Why governance maturity is a competitive advantage for SEO

Written by Ash Nallawalla AI Overviews, redesigns, and rogue launches expose weak SEO processes. Discover why visibility governance protects rankings and teams. Let me guess: you just spent three months building a perfectly optimized product taxonomy, complete with schema markup, internal linking, and killer metadata.  Then, the product team decided to launch a site redesign without telling you. Now half your URLs are broken, the new templates strip out your structured data, and your boss is asking why organic traffic dropped 40%. Sound familiar? Here’s the thing: this isn’t an SEO failure, but a governance failure. It’s costing you nights and weekends trying…

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7 digital PR secrets behind strong SEO performance

Written by Andrew Holland As informational search declines, digital PR is driving authority, relevance, and high-intent results in SEO. Here’s how it works. Digital PR is about to matter more than ever. Not because it’s fashionable, or because agencies have rebranded link building with a shinier label, but because the mechanics of search and discovery are changing.  Brand mentions, earned media, and the wider PR ecosystem are now shaping how both search engines and large language models understand brands. That shift has serious implications for how SEO professionals should think about visibility, authority, and revenue. At the same time, informational search traffic is shrinking. Fewer people are…

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Why SEO teams need to ask ‘should we use AI?’ not just ‘can we?’

Written by Claire Taylor Automation can save SEO teams time—but at what cost? Explore where AI boosts speed, where it erodes trust, and how to protect real authority. Right now, it’s hard to find a marketing conversation that doesn’t include two letters: AI. SEOs, strategists, and marketing leaders everywhere are asking the same question in different ways: How do we use AI to cut manpower, streamline work, move faster, and boost efficiency? Much of that thinking makes sense. If you run a business, you can’t ignore a tool that turns hours of grunt work into minutes. You’d be foolish to try.…

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Your local rankings look fine. So why are calls disappearing?

Written by Michel van Luijtelaar AI local packs and ads are shrinking organic space. New data shows why calls drop even when 3-pack positions hold — and what you must change. For many local businesses, performance looks healthier than it is. Rank trackers still show top-three positions. Visibility reports appear steady. Yet calls and website visits from Google Business Profiles are falling — sometimes fast. This gap is becoming a defining feature of local search today. Rankings are holding. Visibility and performance aren’t. The alligator has arrived in local SEO. The visibility crisis behind stable rankings Across multiple U.S. industries, traditional…

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7 custom GPT ideas to automate SEO workflows

Written by Roslyn Ayers How custom GPTs can be used in SEO, with example prompts for planning, analysis, reporting, and technical work. Custom GPTs can help SEO teams move faster by turning repeatable tasks into structured workflows. If you don’t have access to paid ChatGPT, you can still use these prompts as standalone references by copying them into your notes for future reuse. You will need to tweak them for your team’s specific use cases, because they are intended as a starting point. Working with AI is largely trial and error. To get better at writing prompts, practice with small tasks first, iterate…

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Why ecommerce SEO audits fail – and what actually works in 30 days

Written by Gert Mellak Big SEO audits look thorough but stall execution. Here’s why the audit-plus-retainer model underdelivers – and what works instead. A $4 million Shopify brand recently showed me an SEO audit it received six months earlier – 127 pages, 53 action items, and a $12,000 price tag. Since then, the company has updated page titles and meta descriptions and added a few blog articles – 12 recommendations in total. The remaining 41 were not even scheduled. This is not an execution issue. It is a model issue. This article explains why the traditional audit-plus-retainer approach consistently underdelivers for ecommerce brands.…

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37% of consumers start searches with AI instead of Google: Study

Written by Danny Goodwin Traditional search frustrations are pushing users toward AI first, forcing brands to stay visible and credible in both places. Consumers are increasingly using AI tools — not Google — as their first source of information. This is driven by frustration with traditional search and rising expectations that AI will play a much larger role this year, according to a new report from Eight Oh Two, an SEO and PPC marketing agency. Why we care. AI isn’t replacing search, but it’s reshaping where search begins, how people discover brands, and which options they consider. A hybrid journey is…

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Exploring the real risk AI brings to the internet (and SEO with it)

Written by Cindy Krum As AI-generated content floods the web, what happens when humans stop being the primary creators or consumers online? A human look at Google, SEO, and the “Dead Internet Theory.” The idea of starting an article series about AI in a time when so many articles are being at least partially generated by AI and potentially primarily consumed by AI might cause one to pause and consider the value of the effort.  All of us digital marketers hope to find a future where we can still add value and find fulfillment in a world where our efforts and careers are…

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How to Turn Your Internal Experts Into Search Entities

By Stephanie Walden arketers have a new buzzword to either salivate or lose sleep over: entities. Not KPIs, not personas—entities. We know it sounds vaguely like the plot of a sci-fi film about sentient databases. But entities are real, and if AI models don’t recognize you (or your brand) as one, you may as well not exist to the millions of users currently asking AI tools for answers instead of typing searches into Google. Somewhere between “thought leader” and “structured data,” entities are how AI search engines recognize and categorize information sources. That means your brand needs to show up as an entity…

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How to know if your GEO is working

Written by Andrew Holland GEO performance comes down to proof. Share of search, buyer intent, and prompt visibility show whether your strategy is creating real demand. Let’s get one thing straight before the industry turns “GEO” into yet another three-letter source of confusion. Generative engine optimization isn’t SEO with a new hat and a LinkedIn carousel. It’s a fundamentally different game. If you’re still debating whether to swap the “S” for a “G,” you’ve already missed the point. At its core, GEO is brand marketing expressed through generative interfaces. Treat it like a technical tweak, and you’ll get technical-tweak results: plenty of noise,…

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