Common questions about modern search, AI-powered SEO, and what it takes to grow organic performance.
AI tools can be used for more than just churning out mediocre content. Providing modern models with well-structured, highly relevant data can lead to deep insights and impactful action plans. Learn how to unlock the power of your data with cutting edge tools like n8n, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and more.
While pinning down a single signal is difficult, broadly speaking, "Authority" is the most valuable signal. This is a combination of your backlink profile, strength and depth of content, site hierarchy, and indexability. Is your domain providing accessible, valuable service to its audience, and is that audience responding with frequent, positive sentiment?
There are many places in SEO where your personal knowledge of your brand, your audience, and your industry will be your greatest asset. On the other hand, there are many places where tedious, recurring tasks eat up time, energy, and resources. Keyword research, landscape analysis, rankings shifts, and more can deliver deep insights on a regular basis with minimal input from your team.
Tools like n8n, Claude Code, Gemini, and ChatGPT can make these frequent tasks a breeze, freeing up time and energy to dive into the areas that truly need a human touch.
SEO is changing, as it always has. The rules that govern modern search are different than they were 5 years ago. And 5 years before that, things were just as different. We're going through a massive shift now, but the reality is, people still need to find information. Whether they're shopping for products, looking for quotes, or researching a new hobby, they seek answers from the technology available to them.
Google Search, Social Media, and LLMs each provide their own dynamic landscapes and best-practices, and can drive huge traffic to sites that position themselves well. For many sites, organic traffic still remains the largest and most profitable channel. SEO best practices often overlap with paid search and UX best practices, so additional value in the form of lower cost per click and higher conversion rates can add value to your investment.
Familiarize yourself with how organic traffic performs at the session level. Whether in GA4, a competing analytics platform, or a custom solution, make sure you can get low-friction access to organic session count, bounce rate, and revenue — along with that performance data for other channels. Understanding how organic traffic performs over time, and relative to other audiences, is essential context.
Query-level data is equally critical. Search Console has its limitations, but it should be a cornerstone of your SEO. Other tracking tools like SEMRush, Moz, or AHREFs can provide helpful second datasets, but GSC is a fantastic foundation. Track how your position, clicks, and impressions change over time for various keywords, and think about user intent, content opportunities, and keyword cluster trends.
The final category is the one most often overlooked: search landscape. Knowing you lost traffic and rankings isn't enough to develop an action plan. Who is taking your position? What kind of content is Google ranking ahead of you? What kind of schema do you see in pages cited by ChatGPT? What queries trigger AI Overviews, and are you being cited in those snippets? This data completes the story and allows you to develop concrete next steps.