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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a cornerstone of digital marketing, helping businesses attract visibility, build credibility, and reach their target audiences online. However, in recent years, SEO has evolved far beyond keyword placement and backlinks. 

Today, it’s an integrated, data-driven, and user-focused strategy that shapes nearly every element of digital marketing — from content creation and social media to analytics and brand storytelling. 

The modern SEO landscape reflects advances in search engine technology, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience (UX), and consumer behaviour, forcing businesses to rethink how they approach online visibility.

At our next Business Growth Series session on Nov. 18, Sanj Rajput, Vice-President at Kitchener-based REM Web Solutions Inc., will explore how strategic content, data-driven campaigns, and smart SEO practices can elevate online presence, attract the right audience, and convert clicks into customers. 

In preparation, Sanj offered his input on the importance of SEO and how it can impact businesses:

What are some of the major trends surrounding SEO businesses may not be aware of?

Sanj: I'd say the biggest area that most businesses are unaware of is the sheer number of changes that are happening right now. There are changes being constantly made, and Google puts an update out almost weekly. It's no longer keywords. It's just figuring out what the users are actually looking for. Search engines now prioritize content that directly satisfies user intent.

AI tools like Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience) and ChatGPT-based assistants mean businesses must write for how people ask questions, not just for keywords. Let’s say you sell plastics, instead of just throwing the word plastics into a bunch of paragraphs, you must sit down and ask yourself, ‘Somebody out there who's searching for a service, what would they be looking for in plastics?’ They want to know durability or melting point or brittleness or flexibility, or whatever those things are, then you have to write those answers because that's what people are looking for. 

Also, with more than 60% of searches being mobile, optimizing Google Business Profiles, reviews, and local citations is critical for visibility. We (REM) try to tell clients find every directory, every listing, anything you can be involved in locally and get your name on it and list what your business does so when searches happen locally, you show up higher in the map. 

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness); Google increasingly rewards content that demonstrates real-world expertise and authenticity — especially in competitive industries.

As well, fast, mobile-friendly, secure websites (HTTPS, clean code, structured data) now heavily influence rankings. If you've got a website that loads slowly, doesn't work on mobile, or it doesn't have a secure web address, you just shot yourself in the foot. There's no point in doing anything else. Fix those three things first because that's the No. 1 thing you want to look at. 

There’s also been a switch where algorithms are starting to look more and more at regularly updated content. So, it used to be you could write a blog post on a topic once, leave it sit up there and it would continue to rank forever. And now what's happening is you must go back and refresh that post with current data and update it on a regular basis to keep it up at the top of the algorithms.

Is it an ‘easy sell’ to get businesses to embrace SEO trends?

Sanj: Not always. SEO takes time and consistency, which can be a tough sell in a world used to instant results from ads. Many business owners still see SEO as a technical “set-and-forget” task instead of a continuous marketing investment. You must put time and money into SEO every single month. It's never going to go away, and it's literally like eating healthy and going to the gym. You can go to the gym and work out for five or six months, lose the weight, and then if you go right back to the way you were before those pounds are going to come flying back on.

However, once they understand that SEO impacts every stage of the buyer journey from awareness to customer retention, it becomes easier to justify. Showing data (traffic growth, conversions, improved ranking) and focusing on practical, measurable steps helps build buy-in.

Once they do understand that SEO impacts every stage of the buyer journey, they've learned that it's becoming easier to justify. There's a customer retention stage and SEO helps every single one of those stages, but ads only help the very first stage. So, if they stop focusing on just customer acquisition and they actually look at their entire journey, they'll get more sales long term and a better-established brand long term. But it's a hard sell to get a business owner to back off of what they need now, for what's going to be better for them in the long run.

What are some of the stumbling blocks businesses are facing surrounding SEO changes or enhancements?

Sanj: One is outdated websites and not being mobile just destroys it. A lack of strategy. A lot of people are focusing only on keywords and they're ignoring the buyer persona and the intent that the buyer is searching with, and they don't align the content with the different stages of the journey. Also, inconsistent Google listings and lack of reviews hurt credibility. As well, limited resources are one of the other stumbling blocks.

Small businesses often lack the time or internal expertise to monitor analytics, update content, or adapt to Google’s constant algorithm updates, which is why we recommend obviously bringing in an agency like ourselves to help you with that. It's almost impossible to be an expert in SEO because it changes so fast. I literally have two full-time employees that specialize in areas of SEO because it's such a vast piece of information that no one can know everything possibly all the time.

There is also a fear of changes. Businesses often hesitate updating long-standing content or designs that are underperforming. They've got their website up, they're happy with it, they don't want to fiddle, they're just going to leave it as it is. Or like I said, they've had some blogs that have been doing really well they wrote years ago and don't want to touch those, but trends are showing that they have to go back and update those ones even though they look like they're performing well.

What is one of the first steps a business can take to better utilize their SEO?

Sanj:  Start with an SEO audit, a full review of your website’s technical performance, on-page content, and local visibility. Contact a company like ours and then we would prioritize a list of fixes that make the biggest difference. We look at things like improving page speed and mobile responsiveness and we optimize title tags, descriptions, and headings, ensuring your Google business profile and online listings are complete and consistent. We can create refreshed content that answers real customer questions. Even one round of an audit can dramatically improve online visibility and the quality. 

Our Business Growth Session ‘Digital Marketing & SEO – Driving Visibility in the Digital Age’, will take place Nov. 18 from 9-11 a.m. at our office (750 Hespeler Rd.). Click here to reserve a seat.