Forget Alphabet Soup. Discover your "I"

There was a time when SEO meant one thing.
Search Engine Optimisation.
A bit mysterious, occasionally maddening, but ultimately useful. You wrote good content, made your website reasonably find-your-way-around-able, and Google rewarded you with a bit of traffic. Simple enough.

Then came the acronyms.

AEO. SXO. GEO. AIO. Possibly UFO, depending on how recently someone pivoted their agency’s strategy after a podcast binge.

It’s like SEO started dating other acronyms behind our backs. Now they’ve moved in, eaten all the biscuits, rewritten the to-do list in Klingon, and told us we’ve been doing it wrong this whole time.

Marketing agencies—some brilliant, others better suited to selling questionable hatchbacks—saw an opportunity. After all, “complexity sells” has been a winning IT strategy for decades. And so they wrapped the straightforward basics in a cloud of jargon, stuck a trademark symbol on the end, and called it a methodology.

The result? Business owners everywhere are now being handed reports that read like encrypted signals from an alien marketing overlord.

So let’s stop for a second. Breathe. And bring things back to something that actually matters.

Because underneath the alphabet soup, there’s one letter that hasn’t lost its relevance.

“I” is for Influence...

Not the influencer kind of “pseudo influence” that involves hashtags and ring lights. The quieter kind. Your influence - your digital reputation, your consistency, your authority, your content and how well the internet believes you know what you’re doing.

That’s what search engines are scanning for today. Not just whether your page exists, but whether it looks like something they can stand behind when a user needs an answer.

And that’s what Search Engine Influence is really about.

People still search. But what they’re expecting has changed.

They don’t want ten options. They want information they can make a decision on.
Something fast, direct, and confident.

That’s what Google and its AI sidekicks are now scanning for. Not just for keywords, but for signals that indicate that business knows the answer and won’t embarrass them if they repeat it.

If those signals aren’t there?

You don’t lose a position on a page. You lose presence.

The algorithm simply nods politely and moves on to someone it finds more reassuring.

This is why influence matters more than ever.

Your influence shows up in how your content is written.
Your influence shows up in whether your reviews feel authentic.
Your influence shows up in the consistency of your tone and whether your structure makes sense.

Your influence shows up in whether your website reads like a real person put it together rather than a patchwork of conflicting, derivative AI advice.

Influence is not about perfection. It’s about being coherent enough to quote.

As Robert Cialdini wrote:
“People seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.”

And right now - as AI takes search engines beyond keywords -  what you could be most at risk of losing is visibility.

Not because your product’s wrong. But because your presence feels uncertain.

Leigh Baker from Terminology puts it plainly:

“Short-term SEO tactics won’t sustain your online influence in the long run. Demonstrated authority and trust will.”

We’ve seen it again and again.
Strong influence—real content, clear structure, human-friendly design, consistent signals—beats technically “perfect” pages that leave Google unsure of what to do with them.

So the question is no longer “how do we rank?”

Today’s question is “Are we showing up where decisions are being made?

The best influencing strategies start with clarity.

Clarity about your values and your value proposition..
Clarity about your customer.
Clarity about your offer.
Clarity about how well your online footprint reflects who you actually are (not just what someone once optimised you to sound like.)

Clarity isn’t fluff. It’s what keeps people and algorithms from drifting past your brand in search of something that feels more certain.

So what does influence actually look like?

• A focused message. Not generic. Not copy-pasted. Not “we do everything.”
  
  
• Content that’s structured in a way both humans and machines can understand.
  
  
• A tone of voice that stays steady whether someone’s on your homepage, reading your Google reviews, or seeing your brand on LinkedIn.
  
  
• Real people saying real things about your work. Preferably good things.
  
  
• A website that feels cohesive and current—not something pulled together from five different templates on five different days.
  
  

That’s not fluff. That’s the foundation of a credible digital presence.

SEI isn’t another acronym to memorise.

It’s a way of thinking about digital marketing that starts with trust, builds from content, and stays rooted in how search engines actually behave in 2025. Not how they worked in 2012.

Optimisation still has a role.
But without influence, it’s just noise in a tidy format.

Content still matters.
But if no one believes it, what’s the point?

Traffic can be exciting.
But conversion starts with credibility. And you can’t fake that anymore.

Before you chase the next shiny metric…

Ask the better question - the question your ideal customers are asking.
Then ask yourself - does your business sound like one that belongs in the answer?  Really?

Because if the answer is “not quite” or “we’re working on it”, then that’s where your work on building your influence begins.

The internet is not looking for perfection.
It’s looking for something it can trust just enough to hand over to someone else.

That’s your job now. To be quotable. To be authoritative. To be believable. To be consistent.

And that starts with influence.

Want to know how influential your digital presence actually is?
Run it through the SEI Tool.
It’ll show you where to focus.

And if your last agency handed you a report that looked like it fell off the back of a spacecraft, maybe it’s time for a different kind of conversation.

  Author: Ian Hopkinson 

    Digital Madman, Founder of Terminology and Mad Scientist Digital

    Socials: Instagram / / LinkedIn 

    Websites: Terminology / / Mad Scientist / / Hopkinson Creative