Today, an interview with me as an SEO expert went online at Seo-Inform.de. As the answers reflect a good overview of our stance on current SEO topics, I am also publishing my answers here. If the topics about the current challenges in the age of AI and our approaches to generating visibility and clicks for customers are of interest to you, please read on.
Matthias Petri is Managing Director of the agency 4eck-Media.de and operator of the multilingual e-learning & content portal TutKit.com. He was a speaker at SEO Day in Cologne and has published several training courses on SEO, local SEO, user experience & customer journey, target group identification & buying persona as well as company positioning & brand building
Your view of SEO and your agency:
How did you get into SEO?
We are in the agency business, but we are also active on the market with our own project TutKit.com. We founded the portal in 2015, so we were also interested in it gaining visibility. That was the starting signal for us to become professionally involved with SEO.
What still excites you about it now?
It's a good feeling when things work as planned. For me, SEO is not just about generating visibility for websites. The use of SEO tools is also a kind of quality management for websites. The tools require valid code, a clean structure, comprehensible content tailored to keywords and search intent and the best possible user experience, including high page speed. Professional SEO forces website operators (and agencies) to adhere to technical web standards and quality criteria focused on user needs.
What motivated you to found the agency?
We started a forum for image editing with Photoshop back in 2002. Via PSD-Tutorials.de, our users were also able to sell educational DVDs (later downloads) on photo optimization and web design with Photoshop, for example. And we kept receiving inquiries as to whether we could also be booked for customer orders. So we founded our agency 4eck Media on January 1, 2010.
How do you categorize your agency?
Initially, we were mainly a full-service agency. Today, we position ourselves with specialized expertise in SEO, page speed optimization and multilingualism.
To be honest, customers from our region don't specifically ask for multilingualism or an improvement in loading speed. Companies continue to ask because they want a relaunch, to develop an online store or simply to improve their visibility on Google. From day-to-day experience, it still feels like full service, although we certainly have the deepest expertise and experience in SEO topics.
What major tasks are agencies like yours currently facing?
- Many customers expect visible results immediately, although SEO takes time.
We therefore invest a lot in education, realistic schedules and clear communication. To be honest, AI answers are also changing the framework conditions. Zero-click searches were already up to 70 percent before the AI overviews - depending on the topic. With the AI answers, even fewer clicks are forwarded to the websites. Expectations of predictable SEO success need to be readjusted. Omnichannel approaches are becoming more important. - In the past, a website went live - and that was often enough.
The main thing was that it looked reasonable. Today, structure, loading time, UX, mobile display, semantics, security, accessibility and content quality are issues that make a website good in the first place. These requirements have not only become more technical, but also significantly more time-consuming and require more explanation. - AI is currently not only changing processes, but also customer expectations.
Some customers believe that texts, images or entire concepts can be automated with just a few clicks. This is partly true. This increases the tendency to discuss services in the offer - with the impression that everything can be done faster and cheaper. One task for agencies will be to prove the real added value for customers in a measurable way.
What strategies does your SEO agency follow?
We combine data-driven analysis with pragmatic implementation. The focus is on:
- Optimizing the technical basis (page speed, core web vitals, clean structure)
- Content with added value, tailored to the target group
- UX improvements along the customer journey so that more visitors trigger the desired behavior
- Comprehensible SEO processes where the customer always knows what is happening and why
What is your SEO focus?
Onpage: Structure, speed and content. We make sure that the site architecture is well thought out, content is prioritized sensibly and loading times are not an obstacle - especially for mobile users. We make the results of these optimizations transparent by presenting test tool-based score improvements for on-page, page speed, security, etc. And after some time, the planned ranking improvements often materialize, the number of URLs in the top 10 increases (see example in the following screenshot) and the increase in clicks becomes visible in the Search Console.
Offpage: We actually only do offpage passively for our portal TutKit.com, less for our customers. The reason for this is that we ourselves are contacted almost daily about whether we want to carry out certain link building campaigns. Our portal is available in 28 languages and we have a very good international reach. That's why we are sooner or later on the radar of many SEOs who do off-page work.
Your view of your customers:
What do you currently see as the biggest challenges for end customers?
Many companies underestimate the effort required for sustainable SEO success. They expect success without providing internal resources - neither for content creation nor for technical implementation. In addition, there is often a lack of understanding that SEO is not a project with an end date, but a continuous process. We therefore also see our role as a translator and companion - not just a service provider.
I see the biggest challenge for end customers in generating any significant organic clicks at all in times of AI responses. The trend we have seen since the beginning of the year represents an unprecedented change in the rules of the game for website operators and agencies. One example: We see a drop of 20 to 50 percent in clicks for our client projects over a three-month period compared to the previous year, even though visibility has remained almost the same according to Sistrix.
What advice can you give SEO managers in industry and business?
If the answers on Google are shifting to AI answers, it is important to start making websites fit for this now at the latest. Structured data, well-maintained FAQ snippets, how-to markup and speakable tags are mandatory - if you want to be mentioned in AI-generated answers from Google & Co. you have to communicate in a machine-readable way.
SEO is not an end in itself. Every measure needs to be related to specific business goals. In our current relaunch project, a website is being completely redesigned for technical brilliance, high page speed, security and accessibility. The content is being expanded by five languages and enriched on all pages with FAQ boxes and other elements aimed at optimizing for AI response systems. In my opinion, SEO managers should deal with such topics.
And never forget: Target customers should perform the desired action on the website. What is currently preventing them from doing so? How can I support the user on their customer journey?
Which tools do you use?
- Seobility: for on-page optimization for technology & meta, structure and content. It has established itself with us primarily because of its gamification approach.
- Audisto: especially for TutKit.com, because we now have over 300,000 URLs and need more specialized analyses.
- Sistrix: For keyword and ranking monitoring. It is the gold standard in Germany.
- PageSpeed Insights: For improving loading speeds. Important: check not only the start pages, but also the other page types. And then work through the recommendations to improve PageSpeed.
- AI tools: especially ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for texts. Midjourney, Adobe Firefly and Freepik for images, although ChatGPT for images has also become pretty damn good.
Your view on ...
... backlinks: Which characteristics / KPIs make a backlink so valuable?
The domain rating of the website is important. For backlink campaigns, the domain rating of the other website should not be too far away from your own rating. Higher is of course always welcome. And the website should not be too far removed from your own in terms of subject matter. A tip: If you get involved in link exchange campaigns etc., you should always check that the page where the link is placed is actually still indexed by Google.
... Keywords: How important are keywords for an SEO campaign?
Keywords are still important, but they are no longer the only decisive factor. We work with search intentions, not just word combinations. Classic keyword density is irrelevant if the page does not meet the user's needs.
Contextual accuracy should also be taken into account, especially with translations. An example: What sounds like a natural translation to us may never be searched for in this way by natives. Therefore, always check the search volume of the keywords.
... Keyword analysis: What developments are there in keyword analysis?
Semantic clusters, entities and intent analysis are more important today than exact matches. We are also seeing a shift towards SERP analysis: What does Google actually show for this term - and what doesn't?
... SEO campaign: How do you measure the success of an SEO campaign?
We define KPIs together before the campaign starts: organic traffic, visibility, conversion targets. Then we check regularly - with reports that provide real business value in addition to rankings ... in the best case clicks and then purchases, contact requests or other desired behavior.
Your view on the following trends:
What influence does AI have on SEO?
AI is primarily changing content creation and user expectations. Texts can be produced faster - which increases the quantity, but not automatically the quality. It is crucial to use AI correctly: for brainstorming, structuring, snippets or transcripts. At the same time, human input is becoming more important - for tonality, structure and real differentiation. AI is a tool, not a substitute for strategy or experience.
How has Google changed since ChatGPT?
Many websites have used ChatGPT for immense content scaling. So have we. Without AI tools, machine translation on a large scale would not be possible. And with the help of ChatGPT or the use of the API to OpenAI, content creation is also automated. Google has to find ways to place the best result for users at the top. This is probably not so easy if more and more content is to be indexed every day. It is therefore also important to serve the metrics that are decisive for positive user signals, e.g. by increasing the length of stay on websites by placing video-based content.
Google itself is under pressure because more and more users are conducting their searches in ChatGPT. User behavior is slowly shifting. One answer that Google has come up with doesn't really please us all either: now there are even AI-generated answers with AI Overviews. This makes it all the more important to optimize websites for the needs of AI response systems.
Other SEO experts see the following trends. Can you comment on each of them?
Voice search:
We are observing the trend, but reacting pragmatically. Voice searches target specific answers. That's why we optimize specifically for FAQs, featured snippets and structured data - but without gearing the entire content towards them.
Internal linking and backlinks:
Both are essential. Internal linking provides structure and topic authority, while backlinks show relevance in an external context. If you think both through well, you will have advantages in terms of rankings and user guidance.how are AI-generated website summaries changing the SEO world? a gift for some sites, a traffic killer for others. SEO must be thought of as an omnichannel approach in 2025: how can traffic be directed to the website from social channels in addition to Google, how do you make it into the AI responses, etc.?
How important is the integration of different types of media for you?
They complement texts in a meaningful way - especially for complex topics or products. YouTube SEO, video snippets and integrated explanatory videos increase dwell time and relevance. In the relaunch project mentioned above, we are incorporating video-based sections with videos in portrait style, as users are familiar with from TikTok and the like. We therefore consider video content to be important.
Mobile-first: What special features need to be considered?
Pay attention to loading times. With computer resolutions, most websites achieve good loading times. However, mobile page speed is particularly important. And also testing the pages on the smartphone. Companies tend to test everything on the computer. But that is not mobile first. We regularly test mobile loading times, finger-friendliness, font sizes and visual stability using real devices, not just tools.
Data protection and security:
The smaller projects in particular manage quite well without cookies. If you come to a website without a cookie banner, I find that quite pleasant. Otherwise, data protection is always an issue, if only to avoid warnings.security is important and apparently not on the agenda for many websites.if you run a query on securityheaders.com with your website URL, for example, you will get an initial indication that less attention has been paid to security aspects. This is why test tools are so important. For example, we use Symfony Insights for our large projects, where 130 security-based checks are carried out for the backend code.
UX as a ranking factor:
UX already starts with the fact that I, as a website user, have to grasp immediately on my first visit without giving it much thought: what is the website operator's offer or service and do I belong to the target group? Unfortunately, not all websites answer this question. Google measures behavior. Anyone who leaves a site because it is confusing or content cannot be quickly grasped will lose out in the long run. Therefore: good layout, clear structure, comprehensible content and mobile usability are part of the SEO strategy.
Automation and feed management:
This is relevant for larger projects and e-commerce, such as we do with TutKit.com. Product feeds, structured data and automatic updates save time - if they are well maintained. We rely on a combination of automation and manual quality assurance. The importance of this is actually relatively high.
What is your outlook?
What do you see as the SEO trends for the future?
Omnichannel SEO and SEO for AI response systems.
What topic will your next training course be on?
It will be about paid ads for Google, Meta and Co. and the use of AI to optimize and automate ad placements. If organic visibility decreases for many websites, companies will inevitably pay for clicks. As an agency, we also want to deliver the best possible results for our clients.