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Welcome back to Koozai Couch, our interview series where we speak to people from across digital marketing about the ideas, tools and changes shaping the industry.
This time, we spoke with Jojo Furnival, Marketing Manager at Sitebulb, about why technical SEO fundamentals still matter in the age of AI search, how AI has changed the way she works and why brand building should be firmly on marketers’ agendas over the next 12 months.
Jojo has more than 15 years of experience across marketing, SEO and communications, having worked agency-side in London and Australia, as a freelancer and in-house in the charity sector. In 2023, she found herself, almost by accident, working in technical SEO.
As Sitebulb’s one-woman marketing function, she’s since built its marketing strategy from scratch, tripled its following and increased brand awareness in a key market from 46% to 65% in under two years. She’s also an active voice in the Women in Tech SEO community and a familiar face at industry conferences.
For each Koozai Couch, we ask the same five questions to get a quick but useful snapshot of what people across digital marketing are seeing, using and rethinking.
Here’s what Jojo had to say.
Getting caught up in GEO as the new shiny thing and treating it as a discipline that’s separate from SEO.
Remember, LLM bots can and do crawl indexed website content to seek information that helps them provide an answer to their users. This means the technical health, crawlability and indexability of your website are just as important as they’ve always been.
This falls under the remit of good old-fashioned technical SEO. And don’t you forget it!
Claude Cowork.
I can legitimately say that Cowork has transformed the way I repurpose content. With its help, I can turn one pillar piece of content into seven or more different formats and types of content with ease.
Manually, this pipeline would take me five days or more. Now, it can be done in a day.
As the one-woman marketing function at Sitebulb, I can’t tell you how valuable that is. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean I can sit back and put my feet up. All the time I’ve saved has simply been filled with more responsibilities and projects!
AI workflows.
I’ve been working with AI for a while now, like most people, and the models have come a long way since the beginning.
For some time, I probably sat more in the “AI seems clever, but it’s actually the dumbest assistant you’ve ever had” camp.
However, since starting to use Claude Cowork and investing a lot of time in creating and continually improving genuinely smart Skills that work to my exact specifications, AI has become invaluable to my workflows.
I’m in a privileged position at Sitebulb because I’m talking to super-smart people in SEO and digital all the time.
They contribute articles to our site, which I edit. They speak at webinars that I organise. They put together training sessions for Sitebulb’s audience, and I work with them on the topics. I also attend conferences throughout the year, where I get the chance to engage with some incredible minds in our field.
But a lot of these people’s insights are accessible for free.
Anyone can watch Aleyda’s Crawling Mondays on YouTube. Anyone can sign up to receive Candour’s Core Updates newsletter. Anyone can join Good Signals’ Friday morning Office Hours. And any woman or person of a marginalised gender can join the Women in Tech SEO community.
So I heartily encourage anyone reading this to do exactly that because, alongside Sitebulb’s content, of course (!), this is where you can learn a huge amount from clever people who are actually doing the work.
BRAND BUILDING.
Sorry for the caps, but it deserves them!
SEOs have to adopt a brand marketing mindset. The modern SERP is a nightmare for organic results. The average searcher has to scroll basically to the fold before they see position one because of AI Overviews and paid search placements getting bigger. Thank you to Tom Capper for the data on that one.
And ever since featured snippets came out, we’ve been seeing drops in clicks.
So we know it’s not just about the click anymore. The way customers find and interact with brands has changed. For a growing number of queries, AI is providing the responses.
The question then becomes: how can our brand become visible in this environment?
There’s plenty of data showing that strong brands have an advantage, so I think brand building and digital PR are going to become much more important over the next 12 months.
A huge thank you to Jojo for joining us on the Koozai Couch.
Her answers are a useful reminder that while AI is changing how marketers work and how people find information, the fundamentals haven’t disappeared. Technical SEO still matters, smart workflows can help small teams get more done, and building a recognisable brand is becoming increasingly important for visibility.
Enjoyed Jojo’s interview? There are more perspectives from across the digital marketing industry on the Koozai Couch.
Catch up with Sean Barber, SEO Manager at Macmillan Cancer Support and host of Search with Sean, as he shares his thoughts on AI search, SEO fundamentals and where the industry could be heading next.
You can also read our Koozai Couch interview with Erin Simmons, where Erin discusses trust, community and why doing less can sometimes support growth.
We’re always keen to hear different perspectives from people working across digital marketing.
If you’d like to feature in a future Koozai Couch interview, submit your answers via our Koozai Couch form. We’d love to hear what you think.
