Sarah McDowell shares that surrounding yourself with the right people is a key part of maintaining personal growth.

Sarah says: “Community and your inner circle are not only essential for your well-being, but they are also so important for your career progression as well.”

Why is community relevant to SEO?

“When it comes to SEO and career progression, as in any industry, looking after your own well-being and looking after yourself is so important. It prevents things like burnout, imposter syndrome, not feeling confident enough to push yourself forward, and not having confidence in your own skills.

One of the reasons why Tazmin and I started the SEO Mindset Podcast is that there are lots of great podcasts out there that tell you how to do SEO, but there was a gap for a podcast talking about career progression, personal growth, and mental health for those who work in SEO.

Those softer skills are really important. They're at the core of all of that lovely growth.”

Our final chapter begins with Helen Pollitt taking a look at the skills you need to personally build, to remain as relevant as possible in the SEO workforce for many years to come.

Helen says: “Keep your SEO career on track.

When it comes to your skillset, you need to stop thinking of ‘SEO versus GEO’. Instead, you need to understand how to apply your organic discoverability skills to each and every channel that you may need to – and how you can use AI to enhance those skills.”

How much of your SEO time should you focus on developing those skills?

“SEO is a career that is constantly changing, and not just in the sense that what works in SEO is changing. The tools and educational platforms that are available are changing as well.

As a result of that, we really need to be investing a lot in our own careers and in our skill sets. I like to spend at least a little bit of time every day dipping into articles, watching webinars, or just making sure that there's no breaking news within the SEO industry that I'm missing.

Treat it like an investment. Make sure that you are spending a significant portion of your time investing in those skills and keeping current with what's going on, without succumbing to the hype and fear-mongering that also seems to go around the space at the moment.”

Ray Saddiq shares that you need to be both recognisable and discoverable in 2026.

Ray says: “If you want to seriously influence your consumer moving forward, brand alone is not going to cut it.

We got into this mindset that brand was going to be key to driving SEO success, and it plays a huge part, but if you want to grow and stay top-of-mind, you need to drive demand and be discoverable. It's not just an awareness thing anymore. You need a combination of both. It's not enough to be known; you need to be found as well.

That means building brand and category salience. You've got to own your category in search so that, moving forward – with LLMs, AI search, and social search – you are the brand that has salience to the category that you want to be known for. You’re the one most closely related to that category.

This can’t just happen across Google. This needs to be across every searchable platform, because that's where intent starts now.”