Gagan Ghotra

• Avoid creating content using AI, make sure that if and any use of AI is being double checked before making it live on the site. And also don’t mass produce AI content and then just publish it on your site, avoid this at all cost because consequences for your business can be significant & it might lead to loss of all existing rankings. That’s why be careful if having to use AI content for saving on costs to not get it written by Humans.

• Don’t just focus on optimising for Google Search, focus on other traffic driving surfaces like Google Discover and other AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity. Its not like there is something unique that needs to be done for optimising for these AI chatbots. Mostly optimising for Google Search actually aligns with optimising & showing up in these AI surfaces.

• Stay in the lane and write what is relevant for your existing or potential users, don’t go too broad (speaking of publisher sites) just focus on what your expertise is and don’t just write about a topic or keywords because some tool is telling that its easier to rank for those topics. Also remember recent changes in how Google ranks websites, mentions this as well and going forward in 2025 Google would be focused on treating different topical content clusters of the site as if these are different sites in a site. Meaning if as a publisher, trying to go out of line and writing about topics which aren’t actually relevant to the purpose of the site then Google may not rank those pieces of content.

• Tracking wrong SEO metrics – SEO is too broad of a topic and sometimes its hard to track ROI out of it, but don’t just take this as a word. Rather ask who ever your working with to provide an approximation model, telling you how much spend let’s over 6 months will lead to specific ROI. Also don’t rely on vanity metrics, just focus on things which matter, I think that’s revenue, rest is just part of the picture which matters but not more than revenue of business.

Just a side note recently I have been thinking of a better SEO success metric something like Return on SEO spend (ROSS) which can clearly show like 5K was spend on SEO for 4 months and net revenue return out of that is like 20K leading to a 4x ROSS. Recently I posted about this concept on LinkedIn too sharing some more details about what I think of this concept.

• Obsessing over improving the site speed – don’t get me wrong, having super fast pages is amazing and is a requirement to make sure that users coming to the site are having an amazing experience. But don’t obsess over this metric and just make sure that it’s okish enough. That’s it, don’t spend too much of SEO resources to make the pages super fast.

Also let me know in the comments if you want to know something else. You can directly comment below or reach out to me on LinkedIn, if you prefer that. Also recently I wrote a long LinkedIn article sharing some of my SEO tips for 2025 and what businesses should consider for growing their organic traffic, you can check that article here – Some simple & easy to implement SEO suggestions 2025.