagement, we're getting better yet, which is again something that's great. And Monday morning, come to the office, you know, open up your laptop and it feels just so good. Wow, not many people can

22:01say that. All right, Kasper, I'm loving the conversation, but I feel like, you know, being respectful your time, I should transition here into kind of the more short form lightning round of this. So I'm going to throw more, some shorter form questions at you. And there's going to be some, you know, tie to also like, why FOMO is bad for SEO, kind of bringing it back around. So with that rated dive right in, absolutely. First question here, what's the biggest SEO trend from the last five years that turned out mostly hype? Like just the whole thing got blown away out of abortion. And you just, you saw the biggest level of overreaction. Voice search. Voice search. I'm trying to be as concise as I can. Fair. And do you feel like anything was like driving that? Like why that got took off like,

23:03well, you know, at times, if there is no news, news needs to be generated in order to remain the topic of, you know, in town. So there is probably not much that was going around to the time. And voice search indeed was a feature, a feature that short of the English speaking market is barely usable. I tried many times again, time, time again and again. And it's just not something that you can use as a human person to get anything done. And even in English, it tests its limitations. And most importantly, you don't need to do anything different in order for your website to be kind of like ranking for voice search. You just need fundamental data, extra square one. So voice search was hyped, but it was literally a storm and a teapot. And I guess that's what I was kind of getting towards was like the hype versus substance. And yeah,

24:06even though the noise around LM's and AI right now is all time high, there's still a bit more weight and substance behind that than something like voice search. Absolutely. Next question. If you could make an enterprise team focus on just one data source in 2026, what would that be? Well, there is one that we can't do without, right? And that's Google Search Console. And I'm saying because it's particularly insightful or comprehensive, it's the only data source that allows for verified insights into how Google perceives data, right? It's much delayed. There is hiccups. And generally speaking, it's anything but comprehensive. But if there is a manuals per action again, Google penalty, we will know for sure. And that's business critical, right? So if I can pick and choose just one, I'll take Google Search Console,

25:09but I'll be fighting hard to get more. No. And it's a little bit of tangent from the original question here, but like thoughts on kind of like the latest update and kind of release from Bing Webmaster. Like, do you feel that they're going to kind of push Google Search Console to like expand some AI reporting and like performance metrics? Not sure they're going to do that because of somebody else doing it. And generally the way I knew the Google Webmaster Tools team didn't feel much pushed around by kind of pressure by the industry to think they did thanks at their own pace. If they felt pushed around by pressures in the industry, right-step open in a new tab, right-click open in a new tab would have been a feature that was included a long, long time ago at the very basic level. So I'm not quite sure if the pressure

26:15from the industry or from competitors is something they're going to factor in. I'm actually very, very happy that Google Search Console is in place. And the reason for me saying this, this is a product that absorbs significant amounts of development time and it generates zero revenue for Google, right? And you have to keep in mind, we have to remind ourselves that this is not something that is being utilized across board. So this is essentially a feature which kind of like a favor for those who have master's who care. But it's something that's hard to justify from a financial point of view. So I think it's great that data is available as flawed and as limited as it might be. It is still the only source that's real. Fair points. Next question. And I feel like this one's kind of fluctuated in popularity in conversation. But like, what are your thoughts on blocking LMs from proprietary data?

27:18Well, it really depends, right? How proprietary is the data? And is every LLM out there, including the Rogue ones, kind of responds to that blocking in a way that we would like to? I mean, if it's really proprietary and if it's something that we do not want to get get scraped and crawled ultimately, then it shouldn't be accessible in the first place. But this is a hypothetical situation. I think if it's public, if it's accessible, it's going to get crawled automatically. So it's kind of like a binary choice. If we don't want stuff for stuff to be crawled, it probably shouldn't be crawlable to begin with. If it's crawled by some bots, chances are it's going to leak automatically. I kind of have felt the same way where it seems like there's a little misunderstanding and binary terms. Like, yeah, you can come up with some cases that you're not going to want that to be crawled and scraped and stored.

28:24But then you have some cases, I think the most like nodal one was probably like the New York Times where it's like, yeah, I don't know if like the reason for that actually makes sense in application because it is like, it's not like that information wouldn't be surfaced from then your competitor. And so those are the ones that I'm like, probably the strategy doesn't probably align to the principle in that standpoint. I think it's possibly fundamentally adults was the concept of the internet where stuff is accessible. And if it's public, you know, if it's not entirely private and locked in, chances are it's going to become public knowledge and available one way or the other. So this is a fundamental discussion, but not so much an SEO discussion, I think. In a lot of ways, this is a policy discussion, or even a business model discussion that pertains to the particular business that needs

29:27to make that call. I do not feel qualified to weigh in heavily a short of saying, if you don't want it to be public, just don't put it on your website, I suppose. Keep it simple. And sometimes the best approach. Next question, what's one technical issue that quietly destroys enterprise performance that's commonly blamed for an algorithm update or something that's maybe like Google's fault? I will try to be as concise in France as I can. I'm not sure whether there is the one thing, but there is the usual suspects, if I may say so. That's of course mixing canonicals with no index. That would wreak havoc on the website's performance. In rankings in Google search, if it's unintentional, I'm very common think being, for instance, having the staging server cropped unintentionally was all the no index and canonical combined

30:30terrible, terrible results here. So that's one thing. Internal linking, that leaves large sections of the website that are prioritized actually, orphaned internally. That's of course very, very sub ideal at the same time. And last but not least, really slow websites, as in time to first buy somewhere in a couple of seconds. That's bad, because that's a slow side. So that's not just about Google noticing is primarily about users, because sure of having that one service that everybody wants to have, not being the unique, kind of like a unicorn situation where your website is the only one that provides the service and users are determined to wait those 50 seconds, 15 seconds for the website to load. Short of that situation, users are actually going to walk away. And whenever that's happening, when users come from Google, they do not get what they were looking

31:30for either text too long or they're disappointed with the result on the landing page, they go back, they refine the query, they look for something else, they click somewhere else. That data accumulates, that's going to translate to very poor users, and that's going to kill ranking. So please don't do that. Absolutely, and that is a tough one to boil it down to the one aspect. But yeah, a lot of it just comes back down to hygiene. Yes, consistency. And like going back to the conversation when I was saying like internal linkings, like always kind of a favorite, like easy go to on an enterprise website, hygiene, it's just, it's never ending, it always can more can be done, but it's just such a critical element that it's like you can't ignore it. I love the term, I like to call that as a technical hygiene, which I may actually shamelessly steal from you and utilize going forward. I think it's a big part of the long-term value proposition, and it doesn't sound as exciting as

32:36utilizing the newest latest buzzword of technology, but this is what generates revenue, and ultimately this is the top priority for pretty much every business out there. And to me too, it's worth pointing out that it's like there are ways of spinning these like legacy, I would say like legacy factors, but these like foundational factors to support the narrative and greater awareness that like search and discovery has right now, where I think like I've really been pushing internal like SEOs to be leading those conversations internally, because the CMOs, the CEOs, it's reached a level of noise that they are going to hear, and they're going to have that foam mode that you're bringing up. So one of the core challenges in my mind is whether you're from the outside or you're on the internal team, how do you take that momentum and then carry it back into something

33:36that you know deep down is going to be that high value activity, and some of these hygiene areas are not going to be the most interesting to talk about. If you try to present it in the same way you did two years ago, probably not going to get much interest especially now, but there is such a way of being able to bring that into the conversations of how the industries changing how having that clean structure can then support you in these new LLS systems, but I think like that's a piece that it's like I really would encourage people to even if you're revisiting an old kind of tactic that you do in SEO, try to reframe of how you want to present it in nowadays landscape, which doesn't mean you have to change the activity, it just changes how you're evangelizing it. Yeah, pretty much, and it doesn't mean that I'm reviving every old school method is really recommended. I mean, you know, going around and about and

34:42adding, you know, meta keywords does not gonna help anyone, and you might do, you know, some of our audience may be laughing, but I happen to see that a lot, there is a lot of services out there, and they do spend time on having their meta keywords improved, they're still trying to rank with altavista, even though most of the team doesn't know what altavista is or was. So it really comes down to setting the priorities straight. Another factor that is critically important, we talked about the dynamics between an external consultant and the client's team, within the client's team, there is also a lot of stakeholders that would be the developers critically important, as we all know, there will be the content team, possibly link builders, possibly the marketing, the brand team, a lot of different stakeholders, all of which contribute towards SEO signals. So it's important that these people also understand their work is not just

35:45important for themselves, but also does kind of like influence what the other team does. And the dynamic between those teams, they are understanding that they work on something that is a shared objective, this is also very important. Essentially, what is being talked about very infrequently in the SEO world is the internal dynamics or the internal policies within those companies or within those teams, which does really trickle down to how successful they are, because if we happen to have a team where some stakeholders do not feel like they are understood or listened to, you can install the project forever with having yet another meeting to discuss the same thing over and over again. So in SEO, it's really important to be agile and focused and, you know, tightly necessary steps, because the competition doesn't sleep. Google policies change and evolve all the time. And the competition is probably doing something

36:45that might be a new competitor coming into the game. It's important to take steps that we are successful before the next Q4, which is for a lot of businesses that have really brought a really important time in the year, can't wait forever. People have to work hand in hand. This is also a moment. That's such a great message too. I'm going to throw one final question at you. I think it's a good kind of way to round this out. If you hand to once and for all, distinguish one SEO myth, what would it be? If I may kill one SEO myth, that's patronk and people are going to like, you know, I hear our audience yawning and being like, oh, not again. You know, some of us might be laughing about it, but there is a whole SEO industry out there just building or rather selling patronk passing lengths. And this is something that has been around and visible for users in the toolbar.

37:50For about 14 days, I don't know, it was 14 years ago, 16 years ago, much longer than that. It doesn't really matter much. Now, patronk, most people understand it's not visible, but there is so many fantasy ranks out there that are being sold as marketing tools, you know, none of which matters because patronk, even though it's a thank-it Google, it's not being publicly shared, not even with the website owner. And all of you, those other external values that are being tossed around as marketing tools, Google doesn't factory any of that. So if I may kill one myth or if I may make one recommendation, the vast majority of websites out there do does not need more backlinks. Another rank better was not a million of backlinks that have been created overnight. So if you've been contemplating doing that, don't do it, patronk isn't necessary, something you need to be focusing on, improve your product, make a website faster, do something else, go for a walk, but don't spend your time building more patronk passing backlinks. It's not in your best interest.

38:56Fair enough. When Caspar has been a pleasure, thanks for taking the time to jump on with us, but with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of The Voice of Search Podcast. Thanks again to Caspar Ziminski, Senior Director at Search Brothers for joining us. If you'd like to get in contact with Caspar, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile on the show notes, or be sure to go over and check out his company's website at searchbrothers.com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you'd like a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed in the following day. With that, that's all for today. Thanks for sent by, and we'll see you on the next episode.