This year, I made a few simple lifestyle changes that had an outsized impact on my professional life.
I focused more on family and stopped traveling frequently. I adopted one dog and another cat. Instead of constantly being on the road, I invited my closest friends and community leaders to Kuşadası once a year. This single decision cleared most of my travel agenda and allowed me to spend my time on focused, uninterrupted work.
These choices are not traditionally seen as “professional decisions,” but they dramatically improved my professional efficiency.
Another important change was building a home gym. It saves me nearly 90 minutes every day, time that used to be lost commuting. That extra time compounds quickly.
This was also the year I chose to focus entirely on my own assets and companies, rather than continuously distributing new SEO methods, concepts, or moving from one stage to another in the name of innovation. I shifted from broadcasting ideas to executing them deeply.
I can confidently say that, by making these simple changes, this became the most financially successful year in our company’s history.
Sometimes growth does not come from doing more. It comes from doing less, but with full focus.
I am proud to have presented more than 20 different websites, openly sharing their names, Google Search Console data, project files, and results, while demonstrating my methods with full transparency on the stages of the Kuşadası Mastermind and SERPConf Vienna.
To my knowledge, no one else in this industry has done this before.
I want to publish the books that have been waiting in my Drive for over four years, but I still haven’t found the time to prepare them for release.
James Dooley and Mads Singers are both honest, direct, and excellent at management. I believe you should take inspiration from people who are strong in the areas where you want to improve. I’m happy to learn from them and refine my annual plans further through continued discussions with them.
One of our Indian developers decided to be Christian for one more day of holiday, and we said okay.
Google’s direction is becoming very clear: “People for People in Search.”
Social media and forum presence will matter more than ever. As platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and community-driven sites become more deeply integrated into Google’s surfaces, both in AI-powered results and traditional search, this integration will extend into search reporting as well.
At the same time, the distinction between a web entity and a website will become much more visible, even to non-technical users. It will no longer be just about pages and rankings, but about recognizable entities, communities, and real people behind them.
AI Commerce and Agentic Commerce will have the biggest impact in 2026.
They will become more visible, more direct, and more deeply embedded into the buying journey.
AI-driven product discovery, filtering, comparison, and ordering will no longer be differentiators. They will become a default expectation for customers. Users will increasingly expect systems to understand intent, narrow options intelligently, and guide decisions without friction.
At the same time, cost of retrieval and topical authority will operate at a much deeper and more sensitive level. Brands that reduce friction in discovery and clearly demonstrate authority within their category will gain a significant advantage. Despite all technological shifts, brand will remain the most important trust signal. In addition, the volume and quality of user-generated content on product and category pages will matter more than in previous years. Reviews, discussions, comparisons, and real user experiences will play a critical role in both conversion performance and AI-driven visibility.
Natural language processing, deep understanding and generation capabilities, and the ability to focus on reading patents, research papers, and real-world SERPs are becoming essential skills. Today, almost anyone can automate processes, but creativity grounded in accurate domain knowledge and real experience cannot be automated.
Just because it is business does not mean you cannot see people as friends. When you genuinely like people and understand human nature, you develop stronger discipline and better judgment. SEO is a social skill first, long before it becomes a matter of reading algorithms.
Adopt a cat.
Adopt a dog.
Never skip gym.
Don’t eat more than 50 grams of carbs a day, make fat your main energy source.
Never sleep later than midnight.
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