Relevance should be the most important link metric that SEOs care about heading forward. After all, links will help LLMs, search engines, and users understand your brand – who you are and what you do.
That’s according to James Brockbank, Managing Director at Digitaloft. Some of the topics covered in our interview:
Getting better at SEO strategy.
Why SEO is no longer easy.
Whether links still matter in the age of LLMs and AI Overviews.
A preview of his upcoming presentation at SMX Advanced 2025 in Boston.
Reminder: SMX Advanced returns June 11-13 in Boston. Get your tickets now!
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Danny Goodwin: Hey everybody. It’s Danny Goodwin, editorial director of Search Engine Land, and I am joined now by James Brockbank. Welcome in. We’re here to talk about SMX Advanced, where you’ll be speaking. We’ll get to that in a little bit. But first if you could introduce yourself to the audience, who you are and what you do.
James Brockbank: Yeah, of course. Firstly, thank you for having me, Really excited to be heading over to SMX Advanced as well. I’m James Brockbank, managing director and founder at an agency called Digital Loft over in the UK. We’re a specialist search, content, and digital PR agency. I’ve been doing SEO now for just over 15 years. But still as enthusiastic about it as the day I joined the industry. And really excited to have a chat with you today about what’s going on in our industry right now, which I think is an awful lot.
Danny Goodwin: Yeah, just a little bit. You’ve been around about 15 years, you’ve seen a lot of change. and it feels like these last couple of years there’s been more change than I personally saw in maybe the first, 15 years of my career here in the industry. How do you think we’re doing as an industry? What do you think maybe what are some things that we’re doing right and what are we doing wrong right now as we try to adapt to these latest AI changes?
James Brockbank: My take on this, and I’m fairly outspoken on social online in terms of what I think as an industry we’re doing right and wrong. And I think honestly my take here is that over the past maybe three or four years, sort of prior to the real turbulence that we’ve seen in recent times, maybe that period between 2020 and ’22, ’23. I think a lot of the industry got distracted by how easy it became to mass churn out content and see growth off the back of it.
James Brockbank: I think we’re all to a certain extent guilty of playing into that to some extent or another. And I think it’s no different to how it was back in 2011, early 2012, with links. You try and find an SEO who was in the industry pre-Penguin who wasn’t doing some sort of at least grey hat link building because it worked and I think you get put in this position as an SEO where you have a duty to certainly whether you’re on agency side or client side to drive the growth in line with what expectations are. And I think one of the things that maybe SEOs haven’t done well enough over the past 5 years or so is really setting expectations with stakeholders, with clients. And I look at what happened with the helpful content update, as an example. I personally had a good number of content sites, affiliate sites, which did quite well for some time. But I knew it was too good to be true.
James Brockbank: As an experienced SEO, I knew that this growth we were seeing that I took a number of sites to a million plus sessions a month with average content. I’m not saying poor content, not at all. It was well planned. It was strategic, but it was nothing other than average content. It certainly wasn’t created by experts. It certainly wasn’t the best of the best content, but it drove growth. But I went into that knowing the risks and that this is too good to be true that there will be a point where this all comes crashing down around us. We saw it with, Penguin, I think, was the big one where, look, back in 2012, we were a lot earlier on in the evolution of Google.
James Brockbank: And I think, for any of us who were working in the industry at the time, it was probably a lesson that I’m not going to say won’t get repeated, because I think a lot of people learned the same lessons with the helpful content update. But I think it comes back to the thing of – is this aligning with real mature marketing or are you borderline spamming? And I think it is a fine line. But I think what you get into is this place where clients, stakeholders are and so competitor has seen phenomenal growth. We need to replicate that. And I think maybe one thing that SEOs haven’t been as good as they should be at is setting those expectations and saying this is incredibly risky.
James Brockbank: What I do for my own personal projects is not usually the same as what I would do for a client project. Because on my own personal projects, I’m using them as testing grounds. I’m looking at what’s working, what’s not working. If those sites come crashing down, great. I’ve learned an absolute ton of insights into what is and isn’t working, what we can’t do. But on a client site, that is very different. But I think there became this expectation in this period that if you mass churn out content, you will see growth. Which I think comes back to maybe the overarching point of all of this, which is that as an industry, we have to get better at moving away from vanity metrics and getting closer to sanity metrics, those real business metrics of sales, conversions, revenue, money in the bank.
James Brockbank: And I think that’s maybe an area where, for as long as I’ve been in SEO, we have, 12-15 years ago, we’re obsessed as an industry with rankings. And interestingly, I had this conversation with Stephen Kenright, who you will know, a couple of weeks back. And we were talking about this and we were saying that the difference was back then 12 years ago if you ranked position one for a money keyword you could almost guarantee you were doing well as a business. There were no SERP features.
James Brockbank: There were a couple of ads at the top. Most of the ads were in the sidebar. And I think there was then a much clearer picture of if we rank organically in that top position for a term that we know is going to drive business for us, you will be doing. As that started to change, as the SERPs changed, we moved into this period where it was, “okay. let’s focus on traffic.” I think very quickly we’re coming out of this. Just because you’re driving traffic doesn’t mean it’s having an impact on metrics that the board cares about. And I think that’s something that as SEOs we are we’re certainly getting better at as an industry. And I think maybe the past two weeks has brought this conversation back around again.
James Brockbank: But I certainly think, as going forward, the thing that we have to be better at as an industry is communicating the real business impact of SEO, which isn’t rankings, it isn’t traffic, it’s conversion actions. It’s conversions, sales, money in the bank.
Danny Goodwin: How do SEOs sort of make that pivot, do you think? Because I know a lot of people in industry have historically focused on driving rankings, driving traffic. So, do you have maybe any advice for people who may be struggling with trying to adapt to that and how do they still prove value in the job that they do?
James Brockbank: I think, the reality is that, we are still, traffic and rankings at least right now, they’re a means to an end. They are the way we drive taking relevant visibility through top rankings, which again it can mean different things. It could mean in various search features. It could mean in the merchant listings. But to simplify it, rankings are what drives traffic. As long as that traffic is relevant and aligned with where we want the intent of our commercial goals, then we would expect that to translate into conversions into sales. But I think the number one thing we have to be doing is stopping SEO from being siloed. We have to move SEO into the – I joke about it sometimes that the grown-up conversations at the boardroom table.
James Brockbank: SEO has to have a seat at the boardroom table and be aligning with where the business is wanting to go. And understanding that if the business’s priority is to drive x increase in dollars of revenue over the next 12 months, where is that going to come from? So that sort of key focus and what are the opportunities and really working backwards. I talk a lot about working backwards. If anyone hasn’t read the book from 2x Amazon employees is an absolutely phenomenal read. It’s called “Working Backwards” and it changed my whole viewpoint on how I approach sort of SEO strategy. And I think to me I’m the sort of person who believes that as SEOs we can learn a lot by moving outside of SEO and immersing ourselves in other business and marketing worlds.
James Brockbank: So I think working backwards from those goals and being able to say “how are we going to drive that” in terms of the click opportunity in terms of what does our visibility look like on the SERPs right now. And sort of mapping that into some level of forecasting to really work backwards from those real business goals, which are usually money. Bringing in things like average order value conversion rate, depending if you’re lead gen or ecommerce – and really being able to say our focus areas are and this is how we’re going to drive the revenue by working backwards into sessions and traffic and then into rankings and visibility. And essentially to me, it’s that whole piece on getting better at strategy. I think SEOs have historically been a lot more tactical than strategic.
James Brockbank: And I think this is the point where we have to have a strategy to answer not just that what are we going to do, but why are we going to do it and how are we aligning with the rest of the business. So I think my top piece of advice there is to really make sure everything that we do is aligned with a business initiative that sits bigger than SEO and then we can report into that.
Danny Goodwin: Great advice. Yeah. so again, big-time change in SEO. Is there anything right now that you are super excited about or something of is coming that is exciting or any other new opportunities from the last couple years?
James Brockbank: Yeah, I think the thing that I’m most excited about right now is the wealth of insight that we have and have had over the past 12 months coming out about how Google actually works. I think whether we look at the DOJ case, whether we look at the algorithm documentation leaks last year, I think we are finding almost on a monthly basis right now there is more coming out largely thanks to this DOJ case but there is a lot coming out that some of it confirms what we were doing. The documents that came out a couple of weeks back were really confirmation of this sort of ABC and it’s nothing new to those of us who’ve been doing this for some time but it’s confirmation that actually a lot of the fundamentals are still at play here. I had a few conversations with people who were shocked to see PageRank mentioned in this
James Brockbank: Now Google never said PageRank went away. But I think it keeps us having these conversations to go yes there is a lot changing in search but many of the fundamentals they’re still there in some form. Doesn’t mean they’re not drastically different to what they were 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago but in terms of those fundamentals of search they are still there and I think we are certainly as someone who I love diving into the different patterns do this documentation to understand a bit more about how Google is working right now what Google is trying to do.
James Brockbank: And I think, that to me is one of the biggest opportunities that we have right now. just this morning I saw Mike King’s write up on how AI mode works. I think, these are to me phenomenal opportunities that we didn’t have when I started out in SEO because It was all theory and testing. Yes, it was probably a much simpler search world. But for those who really take the time to understand how Google works, what Google is trying to do, I’ve said for a long time, if we look at things like the patents in the light and in the view of they may not be what Google is doing right now, but they give an indication into certain things Google has tried or is trying to do. they allow us to think about how we approach what we do and how that aligns with it.
James Brockbank: So I think to me that is one of the most exciting things and the biggest opportunities that we have right now in SEO is understanding in more detail than we’ve ever been able to do before how to align with the ongoing information that we have coming out.
Danny Goodwin: Awesome. So on the other end of that, is there anything that kind of has you worried right now or is keeping you up at night about the future of SEO?
James Brockbank: The answer I’m going to give is probably the answer that most people would give. I think we don’t know what the future holds in terms of AI Mode, in terms of how that integrates into core search. And I think any of us who isn’t worried to a certain extent is probably not being completely honest.
James Brockbank: But I think as much as it’s a worry and a concern, it’s also a massive opportunity. I think, coming from someone who runs an agency, I think we are going to see in the next 6 to 12 months the agency landscape shift massively. I think there is going to be more not pressure but there’s going to be different expectations from agencies over the coming year. And I think to me as someone who runs an agency it’s my responsibility to make sure we stay the right side of that.
James Brockbank: I think the things are moving so fast right now, I guess that worry that concern is that it’s going to be very very easy to be left behind. Even things that were working 6 months ago 12 months ago, there is a very very strong chance that they will not be impactful in a year’s time. So I think, which again I think feeds into what I say is the exciting thing right now which is we’ve got more information than probably we ever have had before to look at this from a perspective of I think those who want to stay ahead of the curve will have probably a very exciting few years.
James Brockbank: But I think there is that going to be that pressure and that necessity to be at the forefront of this and being able to adapt really really quickly.
Danny Goodwin: Zooming out a little bit here and based on all you’re seeing and what we’ve talked about, do you feel like SEO is heading toward a period of growth, decline, or reinvention?
James Brockbank: I think we’re heading to a period of slight reinvention where, I think honestly as I said five 10 minutes ago we’re coming out of this period where I think SEO got easier again. I remember back in 2010, 2011, SEO was pretty easy compared to what it has been in that interim period. I think we saw maybe this period, as I say, 2020, 2021, ’22, where SEO actually became pretty easy again for a period.
James Brockbank: I think it was a lot easier than it ever had been to drive traffic. And I think, we come back to this distinction on traffic in a lot of cases is a vanity metric rather than a sanity metric, a real business metric. But I think we’re coming back into this period where we’re coming out of a time frame when it’s been relatively easy to rank a site.
James Brockbank: And I think ultimately that means we are going through some period of reinvention, not just with AI Overviews with AI Mode with whatever comes off the back of that. I’m going to call them distractions but we have people searching in more places than ever before. We have people turning to social for search. We have people turning to ChatGPT. So I think we are going to be in a period or we are probably already in a period of reinvention. And I think that comes back to again addressing the fundamentals. Making sure that our fundamentals are right. Making sure maybe not the most popular answer but make sure we’re doing things for users not for search engines. And really make seeing a reinvention of the industry as an opportunity.
James Brockbank: I think we’re in for a rough ride in terms of traffic is going to decline to some extent. Now, there’s various studies that have come out already that, I think I saw a great one the other day from Ross Hudgens at Siege Media where homepage traffic in a lot of the LLM search is significantly increasing. … Measurement as we all know I think is going to be one of the challenges that comes out of this and it’s very very likely that we go into a period where we are maybe unable to track in granular detail the impact of our work and our efforts on some of the metrics that we’ve historically always reported on. So I think, however we look at it, reinvention is happening.
James Brockbank: As with everything, it will slow down. We will come to a point where it plateaus and we are able to better advise. And I think, certainly when my clients are asking me what do we need to do to rank in AI Mode what do we need to do to rank to appear on ChatGPT, I think those answers are changing monthly right now. How we track that, think about that, they’re changing very very quickly and I think anyone who is able to give you a definitive answer with 100% confidence probably isn’t as experienced as they would like to make out. I think they’re probably trying to sell you something.
James Brockbank: So, I think, again, having these open conversations. To say as SEOs, we have to move fast. And I think, make sure that stakeholders, clients, employers, the teams we work with, are moving at the same speed that we are.
Danny Goodwin: At SMX Advanced, you will be speaking. We’re live back in Boston June 11 to 13. Your session which I’m very much looking forward to is about measuring link relevance using vector embeddings and cosine similarity. So could you maybe if someone’s watching this and thinking about going to the show or is already going and just wants sort of a preview could you maybe talk a little bit about it and also as a side question do I need to know math to do this because if so I’m in trouble.
James Brockbank: Yeah. So yeah, at SMX Advanced I will be talking about how we can actually measure the relevance of links. Now I think one of the biggest challenges we have faced as an industry is the showcasing the impact of links and actually bringing some sort of data to whether links that we are earning or are trying to earn are or aren’t going to be impactful. Now I sort of started this journey of looking at this when the algorithm documentation leak came out last year. And I came across something in there called anchor mismatch demotion.
James Brockbank: So digging into there is question of doubt that this is about a relevance mismatch when you start to cross reference this with how Google is referencing topic embeddings and actually at the page/site level placing this alongside things like the site radius that we saw. There is no question to me that this anchor mismatched emotion is where Google is looking, whether a link is or isn’t topically relevant to in my opinion most likely the site as opposed to page to page. So I started off on this journey to say right okay, we have some more insight into confirming what a lot of us have said for a while that if we are earning irrelevant links Google is almost certainly ignoring them.
James Brockbank: I think, for many many years, link sellers especially have had this mindset that Google’s only going to ignore a link if it’s on a low DR site or a very obviously spammy paid guest post site. I don’t agree. I think when we come into this mindset that when you set the top end goal of building your reputation that links should be on high traffic pages links should be clicked. You can very very quickly see why we should be chasing links that are relevant and that build a brand. As we come into this era of AI search this is more important than ever. But the million-dollar question how do we measure this.
James Brockbank: Relevance has always been something that has been very very subjectively measured. I believe this link is relevant and suddenly you get some spin that’s three or four topics removed that you might be able to argue. So when we use vector embeddings and cosine similarity, it’s as close as we can get to how Google is measuring the relevance of links. And we can start to do a couple of things. We can start to draw analysis between which of a competitor’s links are certainly helping them rank and which are likely being ignored. Which of our own links are helping us to rank which are going to be ignored? So, what can we go after more of the same? And what tactics maybe aren’t effective nowadays?
James Brockbank: But we can then do this to start to see okay actually we can run the same process for page content versus queries. And we can start to address the question of if we want to drive growth do we need to be focusing on increasing our reputation and authority (i.e links and off- page signals) or is it a page content issue. So we can use it strategically as well to guide our focus. To answer your question no you don’t need to know maths. Thankfully a lot of these features are now built into things like ScreamingFrog.
James Brockbank: I will be sharing a really really simple script and a link to a sheet where you can load it up in Google Sheets. So, all anybody needs to run this is ScreamingFrog, which I think pretty much any SEO who is practicing will have, and Google Sheets. That is all anybody needs. And I’m going to be talking everybody through the process of how you can do it using those tools that we all have readily access to.
Danny Goodwin: And since I have you here, as you were speaking, one of my ongoing questions and I’ve heard this answered both ways. So I’m curious for your take on it. Do you think links will matter as much in large language models or I know they’re still going to matter obviously for Google and traditional classic search, but do you think they at all maybe lose value in the coming years?
James Brockbank: I think links will continue to hold the same weight or continue to hold weight in LLMs, but it’s in the right context. I think links in a sense of just chasing a link that isn’t relevant. Again, we come back to this concept of relevance. I think relevant links that help LLMs understand who you are and what you do, which is it even links anymore? My gut feeling is that as we move, mentions can hold the same weight here. Off-page signals, whether they link, whether they don’t. I think links as referral traffic course, links are in their core form navigational. They take people from page A to page B. And I don’t think we should ever ignore that. And I don’t think we should ever be looking at links just for SEO.
James Brockbank: But I think in LLMs, we are seeing this if we’re doing things to build our reputation to help LLMs, search engines, users at the very very core of it understand who we are and what we do. I think they’re going to be more important than they have been in recent years. And I think we’re going to see a big demand for reputation builders. I don’t like calling us link builders anymore because I think, we’ve evolved so much beyond that. But if we call us reputation builders, those of us who are able to build a brand’s reputation, I believe, are going to be in hot demand over the next few years.
James Brockbank: And yeah, I think, it’s not going anywhere. We have to focus on aligning it with building a brand rather than just building links for the sake of it.
Danny Goodwin: Great answer and great stuff. thanks James so much for joining us. Really looking forward to your session at SMX Advanced in Boston. You’ll be on lucky Friday the 13th for you.
James Brockbank: Absolutely. Very welcome.
Danny Goodwin: So, I’m sure it will go amazing. Thanks again for coming out and doing that and joining us today.
James Brockbank: Thank you.
Danny Goodwin: Right, thanks, James and thanks everybody for watching.