SEO Tools and Resources

SEO is all about optimizing for, well, search. In 2018, I defined SEO as: “The art and science of persuading search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to recommend your content to their users as the best solution to their problem.” In 2025 (and beyond), we can define search, answer, and assistive engine optimization as “The art and science of persuading recommendation engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Siri, Alexa, and Copilot to recommend your solution to their users as the best in the market.” The aim is the same – get the conversion. The difference? We have more engines. The recommendation is often further…

The March 2026 core update brought what Google describes as a design “to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.” This confirms the simplest truth in search: people use Google to get answers. Whether it’s solving a problem, learning something new, or making a decision, searchers want content that is genuinely helpful in their busy, on-the-go lives. If your content does that, it succeeds. If it doesn’t, no amount of SEO tricks, hacks, or magic bullets will get your content to show up on page one, let alone in AI Overviews. How modern search systems surface helpful content AI Overviews went from appearing for just 6.49%…

Here’s a question every marketing leader should be asking right now: How healthy are your customer relationships? Not your campaigns, not your channels but the actual relationships. It’s a harder question than it sounds. Most organizations have spent the last two decades building around channels. Email had a team. Social had a team. In-store, ecommerce, service, each with their own stack, their own metrics, their own version of success. And from the inside, it looked like progress. Every team was hitting their numbers. But from the customer’s perspective it felt like dealing with multiple companies wearing the same logo. Marketing sends a “We miss you!” em…

Eligible Yoast customers can now run a free Yoast AI Brand Insights scan and get a personalized report showing how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini see your brand. Your brand is part of the AI conversation whether you’re monitoring it or not. Yoast AI Brand Insights, part of the Yoast SEO AI+ plan gives you visibility into what AI tools say about you, how often you appear, and whether the picture they paint matches reality. To help you see that for yourself, we’re offering eligible customers a free, one-time scan. What you’ll see Your AI Visibility Index: a clear score showing how present your brand is across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini Sentiment analysis:…

Semify acquired Dragon Metrics, a Hong Kong–based SEO, AI, and PPC reporting platform known for its international reach. The move boosts Semify’s reporting strength and AI optimization tools as the search landscape shifts more toward AI. Why we care. Dragon Metrics customers can expect business as usual, plus faster product updates. Co-founder Simon Lesser said on LinkedIn that the platform will stay a standalone brand with the same contacts and product experience. Customers also gain access to Semify’s growing AI optimization methodology and future software integrations. About the acquisition. Semify announced on Dec. 8 that it is acquiring Dragon Metrics: F…

SEO is like a never-ending story. There are always things to do. And these things need your undivided attention, from keyword research to content audits and performance reporting. Many of these are repetitive, recurring, and time-consuming. And that’s why you need SEO automation. Table of contents What is SEO automation? The benefits of SEO automation Tasks you can automate right now How to get started with SEO automation Final thoughts on automating your SEO What is SEO automation? By automating SEO, you use tools and software to do the repetitive optimization tasks for you. These tools don’t eliminate the need for a person to be involved, but they can …

Link building is an essential part of SEO. It helps search engines find, understand, and rank your pages. You can write the perfect post, but if search engines cannot follow at least one link to it, your content may stay hidden from view. Table of Contents What is link building? What is a link? Internal and external links Anchor text and why it matters Why we build links Link building as digital PR Link quality over quantity Avoid shady link-building tactics How to earn high-quality links Link building in the era of AI and LLM search Examples of effective link building In conclusion TL;DR For Google to discover your pages, you need links from other websites. T…

SEO is something of a nebulous concept. To some, SEO is technical; to others, it is creative. Neither of these is 100% right or wrong. SEO is all of this and more, depending entirely on the unique situation and goals of the business looking to use SEO. This loose definition leads to some common and fairly troublesome issues. One of these issues, which we see repeatedly and completely derails the success of projects – even by experienced agencies – is the misunderstanding between SEO strategy and SEO planning. This article defines these terms and shows a simple way to ensure both strategy and planning are tackled with the rigor that the modern, h…

We love to say that SEO is always changing, and 2024 proved that true. There’s hardly been a year more challenging and exciting than that. But as we’re heading into 2025, we’re sure we have not seen the last of it. With everyone banking on AI, search, and the search industry are set for another sea change. In this post, we hear from seasoned SEO experts for their predictions on the future and how you can prepare. Table of contents A look back at SEO in 2024 The SEO experts in this article Main trends and SEO insights for 2025 AI’s role in SEO Adapting to zero-click searches The rising importance of video content E-commerce SEO shifts Local SEO trends for 2025 User …

Is it possible to get an accurate view of the current state of SEO? There have been multiple attempts to reach consensus on what works, predict what might be coming, and identify the factors that may play a role in “good” (or “bad”) SEO. As useful and productive as some of this may be, none of it offers the same grounded data as the Web Almanac, a project I was honored to be a part of. With the publication of the 2025 SEO chapter, we can now review the data and spot the emerging trends from 2025 and what that could mean for SEO in 2026. SEO standards on the rise 2025 has been another year of increasingly higher SEO standards — which can only be a good thin…

If there’s one takeaway as we look toward SEO in 2026, it’s that visibility is no longer just about ranking pages, but about being understood by increasingly selective AI-driven systems. In 2025, SEO proved it was not disappearing, but evolving, as search engines leaned more heavily on structure, authority, and trust to interpret content beyond the click. In this article, we share SEO predictions for 2026 from Yoast SEO experts, Alex Moss and Carolyn Shelby, highlighting the shifts that will shape how brands earn visibility across search and AI-powered discovery experiences. Key takeaways In 2026, SEO focuses on visibility defined by clarity, authority, and trust rat…

Around the turn of the year, search industry media fills up with reviews and predictions. Bold, disruptive ideas steal the spotlight and trigger a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out). However, sustainable online sales growth doesn’t come from chasing the next big trend. In SEO, what truly matters stays the same. FOMO is bad for you We regularly get excited about the next big thing. Each new idea is framed as a disruptive force that will level the playing field. Real shifts do happen, but they are rare. More often, the promised upheaval fades into a storm in a teacup. Over the years, search has introduced many innovations that now barely raise an eyeb…

A little over a year ago, I wrote an article titled “The future of SEO in an AI-powered world.” I wanted my opening line to be dramatic, so I wrote “The Google interface we know today will be gone in less than three years.” At the time, this line sounded outlandish. Could the world’s most popular website, with close to 2.5 billion daily users, just vanish? It’s a year later, and I find myself overwhelmingly turning to LLMs over Google for all kinds of information. In my case, the prediction of three years was an understatement. I suspect the same is true of many of you reading this. Is Google dead? Not quite. To paraphrase Mark Twain, news of Go…

Google’s quiet retirement of the num=100 parameter might look trivial to the rest of the world, but for SEO professionals, it’s another step deeper into the dark. That small setting allowed us to see the full top 100 results at once, which made competitive research and rank tracking more complete. Its disappearance comes on the heels of Google requiring JavaScript execution for scraping (temporarily breaking many rank trackers) and alongside AI Overviews that steal clicks surface answers without disclosing sources. Piece by piece, the data we’ve relied on to measure SEO impact is slipping away. We are entering a black box era. Note: If your impressi…

Search has transformed. AI-powered results, featured snippets, “People Also Ask,” and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) are redefining how — and where — visibility happens. Join Wayne Cichanski, Vice President of Search & Site Experience at iQuanti for SEO Beyond Just the Ten Blue Links! He’ll share a data-driven SEO 2.0 framework designed to help brands systematically claim high-impact search shelf-space — and convert visibility into measurable results. In this live session, you’ll learn: How to analyze and win across modern SERP features A blueprint for aligning structured data, content, and intent Real-world strategies for navigating S…

Wil Reynolds, founder and CEO of Seer Interactive, is challenging SEOs to rethink what success looks like in a world increasingly shaped by AI. In his SEO Week session, “SEO is a performance channel, GEO isn’t. How do you pivot?”, Reynolds said many marketers are focused on the wrong outcomes — and producing work that people don’t believe. Marketing isn’t just about being seen Reynolds opened by pushing back on the idea that visibility alone is the goal of marketing. “Marketing was never just to be seen or be visible,” he said. “You had to turn that visibility into something — believing something about your brand… And then they ultimately have to choose you…

SEO is moving out of the marketing silo into organizational design. Visibility now depends on how information is structured, validated, and aligned across the business. When information is fragmented or contradictory, visibility becomes unstable. The risk isn’t just ranking volatility – it’s losing control of how your brand is interpreted and cited. For SEO leaders, the choice is unavoidable: remain a channel optimizer or shape the systems that govern how your organization is understood and cited. That shift isn’t happening in a vacuum. AI systems now interpret, reconcile, and assemble information at scale. The visibility shift beyond rankings The future of…

SEO tools were the most replaced martech application in 2025 — but not for the reason you might expect. According to the 2025 MarTech Replacement Survey, SEO platforms topped the list of replaced tools for the first time, overtaking categories like marketing automation platforms (MAPs), which had led for the past five years. At first glance, that might suggest instability in SEO. After all, the discipline is being reshaped by LLMs, AI-generated answers, and the rise of zero-click search experiences — all of which challenge traditional keyword tracking and ranking-based workflows. But the data tells a more nuanced story. SEO tools: most replaced, but stabil…

SEO keeps evolving faster than most of us can handle. If you’re finding it hard to keep up with all the changes in search, you’re not the only one. I’ve talked to dozens of marketing teams this quarter, and they all tell me the same thing: the old SEO playbook just isn’t working anymore. Whether you’re running your company’s search strategy or working with clients, you need a smarter approach that puts users first and works across all the places people search online. This guide shows you key areas that are driving SEO success right now in 2025. It’s based on what’s working for the most successful marketing teams I work with. You’ll get practical ti…

If you feel like you’re being pulled in different directions with your SEO program, you aren’t alone. How do you know where to focus first for the most impact? And when that’s done, what do you do next? It can be challenging to decide which SEO tasks to prioritize because they all impact the end user in some way – but some more than others. This is where discernment comes into play. This article will help you build a path to get your SEO program organized from point A to point B and figure out how to prioritize tasks to get ROI quicker. Frameworks for identifying high-impact SEO opportunities When every SEO task feels urgent, knowing where to focus fi…

Picture this: Your company relies on Data Studio for SEO reporting. It’s right before your next big meeting when you’re planning to present results… but Data Studio has an outage (again) and suddenly you have nothing to show. That’s embarrassing. And it happens more than it should. It wasn’t even a year ago that I touted the benefits of Looker Studio (now Data Studio) for SEO reporting. Now the platform feels archaic compared to the agentic coding tools available today. Here’s how rigid SEO dashboards like those produced in Data Studio are holding you back and why code-driven SEO reporting is the only way to remain efficient and competitive. The pr…

AI has made it easier than ever to scale SEO fast – but with it comes high risk. What happens when the party is over and short-term wins become long-term losses? Recently, I worked with a site that had expanded aggressively using AI-powered programmatic. It worked until it didn’t, resulting in a steep decline in rankings, which I doubt they will recover. It’s not worth the fallout when the party is over. And, eventually, it will be. Here are the lessons learned along the way and ways to approach things differently. When the party ends The risks of AI-driven content strategies aren’t always immediately apparent. In this case, the signs were …

2026 is around the corner – and the SEO space has never been this noisy. Every day brings something new. It’s easy to get stuck in panic mode, worrying you’re missing the next big thing, or to spend hours scrolling LinkedIn threads that lead nowhere. In both cases, you end up with nothing concrete – and with stakeholders still expecting clear impact. As we head into 2026, the real challenge is building a strategy with discipline – one that cuts through the noise and balances: Short-term wins that prove impact and build trust. Long-term bets that future-proof visibility. The boring but essential, business-as-usual (BAU) tasks that keep your foundati…

SEO is at a crossroads. As AI reshapes the digital landscape and Google continues to drive less traffic to brands, marketers face a critical challenge: how to balance strategies that deliver results today with innovations that prepare for tomorrow. This article outlines eight key considerations to help you navigate these changes and stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of SEO. Why SEO feels overwhelming right now In 2024, five of the top 15 SEO stories on Search Engine Land were about AI, with several others covering major changes at Google that have led to less traffic being sent to brands. These shifts leave us with a lot to think about. Studies a…

SEO never stands still, and neither do we here at Yoast. In our November 2025 edition of the SEO Update by Yoast, our principal SEOs, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, broke down the latest shifts in search, structured data, and AI. Whether you’re running an e-commerce store, managing a content-heavy site, or just keeping up with Google’s ever-changing rules, this edition highlights what actually matters. Google updates Google is refining its search results, phasing out certain structured data features, including FAQ snippets and COVID-19 updates. But that doesn’t mean you should strip structured data from your site. It still plays a role behind the scenes, especiall…