SEO in 2026: The Right Way to Do Search Everywhere Optimization

Fact, 99% of people in 2026 are doing SEO completely wrong. SEO has changed dramatically, but they're still following the same old playbook. Or worse yet, letting AI optimize everything without any oversight. So, why should you listen to me? Well, I built and sold not one but two businesses on the back of SEO. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to do SEO the right way in 2026. No hacks, no shortcuts, just the specific

strategies that are working great right now. Now, unfortunately, most people are still 100% focused on Google. But the biggest change isn't happening inside of Google. It's happening at the user level. The number of people using AI tools like Chachabt has generally increased. The share of people searching on Google is significantly smaller than just a few years ago. To dominate in SEO today, you need to be everywhere, not just Google. Let's say that you need to buy

some aftershave oil. You might start by searching for aftershave oil on Amazon and you see the brand True Beauty, which you've never heard of. A few minutes later, you search for best aftershave oil on YouTube. And again, you see True Beauty. Well, it's time to go to Reddit to see some unfiltered, honest opinions. Once again, True Beauty shows up in the results. If you're an SEO, there's a clear takeaway here. You need to show up wherever

your audience searches. And this is exactly what True Beauty figured out. They leveled up search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization and it's working amazingly well. The first step of search everywhere optimization is to figure out who is actually searching for your product. The easiest place to start here is with your existing customers. Ask them how they found you and what they did before deciding to buy. For example, I did this exact thing a while back

for my SAS company, Exploding Topics, and right away we noticed sort of a strange pattern. A lot of people told us that they found us when searching for alternative data providers in Google and on YouTube. It told us that a lot of our customers were investors looking for an edge, which is something we're honestly kind of clueless about. In fact, we ended up creating content specifically for people searching for alternative data, which brought in a nice

pipeline of new customers. Step two is mapping out how someone first hears about your product to actually buying it. First, you have discovery. Then there's comparison. And finally, you've got action. Someone might first hear about the concept of a dedicated trend spotting tool in a YouTube video. Then they'd Google something like trend research tools or alternative data providers to see what's out there. After that, they'd look up reviews, comparisons, or Reddit discussions to see whether a

specific tool is any good. And obviously, they'll use AI tools like Chat GBT at all of these stages throughout the process. But yeah, only after all that stuff would someone actually visit our site and try the product. The major takeaway is that you need to learn where your customers are searching so you can get in front of them in those key places. Which brings us to step number three. Figuring out where you're missing in that journey.

Figure out where your brand is and where it should be. When I did this step at Exploding Topics, I noticed something pretty interesting. A lot of trend related content was published in newsletters and discussed on email platforms like Substack. So, we decided to start a weekly newsletter called Exploding Topics Tuesday. The newsletter ended up growing to over 155,000 subscribers and was responsible for around 25% of our ARR. The key point here is that you're not trying

to be everywhere. Instead, you're trying to find the top places where your customers search for solutions and make sure your brand shows up there. The next step is creating content for those specific platforms. For example, when you're in the discovery stage, you're usually trying to understand a problem or explore different solutions that are out there. And that's where educational content tends to work best. Then there's content for the comparison stage. At Exploring Topics, we create content

around terms like trend research tools and alternative data tools. These pages explain how different tools work and where exploding topics fit into the landscape. Finally, there's the action stage for exploding topics. That meant having clear product pages, examples of trends that we discovered early on our platform, and case studies showing how businesses use our data to find trends early on. So yeah, now that you have this strategy ready to go, the only thing left to do

is execute it. So close out this video and get to work.