SEO Tools and Resources

Does schema markup really benefit AI search optimization? Some suggest it can 3x your citations or dramatically boost AI visibility. But when you dig into the evidence, the picture is far more nuanced. Let’s separate what’s known from what’s assumed, and look at how schema actually fits into an AI search strategy. How schema fits into AI search now Search is shifting from surfacing a SERP with blue links to AI Overviews, generative answers, and chat‑style summaries that collate content in addition to links. To get your content to appear in this model, your site has to be understood as entities — singular, unique things or concepts, such as a person, place,…

SEO agencies are perfectly positioned to expand their services to include website management. The connection between SEO and site maintenance is clear: both prioritize keeping websites fast, functional, and optimized for search engines. Tasks like improving load times, fixing errors, and maintaining security align with what SEO agencies already do. By offering website management alongside SEO, agencies can build new revenue streams, potentially including reselling site hosting. Unlike project-based SEO work, site management creates opportunities for ongoing, predictable income through recurring service plans. This is a strategic way to grow your business and…

Agentic AI is increasingly appearing in leadership conversations, often accompanied by big claims and unclear expectations. For SEO leaders working with ecommerce brands, this creates a familiar challenge. Executives hear about autonomous agents, automated purchasing, and AI-led decisions, and they want to know what this really means for growth, risk, and competitiveness. What they don’t need is more hype. They need clear explanations, grounded thinking, and practical guidance. This is where SEO leaders can add real value, not by predicting the future, but by helping leadership understand what is changing, what isn’t, and how to respond without overreacting. …

You know SEO improves traffic, authority, and trust. What we don’t talk about enough is how a strong SEO foundation can help other channels, including PPC. This practical case study will show you how performance marketing scales in a high-consideration B2B medical device market and how getting SEO fundamentals firmly in place enables paid media to deliver at scale. B2B medical device marketing breaks most performance playbooks Marketing a premium pelvic floor chair has little in common with selling SaaS tools or consumer products. This is a high-ticket medical device with a long sales cycle and a strong reliance on medical expertise. Buyers include doctor…

AI search visibility in beauty is increasingly shaped before a prompt is ever entered. Brands that appear in generative answers are often those already discussed, validated, and reinforced across social platforms. By the time a user turns to AI search, much of the groundwork has been laid. Using the beauty category as a lens, this article examines how social discovery influences brand visibility – and why AI search ultimately reflects those signals. Discovery didn’t move to AI – it fragmented Brand discovery has fragmented across platforms. AI tools influence mid-funnel consideration, but much discovery happens before a user enters a prompt. The signals…

Until a few years ago, schema helped search engines extract basic facts and display visual enhancements like star ratings and sitelinks. However, in the AI-driven search world, schema plays a different and fundamental role for local SEO, helping Google and other AI systems understand who you are, what you do, where you operate, and how confidently your information can be reused. Improving rankings isn’t as relevant. Now, schema helps reduce confusion for Google and reinforces your business as a stable, trustworthy local entity across traditional search, local packs, AI Overviews, rich results, and external AI platforms. Let’s dig into how schema helps local S…

You’ve probably heard developers talk about the DOM. Maybe you’ve even inspected it in DevTools or seen it referenced in Google Search Console. But what, exactly, is it? And why should SEOs care? Let’s take a look at what it is, why it’s important, and how to best optimize it. What is the DOM? The Document Object Model (DOM) is a browser’s live, in-memory representation of your webpage. It acts as the interface that allows programs like JavaScript to interact with your content. The DOM is organized as a hierarchical tree, similar to a family tree: The document: This is the root of the tree. Elements: HTML tags like <body>, <p>, and <a…

Is your website traffic dropping, leaving you unsure of what went wrong? Every day without action means more lost rankings, leads, and revenue. This article outlines a seven-step framework to help you analyze the causes of your traffic drop and create an SEO plan to fix it. What’s causing your traffic to decline? Some website owners hope for a quick fix to restore traffic, but our analysis shows most drops are caused by one or more of the following: Changing search intent. User experience issues. New ads or Google SERP elements. Algorithm updates. Technical issues. Content changes Backlink decay. To fix the ranking drop and regai…

Search behavior is no longer just people typing keywords into Google. It’s people asking questions and, in some cases, outsourcing their thinking to LLMs. As Google evolves from a traditional search engine into a more question-and-answer machine, businesses need a robust, time-tested way to respond to customer questions. AI changes how people research and compare options. Tasks that once felt painful and time-consuming are now easy. But there’s a catch. The machine only knows what it can find about you. If you want visibility across the widest possible range of questions, you need to understand your customers’ wants, needs, and concerns in depth. That’s wh…

Big brands have a blind spot. They talk about “brand health” while ignoring what users are actually asking about their products – on Google, in AI answers, and across search data. Meanwhile, all the signals are right there in the SEO stack. Questions like “Is Gatorade actually good for you?” aren’t just keyword opportunities. They’re warning signs. And if you know how to read them, they expose major gaps in brand trust and positioning. The brand audit hiding in your SEO tools I sent a client a 100+ page audit evaluating their brand (to be fair, there were a lot of screenshots), and their first question was, “Where did you get this data?” It w…

If you’re still just copy-pasting prompts into ChatGPT to write ad copy, you’re missing the real opportunity – using the ChatGPT API to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks inside your Google Ads workflow. At my agency, we’ve used GPT-4o in scripts, Google Sheets, and custom-built apps to solve real problems – from Shopping feed cleanup to search term waste audits to performance reviews across entire accounts. This article shows you how to set up the API, use it safely and efficiently, and apply it to high‑impact PPC workflows. Step 1: Get access to the ChatGPT API To use GPT in your own scripts or applications, you’ll need access to the OpenAI API. T…

Over the past decade, I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes, conducted countless interviews, and led numerous technical tests for SEO candidates. Along the way, I’ve met many exceptional professionals — but I’ve also noticed a recurring pattern of common interview mistakes that can hold even the most talented candidates back. Below are 11 common mistakes I’ve observed in SEO interviews — and how you can easily avoid them. 1. Projecting arrogance instead of confidence Confidence is great! While imposter syndrome is common in SEO, it’s important to maintain realistic confidence in your skills and experience. However, there is a fine line between projecting conf…

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is having a moment in marketing measurement. As privacy regulations limit user-level tracking, marketers are turning to it for reliable, cross-channel measurement. (We love it at my agency – MMM analyses often lead to smarter budget allocation with significant downstream impact.) But as adoption grows, so do execution errors and misconceptions about what MMM can and can’t do. Despite its strategic potential, it’s often misused, misinterpreted, or oversold – leading to costly mistakes and credibility loss from unrealistic expectations. MMM isn’t a black box. To produce meaningful insights, it demands context, strategy, iteratio…

AI tools can help teams move faster than ever – but speed alone isn’t a strategy. As more marketers rely on LLMs to help create and optimize content, credibility becomes the true differentiator. And as AI systems decide which information to trust, quality signals like accuracy, expertise, and authority matter more than ever. It’s not just what you write but how you structure it. AI-driven search rewards clear answers, strong organization, and content it can easily interpret. This article highlights key strategies for smarter AI workflows – from governance and training to editorial oversight – so your content remains accurate, authoritative, and unmistakab…

Many SEO professionals enter freelancing for the same reason: freedom. They dream of fewer meetings, flexible hours, and the ability to choose their own projects. What they don’t expect? Freelancing isn’t just “SEO without a boss.” It’s SEO plus sales, scoping, contracts, billing, and client management. Without those essential pieces, even the strongest SEOs struggle to make freelancing sustainable. We’ll break down each step in this process to bridge the gap between dream and reality. By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly how to build a sustainable freelance practice so you can become a digital nomad answering client emails and enjoying mojitos from a…

One of the most energetic conversations around AI has been what I’ll call “AI hype meets AI reality.” Tools such as Semush One and its Enterprise AIO tool came onto the market and offered something we could not live without: The data on what was happening inside LLMs. How many citations were we capturing? How many mentions were our brands gobbling up? This data became, and still is, an incredible novelty. But with the data came questions like “What’s the ROI here?” and “How do I interpret this data and integrate it into my team’s actual marketing strategy?” It’s clear the data provided by these tools is very valuable and very intriguing, but what do you do with …

No, you can’t just trust AI to do your SEO work for you. Great SEO requires smart humans. But used strategically, it can be an effective accelerant for great organic growth. In other words, as I recently explained to a client, simply using AI to mass-produce content doesn’t work – but a structured AI-driven workflow does. When I say “work”, I mean: It works for the client by delivering results. It works for me because it helps us operate more efficiently and take on more client work with the same number of employees. Before the process I’m about to lay out, I used to have to hire a team of writers for client content initiatives. Now, I …

Managing large catalogs in Google Performance Max can feel like handing the algorithm your wallet and hoping for the best. La Maison Simons faced that exact challenge: too many products and not enough control. Then they rebuilt their segmentation with Channable Insights and turned a “black box” campaign into a revenue-generating machine. Step 1: Stop segmenting by category Simons originally split campaigns by product category. It sounded logical – until their best-selling sweater ate the budget and newer or overlooked products never had a chance to surface. Static segmentation meant limited visibility and slow decisions. Marketers stayed stuck making m…

As AI transforms how users search for information online, we all face a new challenge: ensuring our content is visible and impactful within emerging AI platforms. While traditional SEO tactics remain crucial, brands must also embrace AI SEO to truly excel. By optimizing content for AI systems, brands can ensure they stand out in AI-generated responses and large language models (LLMs) like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and ChatGPT. Ninety percent of businesses are concerned about losing SEO visibility as AI reshapes search, according to a recent survey. The same report also found that 61.2% of businesses plan to increase their SEO budgets due to the growing …

Has your organic traffic looked like this over the past couple of years? I’ve evaluated a handful of global websites negatively impacted by core updates related to page experience, helpful content, and spam. This specific site is a large enterprise global site with multiple subdomains and millions of orphaned pages without proper URL structure. If you’re an SEO professional seeing an impact like this on your organic traffic, you may want to read on. Many websites struggle with buried content, missing internal links, and a lack of logical hierarchy. The good news? You can optimize your site architecture and give users and search engines the…

AI-based discovery offers a new level of sophistication in surfacing content, without relying solely on keywords. Beyond keyword-string-first approaches, contextual and semantic elements are now more important than ever. Optimization is no longer about just reinforcing the keyword. It’s also about constructing a retrievable semantic environment around it. This impacts how we write, create, and think about content. It applies whether you write every word yourself or employ automated workflows. Reframing your publishing strategy around context Much has already been written about the concepts covered here. This discussion focuses on tying them together into a…

The OpenAI GPT Store launched in January 2024 with more than 3 million custom GPTs. Ask any team how many they still use, and the answer is usually zero or one. Most business GPTs fail because they’re built like novelties rather than tools. They’re too broad, under-tested, and launched without a strategy, so they never become part of a team’s workflow. I’ve built and audited 12+ custom GPTs across marketing, SEO, and sales teams. The pattern is consistent: a small number get used daily, while most collect dust. Here’s how to build GPTs that do — from validating the right use case to structuring, testing, and launching in a way that drives real adoption. …

Search marketing is still as powerful as ever. Google recently surpassed $100 billion in ad revenue in a single quarter, with more than half coming from search. But search alone can no longer deliver the same results most businesses expect. As Google Ads Coach Jyll Saskin Gales showed at SMX Next, real performance now comes from going beyond traditional search and using it to strengthen a broader PPC strategy. The challenge with traditional Search Marketing As search marketers, we’re great at reaching people who are actively searching for what we sell. But we often miss people who fit our ideal audience and aren’t searching yet. The real opportunity sits at…

Let’s face it, lead generation can be a real pain. One month you’re drowning in prospects. The next you’re wondering if your website’s broken because nobody’s filling out your contact form. I’ve been there, and let me tell you – there’s a better way. Relying on unpredictable methods can stifle growth and leave your sales team twiddling their thumbs. The good news? Digital advertising, when strategically implemented, can be your key to unlocking a predictable and scalable lead generation system. This article will guide you through the essential steps to move beyond hoping for leads and start building a reliable process to drive a steady flow…

Creating video content takes time and budget, so understanding how it performs is critical. YouTube’s native analytics in YouTube Studio are robust, but they’re locked behind account access. That can make reporting difficult — especially when you need to share data or don’t have direct login access. Moving that data into Google Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) makes it easier to analyze and distribute. With Data Studio, you can: Pull YouTube data into reports you already use. Schedule automated updates for stakeholders. Customize dashboards around the metrics that matter. Track performance without relying on backend access. Here’s how to …