Focused on SWAT SEO actions to propel your business upward and to the right
Weekly SEO + AI Search Updates and Strategies
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Hello SEO friend, here are some of the most insightful SEO + AI news I dug last week. → Google says programmatic SEO is easy to launch, brutal to clean up. and more, obviously. Let's go!
Google on Programmatic SEO: Easy to Launch, Hard to Fix John Mueller says programmatic SEO can lead to low-quality pages when sites scale content without adding enough value for users. He also warns that recovering from a site-wide quality problem can take significant time and effort. Last week I published this article on Twitter. There I explain the citation hub tactic: it's the cheapest and the best way to get backlinks organically, by publishing once. Inside Google Maps Ranking A file recovered from "Geostore" — the system Google uses to represent geographic entities— revealed more than most local SEOs expected: 72 Geostore ranking signals, 793 data providers, and a ranking architecture that goes beyond a fixed proximity radius. Worth reading if you do any local SEO work. Also, ranking first on Google no longer guarantees an AI mention. Loren Baker's recap covers how AI pulls local recommendations from listings, reviews, Reddit, and curated lists. Need more backlinks? We build you a link magnet that attracts backlinks on autopilot. One client picked up 80+ organic quality backlinks without a single outreach email. Backlinks Still #1 To Move The Needle According To The Pros A 2026 survey of 131 SEO professionals ranked relevance, backlinks, and content quality as the top three ranking factors. It's an expert opinion, not evidence of Google’s algorithm, but the results show that core SEO fundamentals still remain important. See the full survey from Cyrus Shepard. Bill Hartzer also breaks down the findings here. Strong SEO Does Not Guarantee AI Visibility Only 8% of searches with an AI Overview lead to a click on traditional results, compared to 15% without one. Cosima Compton from Intero Digital explains where SEO rankings can miss AI search visibility and how brands can identify and measure those gaps without new tools. See the findings. Find Your AI Citation Gaps Leigh McKenzie shares a practical framework for finding where competitors are getting cited in AI search while your brand isn't. The focus is on identifying gaps across prompts, third-party sources, citations, and brand narratives, then prioritizing the ones tied to high-intent queries. Read the full guide. Entity SEO Is More Important in 2026 Harry Clarkson-Bennett shares a practical framework for optimising search entities, from owning your web assets and describing relationships to monitoring third-party coverage and building an entity map using Search Console data. Plus: worth reading if you're thinking about how Google and LLMs understand your brand. Unrelated Obvious to you. Amazing to others. I love this essay from and refer readers to it often, so I though I'd share here. https://sive.rs/obvious from Derek Sivers.
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SEO for growing Startups
Focused on SWAT SEO actions to propel your business upward and to the right
Bold claim? Maybe. But after 15+ years doing SEO and helping startups like Tweet Hunter, Taplio, and Submagic scale their organic traffic, I know exactly what it takes. The problem is that most businesses are doing too much of the wrong stuff and not enough of the right stuff. Here’s the exact 7-step playbook I’d run on any project, from day one. 1) Build (or rebuild) a topical authority map first Before writing a single word, map out every cluster the business needs to own. You guys know I’m...
—Sorry guys, this was supposed to be sent yesterday, but I discovered today it was left on draft!— Hey! Day 13. Time to write the damn content piece now. #13. Follow the Brief instructions and WRITE! If you ran the Blog prompt from Friday, you've got something like this sitting in your AI or doc: An SEO title and meta A full H2 structure with word counts Internal link placements already mapped A FAQ section A conclusion direction Something similar to this: Action Now, what you want to do is...
Good morning! Welcome to our new format. This is WIP, so expect some changes while I make it as useful as possible. But before we continue, a reminder. There's no substitute for good SEO: These are the top SEO + Marketing Insights I found last week: Google just upgraded Search Console with AI You can now request a report, and it generates instantly.Useful but still has limitations. It’s always better to double-check.Read more here. Google Links AI Overviews to AI Mode Google is testing a new...