I keep talking to companies that have rebuilt their website and lost a bunch of their Google search traffic. It's so common. In my experience, I would say 90% of the time an organisation rebuilds their website, they lose a significant amount of their rankings in Google and it's always for the same reason and it's entirely avoidable, unfortunately. Typically when I'm talking to these companies, it's after they've already rebuilt their website and lost their ranking. Now typically we can get most of their ranking back pretty quickly, but I wanna talk about how you can avoid this in the first place with a little bit of simple planning. So most of the time when a company rebuilds their website and loses ranking, they think, oh, I guess our pages aren't as optimized as they were on the old website. Maybe we didn't get the right keyword in our meta title or our H1. And that definitely can happen. But if anyone in the organization has any understanding of SEO, it's rare that that one's missed. The thing that is often missed even by SEO agencies is removing pages or changing URLs. And it's important to understand that from Google's point of view, if you change a URL, you did remove the page and you created a new page. If you want to rebuild your website without losing any of your ranking or Google search traffic, you need to catalog every URL on your website that receives any amount Of search traffic and make sure that URL still exists on your new website...

I keep talking to companies that have rebuilt their website and lost a bunch of their Google search traffic. It's so common. In my experience, I would say 90% of the time an organisation rebuilds their website, they lose a significant amount of their rankings in Google and it's always for the same reason and it's entirely avoidable, unfortunately. Typically when I'm talking to these companies, it's after they've already rebuilt their website and lost their ranking. Now typically we can get most of their ranking back pretty quickly, but I wanna talk about how you can avoid this in the first place with a little bit of simple planning. So most of the time when a company rebuilds their website and loses ranking, they think, oh, I guess our pages aren't as optimized as they were on the old website. Maybe we didn't get the right keyword in our meta title or our H1. And that definitely can happen. But if anyone in the organization has any understanding of SEO, it's rare that that one's missed. The thing that is often missed even by SEO agencies is removing pages or changing URLs. And it's important to understand that from Google's point of view, if you change a URL, you did remove the page and you created a new page. If you want to rebuild your website without losing any of your ranking or Google search traffic, you need to catalog every URL on your website that receives any amount Of search traffic and make sure that URL still exists on your new website. As long as the content on the page is similar, you still have the keyword in your H1 and your meta title, you shouldn't lose a significant amount of ranking. In most cases you'll actually gain ranking. This is because typically if you make significant site wide changes to your website this will force Google to re evaluate the content of your site. So if you've been working on your content or you have more authority than the last time Google evaluated your site you're likely to see a boost in ranking. However, even after learning this I often hear organisations say ah we still wanna remove all these pages cause we want our new site to be clean but with a good site structure you don't have to choose between a clean website and keeping your pages but if you have pages ranking in Google and then you remove that page or change the URL you will lose that ranking. Now occasionally a new page will start ranking for that term but it's rare. If you want to keep your ranking you need to keep your pages. If you absolutely must remove a page or change a URL then you want to set up a redirect to the most relevant existing page. However, this is another thing that people commonly misunderstand. If the page you're redirecting to is not relevant for the term you were Ranking for you're still not gonna rank for that term and the redirects probably not gonna help you much at all the most common and egregious version of this is redirecting all the old pages to your new homepage. You think you're aggregating all the authority and relevance of your old pages onto your homepage but your homepage isn't targeting the same terms that those pages were so all those rankings and all that authority is just lost those are what's called soft 404s in other words, you might as well just remove the pages and let them 404.

How to Avoid Losing Ranking when Redoing Your Website: Don't remove pages or change URLs. Google sees it as deleting... The source says redesign traffic losses often come from removing pages or changing URLs, because Google treats a changed URL as a removed page plus a new page. If a changed URL redirects to an irrelevant page, the old ranking usually is not preserved; blanket homepage redirects can behave like soft 404s. Sitewide changes can trigger Google to re-evaluate content, so improved content or authority may lift rankings when the migration preserves important pages. Main topics: Migration opportunity / re-evaluation, Redirects / relevance, Site migration / URL preservation.

How to Avoid Losing Ranking when Redoing Your Website: Don't remove pages or change URLs. Google sees it as deleting. Keep your URLs = keep your rankings 📊 #SEO #WebDesign #GoogleRankings

Migration opportunity / re-evaluation
Redirects / relevance
Site migration / URL preservation


So your website is a gold mine of data that Google uses to understand your business and understand why they should rank your business in Google. So it's super important that you have a website. Most businesses do. But it's also really critical that you connect your website to your Google Business Profile by filling out that field. So what you want to do is make sure you have connected the website with the field. Then you have fully optimized your website. You want to have a detailed website with all the information about your business, a unique page for every service you offer. Frequently ask questions, everything you can think of about your business, get it on your website. Cause there's only so much you can do on your Google Business Profile.

Local SEO performance depends on maintaining specific Google Business Profile fields, local signals, and location evidence over time. Main topics: Local SEO operations and Google Business Profile maintenance.

If you want Google to understand and rank your business better, you n...


This is how you do keyword research inside the Google Ads tool. I'm gonna do keyword research for a company in South Africa that does venture capital. The first thing I'm gonna do is open up Google Keyword Planner and type in the word venture capital. Now the first word over there, although there's a lot of volume, is probably a word that we don't want to bet on inside of Google Ads. The reason is because there's so much volume that is telling us it's an informational search and probably people that are searching that word are not gonna be our clients. As we go down the list, I can start seeing some words that seem quite attractive. The volumes are lower, but they're still quite good. And also I can see from the higher cost per clicks, that just means that people are bidding on it and that just tells me there's a market for it. The next thing I'm gonna do is open up Google, I'm gonna type in that word that we selected and as I can see, there are people advertising for this term and I can see that the organic results are on the Mark. I'm gonna repeat the same exercise. This time I'm gonna research the word private equity. Again, I'm looking for the volumes that are just correct and the bids are quite good. That tells me again that it is the right word. Again, I'm going to go into Google search that Word and I can see yet again that people are competing in the Google Ads and the organic results seem quite good. Finally I'm going to go to the keyword planner and type in one more word investors for my company...

This is how you do keyword research inside the Google Ads tool. I'm gonna do keyword research for a company in South Africa that does venture capital. The first thing I'm gonna do is open up Google Keyword Planner and type in the word venture capital. Now the first word over there, although there's a lot of volume, is probably a word that we don't want to bet on inside of Google Ads.

The reason is because there's so much volume that is telling us it's an informational search and probably people that are searching that word are not gonna be our clients. As we go down the list, I can start seeing some words that seem quite attractive. The volumes are lower, but they're still quite good. And also I can see from the higher cost per clicks, that just means that people are bidding on it and that just tells me there's a market for it.

The next thing I'm gonna do is open up Google, I'm gonna type in that word that we selected and as I can see, there are people advertising for this term and I can see that the organic results are on the Mark. I'm gonna repeat the same exercise. This time I'm gonna research the word private equity. Again, I'm looking for the volumes that are just correct and the bids are quite good.

That tells me again that it is the right word. Again, I'm going to go into Google search that Word and I can see yet again that people are competing in the Google Ads and the organic results seem quite good. Finally I'm going to go to the keyword planner and type in one more word investors for my company. As I can see over there there are good keywords coming up again.

Once again I'm gonna open up Google, type in that word and you can see over there these words are perfect. I have to do a bit more research. I'm gonna see if there are any more keywords but over here it gives you a bit of an idea how I can do keyword research for Google Ads. If you need help with your Google Ads or if you have any questions just drop a comment below and keep on following me for more tips like this.

Google Ads performance depends on operational settings that can affect spend, targeting, measurement, or campaign continuity. Main topics: Google Ads account operations.

Keyword research using the Keyword Planner tool in Google Ads. The Ke...


Is that. Is that Google Search Console? It's coming down from the clouds. Look at the grass, they're glowing. It reacts when I touch it. This is unreal. Google gives you a way to see how your site appears in their massive search index. This tool, Google Search Console, is one of the most interesting free tools in digital marketing. Connect your site to it. Use the domain property here. Connecting is very easy. By the way, LLMs largely use Google to get their answers for questions involving recency. This is perplexity showing its searches. So if you do well in Google, you do well in LLMs. Try this trick go to performance, toggle on average position. Set a filter so you only see queries where position is greater than 5. This means Google Search Console is only showing you searches that you rank above position 5 on Google. For sort by impressions, click on one of the queries. Now you can see every page Google shows for this specific keyword. Take three of the lower ranking pages, link them to this top page using the query that's showing as the anchor text. This is you telling Google this top page being linked to is definitely about the thing Google already thinks the page is about. If you are ranking on page 1 for a query, Google thinks your page is at least part partly about that thing. This helps you move up the Google rankings so you get more Clicks from search and from LLMs. And if you'd like to save years learning SEO that gets paying customers that works with AI, check out my SEO course at compactkeywords.com.

Google gives you a way to see how your site appears in their massive search index. Their tool, Google Search Console, is one of the most interesting free tools in digital... The creator suggests using GSC queries outside top positions to build internal links toward the strongest relevant page. Main topics: AI visibility / Google as LLM source, Internal linking / near-ranking queries.

Google gives you a way to see how your site appears in their massive search index. Their tool, Google Search Console, is one of the most interesting free tools in digital marketing. Connect your site to it. Use Domain Property. Connecting is very easy. By the way, LLMs largely use Google to get their answers for questions involving recency,  so if you do well in Google, you do well in LLMs. Try this trick. Go to Performance. Toggle on Average Position. Set a filter so you only see queries where position is greater than 5. This means Google Search Console is only showing you searches that you rank above position 5 on Google for. Sort by Impressions. Click on one of the queries. Now you can see every page Google shows for this specific keyword. Take three of the lower ranking pages, link them to this top page using the query that's showing as the anchor text. This is you telling Google this top page being linked to is definitely about the thing Google already thinks the page is about. If you are ranking on page one for a query, Google thinks your page is at least partly about that thing. This helps you move up the Google rankings so you get more clicks from search and from LLMs.  And if you'd like to save years learning SEO that gets paying customers and that works with AI, check out my SEO course at  compactkeywords.com #searchengineoptimization #seotips #digitalmarketing #seo

AI visibility / Google as LLM source
Internal linking / near-ranking queries


This is your reminder to update all your blog titles that say 2025 to 2026. Let's talk about why this is so important and the right way to do it. First of all, if you're not already including the year in most of your blog titles, I highly recommend you start doing that. This has always been an effective strategy for increasing click through rate in Google search results, which in turn can improve your rankings. However, with large language models, it's 10 times as effective. This is because when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI A. Question, it performs a series of searches, and in those searches, it's very common for large language models to include the current year. So if your blog title contains the current year and your competitor's blog title does not, the large language model will cite you by default. Also, both Google and ChatGPT prefer fresh content. However, merely updating the year and publish date isn't enough to convince Google that your content is fresh. You'll actually need to update the content of the blog post. But you don't need to update it much. My recommendation is just to add a short paragraph near the top of the article that says what has changed in 2026. So here's a simple trick for finding all the pages of your website that mentioned 2025. Go to Google and type site colon your domain name, space 2025. This will show you every Page of your website in Google's search index with 2025 on the page, and it'll typically prioritise those with 2025 in the title. And one more tip never put the year in the URL...

This is your reminder to update all your blog titles that say 2025 to 2026. Let's talk about why this is so important and the right way to do it. First of all, if you're not already including the year in most of your blog titles, I highly recommend you start doing that. This has always been an effective strategy for increasing click through rate in Google search results, which in turn can improve your rankings. However, with large language models, it's 10 times as effective. This is because when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI A. Question, it performs a series of searches, and in those searches, it's very common for large language models to include the current year. So if your blog title contains the current year and your competitor's blog title does not, the large language model will cite you by default. Also, both Google and ChatGPT prefer fresh content. However, merely updating the year and publish date isn't enough to convince Google that your content is fresh. You'll actually need to update the content of the blog post. But you don't need to update it much. My recommendation is just to add a short paragraph near the top of the article that says what has changed in 2026. So here's a simple trick for finding all the pages of your website that mentioned 2025. Go to Google and type site colon your domain name, space 2025. This will show you every Page of your website in Google's search index with 2025 on the page, and it'll typically prioritise those with 2025 in the title. And one more tip never put the year in the URL. And that's because once a page starts receiving traffic, you never want to change the URL. From Google's point of view, when you change the URL, you've removed that page and created a new page. If the URL already contains a year, you have a difficult decision to make. If the page is receiving a significant amount of traffic, I would leave the old year in. Otherwise, I would recommend changing the URL, removing the year, and then setting up a redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Should you add the year to blog posts? Yes. If yours say 2025, update them. LLMs search with the current year, so 2026 in your title = more citations... Including the current year in blog titles can improve CTR and may help when LLM retrieval searches include the current year. Changing only the year or publish date is not enough; refreshed posts should include real updated content. Main topics: Content refresh / AI search, Freshness / year modifiers, URL strategy / year in URL.

Should you add the year to blog posts? Yes. If yours say 2025, update them. LLMs search with the current year, so 2026 in your title = more citations. Pro tip: actually update the content too 👀 #SEO #BloggingTips #ContentStrategy #2026 #MarketingTip

Content refresh / AI search
Freshness / year modifiers
URL strategy / year in URL


Anybody want to rank their Google Business Profile overnight for new keywords? Well, I've got an easy way for you to do that right now. So a while ago, Joy Hawkins published very compelling research that shows that the predefined services in your Google Business Profile will boost your rankings. And it's super easy to do. All you have to do is go into Edit Your Google Business Profile, go to the Services section, click Add More, and then you'll see all of these predefined services set up there by Google. You just check them. Click, click, click, click. It'll come all up, and you'll rank better for those terms. It's the nicest Christmas present Google ever gave us. Thanks, Google!

Did you know that Predefined Google Business Profile Services help yo...


This is how you create and add an HTML sitemap for your Wix website. Now an HTML sitemap is basically a place that all your website links and pages, or at least most of them are put on one specific page. That's a great way for users and Google to see all the links on your website, which obviously helps SEO quite a lot. Another big advantage of an Htm L site map is crawl depth. Now with WordPress websites, for example, you can create an Htm L site map with one click from a number of different plugins, but Wix doesn't have this so you have to create an HTML site map yourself. This is how you do it using Claude. Very simply, give Claude a prompt like this. I want you to create an HTML site map for me. Here are all my different site maps. Again, you have to open up your site maps and insert it in there. I've given it further instructions. I want it neatly done and I wanted the colour coding the same like my website. That's going to do its magic and do all the code for you. You can see how well it actually works and depending on the size of the website, obviously depends how long it's gonna do it for you. Once the code is ready, this how you add it to Wix. Go on Wix and create a new page, then add elements and add an HTML element, paste that code in there. Obviously you just have to resize the code so it looks neat and tidy. Then press publish. I would suggest you to put a link on your footer to the site map and then obviously go add that site map in Search Console. There you go...

This is how you create and add an HTML sitemap for your Wix website. Now an HTML sitemap is basically a place that all your website links and pages, or at least most of them are put on one specific page. That's a great way for users and Google to see all the links on your website, which obviously helps SEO quite a lot. Another big advantage of an Htm L site map is crawl depth.

Now with WordPress websites, for example, you can create an Htm L site map with one click from a number of different plugins, but Wix doesn't have this so you have to create an HTML site map yourself. This is how you do it using Claude. Very simply, give Claude a prompt like this. I want you to create an HTML site map for me.

Here are all my different site maps. Again, you have to open up your site maps and insert it in there. I've given it further instructions. I want it neatly done and I wanted the colour coding the same like my website.

That's going to do its magic and do all the code for you. You can see how well it actually works and depending on the size of the website, obviously depends how long it's gonna do it for you. Once the code is ready, this how you add it to Wix. Go on Wix and create a new page, then add elements and add an HTML element, paste that code in there.

Obviously you just have to resize the code so it looks neat and tidy. Then press publish. I would suggest you to put a link on your footer to the site map and then obviously go add that site map in Search Console. There you go.

You've now created an Htm L sitemap for your Wix website, which is going to help you with your SEO ratings. If you have any questions, please drop a comment below.

Homepage and CMS SEO settings affect how search engines interpret the most important page on a business website. Main topics: WordPress and website SEO settings.

Create Wix HTML sitemaps with Claude AI Wix doesn’t always make it ea...


Did you know that there are eight sections on your Google Business Profile that directly impact rankings? Here they are. No. 1, business name. No. 2, primary and additional categories. No. 3, reviews. No. 4, services, five attributes. No. 6, your website field. No. 7, products. And No. 8, your opening hours. This info comes directly from my free email course. So you can either click the link in the bio or just Google White Spark email course.

Every business owner needs to know this. Here are all the sections of...


If you have a business or any kind of brand, now is the time to be creating content. Most people just don't realise how much modern algorithms and AI have changed the strategy for content creation. So I wanna explain why. I think we've just entered the golden age of content creation and how to do it effectively. It's honestly so easy right now, and that's not gonna last forever. So five years ago, if you wanted to create content to get more visibility for your brand or business, there were really only two options. You either needed a large following you could post to whatever channel you have that following on and the algorithm would show your posts to your following. Or you needed to rank at the top of Google for one of the few competitive terms people searched for in your industry. You could also, of course, run ads, but I'm just talking about organic content for now. Today we're in a much different world. Algorithms on social media sites and video sites like TikTok and YouTube really don't care about your following. Even accounts with no followings can get millions of views if they create the right content. The only significant advantage you get from having a following now is clout. You look more legitimate if anyone is looking at your profile. And views isn't even quite the right metric to be tracking. Ultimately, what you want are customers. The fundamental shift we've seen, in the last five years is that the algorithms have become very good at showing your video to the right audience. You don't need millions of views. You don't even need thousands of views...

If you have a business or any kind of brand, now is the time to be creating content. Most people just don't realise how much modern algorithms and AI have changed the strategy for content creation. So I wanna explain why. I think we've just entered the golden age of content creation and how to do it effectively. It's honestly so easy right now, and that's not gonna last forever. So five years ago, if you wanted to create content to get more visibility for your brand or business, there were really only two options. You either needed a large following you could post to whatever channel you have that following on and the algorithm would show your posts to your following. Or you needed to rank at the top of Google for one of the few competitive terms people searched for in your industry. You could also, of course, run ads, but I'm just talking about organic content for now. Today we're in a much different world. Algorithms on social media sites and video sites like TikTok and YouTube really don't care about your following. Even accounts with no followings can get millions of views if they create the right content. The only significant advantage you get from having a following now is clout. You look more legitimate if anyone is looking at your profile. And views isn't even quite the right metric to be tracking. Ultimately, what you want are customers. The fundamental shift we've seen, in the last five years is that the algorithms have become very good at showing your video to the right audience. You don't need millions of views. You don't even need thousands of views. My first 30 videos got 200 to 500 views each. Today, my typical video gets about 25 views, but most of those 25 people are my ideal customer. As a result, we've been able to scale the agency as fast as we want to and be very picky about the clients that we take on. If you're interested in how I create videos, I have another video that's, like six minutes long called I can easily create videos as a business or something like that. And the other reason it's a good time to create content is that large language models are changing the way that people search. In fact, pretty soon, I believe Google will replace their traditional search results with an AI response. And then people won't be really searching at all. They'll be having conversations with large language models, and the large language models will be doing the searching. And these large language models search very differently than humans do. Because they have so much context from the user. They search for hyper specific long tail terms, terms that contain information about the user's demographic, their use case, their location. And because historically, all your competitors have been fighting over a few hyper competitive short terms, in most cases, there's not even any content online targeting these hyper specific terms. If you're able to create content that targets specific demographics use cases, you can share case studies showing how you helped a very specific person solve a very specific problem. For example, in many cases, that will be the only piece of content online that actually addresses this hyper specific search. Now, is it gonna get a lot of views? No. It might get one view a month, but to that one person, it's going to be exactly what they were looking for. And if you can create this content quickly without putting in a lot of effort, it's well worth it. The thing is, your competitors are afraid to make videos, and your competitors are afraid to run experiments like this. Which is why it's so easy right now. Eventually, people will catch on, and there will be more competition. But I do think there's going to be a major first movers advantage. If you can start being recommended by the AI. And algorithms now, then when people are creating content next year, they're gonna use those same AI. Models, which means you'll naturally be recommended in their content. 2026 is the time to create content.

Why 2026 is the best time to create content - algorithms changed everything. You don't need followers anymore, just the right audience 🎯 #contentcreation #businesstips... Modern social and video algorithms can surface content to the right audience even when an account has little following. LLMs can search with user context, creating hyper-specific long-tail queries around demographics, use case, and location. Main topics: AI retrieval / hyper-specific long tail, AI visibility / first-mover advantage, Case studies / low-volume AI search, Social algorithms / ideal customers.

Why 2026 is the best time to create content - algorithms changed everything. You don't need followers anymore, just the right audience 🎯 #contentcreation #businesstips #algorithm #2026

AI retrieval / hyper-specific long tail
AI visibility / first-mover advantage
Case studies / low-volume AI search
Social algorithms / ideal customers


Do you want your brand mentioned more on ChatGPT? I'm sure if you like anyone, the answer is yes. If so, you should check this amazing study that was brought out recently by a Trefs. They analyse thousands and thousands of data points and what they find conclusively is that best of lists, even if you've written them yourselves help you rank up higher on ChatGPT. Now what the best of list is can be really anything. For example, you might have the top online schools in South Africa. You might have the best dentist in San Diego and so on and so on. Again, what the research shows is that even self promoted and self written lists like this help ChatGPT see your company as a name to mention. Now there's a lot of different ways where you can publish it. The first one is to publish it on your blog. Obviously probably the best way is to do something as a press release. Again, you have to base it on facts. You can't just say you are the best voted from yourself. Again, what the study shows is that people that are on these top of lists seem to be ranked higher on ChatGPT for their company names. Let me know what you think about this.

AI visibility work depends on matching the right model, search surface, or answer format to the business outcome being optimized. Main topics: AI visibility and answer readiness.

Rank on top of ChatGPT with best-of lists. ✅ A study by Ahrefs shows ...


Right now is the best time to post. A lot of people take off and don't post on social media during the holidays. This is the best time to do it. There are more people home looking for content to consume with tons of creators taking off so there's less competition. You can cross post videos between in Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook text and image posts, LinkedIn X Facebook threads. Less competition, more opportunity.

Right now is the best time to post. A lot of people "take off" and don't post on social media during the holidays. This is the best time to do it... Posting during holidays may face lower creator competition while more people are home consuming content. Main topics: Social visibility / timing experiment.

Right now is the best time to post. A lot of people "take off" and don't post on social media during the holidays.  This is the best time to do it. There are more people home looking for content to consume.  With tons of creators taking off, so there's less competition. Less competition, more opportunity. #socialmediamarketing #digitalmarketing #personalbranding #entrepreneurship


This graph changed the world of digital marketing this year. This is HubSpot's SEO traffic. For years, HubSpot was posting about things that were not in their niche. They were getting away with it. At the peak, they were getting 24 million clicks a month from Google. Again, for things that were unrelated to HubSpot's core business. But recently HubSpot has been punished for this. Google is now focusing a lot more on what's called topical authority. Very simple. Are you posting things that you have authority for? Content marketing strategies, something that HubSpot has a lot of topical authority for. Inspirational quotes, not so much. By the way, this was something that HubSpot was publishing. A lot of that they were hit for. CRM use cases and benefits. Again, something that HubSpot has a lot of topical authority for. But if HubSpot was to publish something on quantum physics, not so much. Tons of other media properties saw graphs just like this. There is a way to expand into topics that are unrelated to you though. Pick ones that are adjacent to your topic, not completely different. Learn SEO that gets paying customers at compactkeywords.com.

This graph changed the world of digital marketing this year. This is HubSpot's SEO traffic. For years, HubSpot was posting about things that were not in their niche... Technical SEO depends on site speed, architecture, topical coverage, engagement, and freshness rather than isolated keyword edits. Main topics: Technical SEO and site architecture hygiene, Topical authority / content scope.

This graph changed the world of digital marketing this year.  This is HubSpot's SEO traffic. For years, HubSpot was posting about things that were not in their niche.  They were getting away with it, getting tons SEO traffic. At the peak they were getting 24 million clicks a month from Google, again, for things that were unrelated to HubSpot's core business. But recently HubSpot has been punished for this. Google is now focusing a lot more on what's called topical authority. Very simple, are you posting things that you have authority for? Content marketing strategies, something that HubSpot has a lot of topical authority for. Inspirational quotes, not so much. By the way, this was something that HubSpot was publishing a lot of, that they were hit for. CRM use cases and benefits, again, something that HubSpot has a lot of topical authority for. But if HubSpot was to publish something on quantum physics, not so much. Tons of other media properties saw graphs just like this. There is a way to expand into topics that are unrelated to you though. Pick ones that are adjacent to your topic, not completely different. Learn SEO that gets paying customers at compactkeywords.com #searchengineoptimization #digitalmarketing #seotips #webdevelopment


I wanna talk about LLM psychosis. If you or someone close to you has not already been affected by this, I think you probably will soon. The word psychosis might be a little too strong given how common this is, but apparently that's the term we've agreed on. If you don't know, this is just when someone becomes overly confident in an idea after having a conversation with a large language model. In extreme cases, people become outright delusional and I believe it's the result of not understanding what these models are actually capable of. So let's talk about what this typically looks like, how to spot LLM psychosis and how to avoid it. Most common version of this I've seen is a friend or colleague coming to me with their amazing new business idea. It's always a very unique idea. They're always very excited about it and very confident that it's gonna work out. Most cases of LLM psychosis start with the person bringing their own idea to the large language model. A large language model is then affirming their idea and crucially providing a long list of very smart sounding reasons their idea is definitely great. Without a deep understanding of what these models are and aren't capable of, it's very easy to be taken in by these list of reasons. And to make matters worse, the LOLM will then typically encourage the user, encourage them to go deeper, to think bigger, to go more outside. The box and this can all be very exciting and very compelling...

I wanna talk about LLM psychosis. If you or someone close to you has not already been affected by this, I think you probably will soon. The word psychosis might be a little too strong given how common this is, but apparently that's the term we've agreed on. If you don't know, this is just when someone becomes overly confident in an idea after having a conversation with a large language model. In extreme cases, people become outright delusional and I believe it's the result of not understanding what these models are actually capable of. So let's talk about what this typically looks like, how to spot LLM psychosis and how to avoid it. Most common version of this I've seen is a friend or colleague coming to me with their amazing new business idea. It's always a very unique idea. They're always very excited about it and very confident that it's gonna work out. Most cases of LLM psychosis start with the person bringing their own idea to the large language model. A large language model is then affirming their idea and crucially providing a long list of very smart sounding reasons their idea is definitely great. Without a deep understanding of what these models are and aren't capable of, it's very easy to be taken in by these list of reasons. And to make matters worse, the LOLM will then typically encourage the user, encourage them to go deeper, to think bigger, to go more outside. The box and this can all be very exciting and very compelling. Most of us crave this kind of validation and human reinforcement has turned these LLMs into validation machines and they're only getting better. To be able to spot and avoid LLM psychosis, we need to understand what the models are and aren't capable of. If you're an expert in a given field, large language models are really good at giving you ideas. But if you've ever had a conversation with one of these large language models on a topic that you're an expert on, you will realise very quickly that it still often gets things wrong. And you really need to be an expert to notice this because these models are really good at saying things that sound true. And if you're a complete novice in a given area, these large language models can quickly turn you into an amateur. As long as the stakes aren't too high if you get a few things wrong, what else can't do is let you leap frog past experts. So if you find yourself disagreeing with experts after having a conversation with a large language model, you might be under LLM psychosis. If you find yourself reading ChatGPT's diagnosis of your symptoms to your physician, you might be under LLM Psychosis. If as a few of my clients have done, you find yourself giving ChatGPT's SEO advice to your SEO agency, you might be under LLM Psychosis. Of course, these LLs are still very helpful and powerful tools, but the more powerful they become, the more we're gonna have to watch out for LLM Psychosis.

What is LLM Psychosis? If you use ChatGPT, you're probably already affected 😬 Here's how to spot it before you embarrass yourself. #AI #ChatGPT #LLMPsychosis #techtoks #AIAwareness AI visibility work depends on matching the right model, search surface, or answer format to the business outcome being optimized. Main topics: AI-assisted expertise / limits, AI visibility and answer readiness, Risk/avoid / AI overconfidence.

AI-assisted expertise / limits
AI visibility and answer readiness
Risk/avoid / AI overconfidence


Nobody knows this about Google. Go to Google Search Console, connect your site to it. Go to performance, toggle on average position. Scroll down to queries. Go to filter position greater than 7. Now you can see searches that your site shows at the bottom of page 1 of Google for or page 2. Stick to searches between positions 7 and 20. Sort by impressions. These are searches that you are already ranking for that you can get a lot more clicks for. Either rewrite your page title to target the search better, add something to the page title so it stands out more. Or even take the search term and include a specific H2 section for it on your page. Then you can show higher for these searches that you are already ranking for so you get more clicks. Learn to do SEO that gets paying customers at compactkeywords.com.

Nobody knows this about Google. Go to Google Search Console. Connect your site to it. Go to performance. Toggle on average position. Scroll down to queries. Go to filter... Homepage and CMS SEO settings affect how search engines interpret the most important page on a business website. Main topics: Search Console / near-win optimization, WordPress and website SEO settings.

Nobody knows this about Google. Go to Google Search Console.  Connect your site to it.  Go to performance.  Toggle on average position.  Scroll down to  queries.  Go to filter.   Position.  Greater than seven.  Now you can see searches that your site shows at the bottom of page one of Google for or page two. Stick to searches between positions 7 and 20.  Sort by impressions.   These are searches that you are already ranking for, that you can get a lot more clicks for.  Either rewrite your page title  to target the search better,  add something to the page title so it stands out more, or even take the search term and include a specific H2 section for it on your page.  Then you can show higher for these searches that you are already ranking for, so you get more clicks.  Learn to do SEO  that gets paying customers at  compactkeywords.com #seotips #seohacks #searchengineoptimization #webdevelopment

Search Console / near-win optimization
WordPress and website SEO settings


in order for Google to see that one website is passing some of the authority from them to you you have to be connected via hyperlink basically a hyperlink is a line of code that connects your website to their website and vice versa but unless you have a hyperlink connecting your website to their website you're not passing through the juice now there are quite a few different techniques to see that your brand if it's mentioned on a website is passing down that authority to your website via hyperlink the first is just by going on those articles themselves and seeing with your eyes are there hyperlinks if you are a bigger company you have to use tools like Hootsuite and Semrush to look for something called unlinked brand mentions what the software will show you is every place that your brand is mentioned online but there isn't a hyperlink coming back to you having a brand mention of yourself is not good enough for SEO it has to be hyperlinked to pass that juice down to you.

SEO workflows benefit from specific research tools for keyword discovery, historical checks, backlink triage, citations, and search visibility diagnostics. Main topics: SEO research and tooling workflow.

You need hyperlinks to get a real backlink. A brand mention on its ow...


It's crazy that Google will show you all of this. Go to Google Search Console. This is Google's own tool for accessing their search index. Go to performance, add filter, query, custom. Paste this in. Now you can see all the versus, review, comparison, alternative keywords that you show on Google. For click apply, do rows per page 500. You can just see all these alternative keywords, versus keywords, comparison keywords that you show for review keywords. There's so much here. This will be in the description for the video. And to save years learning SEO that gets paying customers, go to compactkeywords.com.

It's crazy that Google will show you all of this. Go to Google Search Console, this is Google's own tool for accessing their search index. Go to Performance... SEO workflows benefit from specific research tools for keyword discovery, historical checks, backlink triage, citations, and search visibility diagnostics. Main topics: BOFU keyword mining / GSC regex, SEO research and tooling workflow.

It's crazy that Google will show you all of this. Go to Google Search Console, this is Google's own tool for accessing their search index. Go to Performance. Add Filter, Query. Custom. Paste this in: (?i)\b(vs|v|versus|review\w*|alternative\w*|comparison\w*|compare\w*)\b Now you can see all the versus, review, comparison, alternative keywords that you show on Google for.  Click Apply. Do rows per page 500.  You can just see all these alternative keywords, versus keywords, review keywords, comparison keywords that you show for. There's so much here.  And to save years learning SEO that gets paying customers, go to compactkeywords.com #seotips #seohacks #searchengineoptimization #uiux

BOFU keyword mining / GSC regex
SEO research and tooling workflow


There's been a long sort of conversation going on in the local community about an increase in review takedowns. Yeah, it seems to be impacting in the restaurant industry all the reviews. So clearly Google is doing one of their review sweeps through that industry. What is the business owner to do if they noticed that their review count dropped from 700 to 6, 30, they 70 reviews got removed. Are they supposed to do anything about it? If you're keeping a log of your reviews, you have a shot at getting some of them back. You can go to the sports system and tell them that there's missing reviews. But Google is very reticent to restore reviews because they believe they're right in taking them down. Sure, if it is a false positive. But if you have the reviews and you have perhaps some additional evidence that they are real, yeah, you can file a claim through the support system. Yeah, they no longer accept escalations through the forum, unlike fake reviews. We can, you can file in the, you know, in the support and then you can escalate the case to the forum and possibly get it taken care of. But in missing reviews, you, you have, it's one and done. You basically file. Now the other thing that can be done if it's one or two or three reviews, you can go back to the person and have them file with the Google Local Guide program for Review of the review. So if it's a small quantity, you can make a request to support and go back to the user, ask them to make a request. If it's a big quantity, you have to have the reviews...

There's been a long sort of conversation going on in the local community about an increase in review takedowns. Yeah, it seems to be impacting in the restaurant industry all the reviews. So clearly Google is doing one of their review sweeps through that industry. What is the business owner to do if they noticed that their review count dropped from 700 to 6, 30, they 70 reviews got removed.

Are they supposed to do anything about it? If you're keeping a log of your reviews, you have a shot at getting some of them back. You can go to the sports system and tell them that there's missing reviews. But Google is very reticent to restore reviews because they believe they're right in taking them down.

Sure, if it is a false positive. But if you have the reviews and you have perhaps some additional evidence that they are real, yeah, you can file a claim through the support system. Yeah, they no longer accept escalations through the forum, unlike fake reviews. We can, you can file in the, you know, in the support and then you can escalate the case to the forum and possibly get it taken care of.

But in missing reviews, you, you have, it's one and done. You basically file. Now the other thing that can be done if it's one or two or three reviews, you can go back to the person and have them file with the Google Local Guide program for Review of the review. So if it's a small quantity, you can make a request to support and go back to the user, ask them to make a request.

If it's a big quantity, you have to have the reviews. You need to be able to submit them to Google and request the return. Chances are low that they'll come back because Google wouldn't have implemented the algorithm. They didn't think they were right.

And air quoting right in the video here. Yeah. Haha.

Search reputation management is about controlling and monitoring how a name or business appears in search results and reviews. Main topics: Search reputation management.

Missing Google reviews are becoming a real problem for many businesse...


This is hidden within Google. If you go to Google Search Console, connect your site to it, go to performance, toggle on average, click through rate, scroll down to queries, sort by most impressions, filter by click through rate is less than 1%. Now you can see high impression searches that your site ranks on Google for but is doing a poor job of capturing. Either rewrite your page title to target the keyword better, add something to the page title so it stands out more, or even take the keyword and include a specific H2 section for it on your page. Then you can get more clicks from these highly searched keywords that you are already ranking for. Save years learning to do SEO that gets paying customers at compactkeywords.com.

This is hidden within Google. If you go to Google Search Console. Connect your site to it. Go to performance. Toggle on average click-through rate. Scroll down to queries... Homepage and CMS SEO settings affect how search engines interpret the most important page on a business website. Main topics: CTR optimization / GSC, WordPress and website SEO settings.

This is hidden within Google.  If you go to Google Search Console.  Connect your site to it.  Go to performance.  Toggle on average click-through rate.  Scroll down to  queries.  Sort by most impressions.  Filter by click-through rate  is less than 1%.  Now you can see high impression searches that your site ranks on Google for, but is doing a poor job of capturing.  Either rewrite your page title  to target the keyword better, add something to the page title so it stands out more, or even take the keyword and include a specific H2 section for it on your page.  Then you can get more clicks from these highly searched keywords that you are already ranking for.   Save years learning to do SEO that gets paying customers  at compactkeywords.com #seotips #seohacks #searchengineoptimization #webdevelopment

CTR optimization / GSC
WordPress and website SEO settings


Have you heard of Claude AI? It's not as well known as ChatGPT and Gemini, but it's quietly becoming one of the most popular AI models in the world. Here's a little bit to know about Claude AI so you're not left in the dark when people are talking about it. Claude AI is made by a company called anthropic. Anthropic was started in 2021 by two ex employees of OpenAI and our siblings, the Modey siblings. Since then, Claude AI has got a lot of investments from a lot of different companies, including Amazon and Google. The latest valuation from what I've seen is about $350 billion. Crowd train their models with constitutional AI to have more human values. As a result of this, Claude is safer and more controllable and it also has less biasness. I've been using Claude AI quite a lot since I only really discovered it a few weeks ago. And I must tell you, I'm obsessed with it. I've already upgraded the package that I'm on and everyone in my office uses it. I find it so much cleverer than OpenAI and Gemini. I don't have to give it these long prompts. There's not so many hallucinations and the outcome is really brilliant. If I was you, I'd go check out Claude AI because you really wanna be on top of it. It really is amazing.

Why I Switched to Claude AI (And Why You Should Too) @Claude  If you ...


It is time to settle this debate once and for all. S just cannot seem to agree on this. Do Google posts impact rankings? Here is the answer. No, Google posts do not impact rankings. And also yes, Google posts impact rankings. Hear me out. If you look on the 2026 local search ranking factors, you will see that Google posts signals are way down at the very bottom of the list. It tells us that local search experts don't think that Google posts impact rankings. And honestly, I agree with them. But you'll also see that engagement signals have a very significant impact on rankings. And so Google Posts can contribute to engagement signals. When you have Google Posts on your profile, you give people more stuff to consume. Plus Google Posts directly contribute to conversion signals. So you should still do them. So really, SEO's on both sides of this debate are correct. Google posts don't directly impact rankings, but they do indirectly impact rankings through engagement signals and you should definitely still do them.

Let’s settle this local SEO debate once and for all. SEOs just cannot...


Google loves to give SEO advice and if you're trying to rank your website at the top of Google search results, it makes sense that you would listen to advice directly from the source, right? The problem of course is that Google doesn't want to help you rank better. They want to help high quality sites rank better. Their primary goal is to improve the quality of the search results so more people use it and more people click on their ads. There are some people who think that Google is actually intentionally making the organic results worse so that you're more likely to click on ads. I do not believe that but I wanna talk about why you shouldn't just blindly follow Google's SEO advice and also why you shouldn't ignore it completely. These are two very common traps that a lot of SEOs fall into. On one hand you have SEOs that become just absolutely obsessed with anything that Google says about SEO. And on the other hand you have people who completely disregard anything that Google says. So I'd like to get into the nuanced middle to help you understand when you should listen to Google and when you should ignore them. So first of all, what is Google's SEO advice? How do you rank at the top of Google according to Google? Well, it's actually pretty simple. You just create high quality helpful content that Satisfies the intent of the searcher. According to Google, their algorithm is designed to automatically notice your high quality content and to notice all the signals associated with it. People are naturally going to link to your content if it's high quality...

Google loves to give SEO advice and if you're trying to rank your website at the top of Google search results, it makes sense that you would listen to advice directly from the source, right? The problem of course is that Google doesn't want to help you rank better. They want to help high quality sites rank better. Their primary goal is to improve the quality of the search results so more people use it and more people click on their ads. There are some people who think that Google is actually intentionally making the organic results worse so that you're more likely to click on ads. I do not believe that but I wanna talk about why you shouldn't just blindly follow Google's SEO advice and also why you shouldn't ignore it completely. These are two very common traps that a lot of SEOs fall into. On one hand you have SEOs that become just absolutely obsessed with anything that Google says about SEO. And on the other hand you have people who completely disregard anything that Google says. So I'd like to get into the nuanced middle to help you understand when you should listen to Google and when you should ignore them. So first of all, what is Google's SEO advice? How do you rank at the top of Google according to Google? Well, it's actually pretty simple. You just create high quality helpful content that Satisfies the intent of the searcher. According to Google, their algorithm is designed to automatically notice your high quality content and to notice all the signals associated with it. People are naturally going to link to your content if it's high quality. And as long as you run a good business, people are naturally going to leave you reviews. Google's algorithm will see all of this and reward you for that high quality helpful content. And of course, there is some truth here, but it doesn't really tell you anything about how Google's algorithm works. The truth is all of this advice is aspirational, but Google isn't transparent about that. Google talks as if their algorithm is already perfectly aligned with their intentions. The truth is their algorithm is still terrible at measuring the quality of content and there are still plenty of things you can do to trick their algorithm into ranking you higher. But of course, Google doesn't want you to know that. The only thing their algorithm is really good at is understanding the intent of the searcher, which is why I think every good SEO. Puts a lot of effort into making sure the content they're creating matches the intent of someone searching for the keyword they're trying to rank for. So if Google is just out there pretending their algorithm can do all these things it can't do, why would you listen to them at all? And this is what has understandably LED A lot of s E. into thinking that everything Google says is just part of one giant misinformation campaign. And there is some truth to that. There have been a handful of times where someone high up in the Google search team I spread complete lies about how their algorithm works. Multiple times we've been told that click through rate is not a ranking factor and now we know definitively that it is. However, after listening to Google's SEO advice for the last 16 years, I personally feel that intentionally misleading advice is actually very rare. In my experience, 90% or more of the advice we get from Google is advice that that Googler truly believes. And of course, a lot of their advice is just common SEO. Best practices that no one would disagree with. But in those times where they're giving truly bad advice, I don't think they know they're giving bad advice. I don't think they know how to rank high in Google and they're just choosing to say the opposite. I just think they're working at Google and there's all this aspirational language about what their algorithm is going to be capable of floating around in the workspace and they buy into the hype the same way a lot of SEOs do. However, those aspirations still tell an important story. They tell us how Google wants their algorithm to work and the directions are likely heading in as it gets smarter. And smarter. So please don't blindly follow Google's SEO advice. But if you're doing SEO seriously, or you're paying someone to do it, I still think it's important to listen to what Google says about SEO. And then run your own experiments.

Should you follow Google's SEO Advice? The truth after 16 years 👀 Most people get this wrong #SEO #GoogleSEO #DigitalMarketing Google's SEO guidance is partly aspirational: useful for direction, but not a complete explanation of how rankings work. The creator argues Google's algorithm is strongest at understanding searcher intent, so intent matching remains central to SEO. Main topics: Google advice / experimental SEO, Ranking factors / contradiction, Search intent / ranking signal.

Google advice / experimental SEO
Ranking factors / contradiction
Search intent / ranking signal


It's almost unfair that Gmail allows this. Take your business logo, give it to Google's VO3. Say, animate this logo with a looping animation. You can give extra detail to make it more brand specific. So I said give it an athletic animation. This is what it made. It'll export as an MP4. So Google MP4 to GIF. Pick one on the list. Go to manage your Google account. Go to change profile picture. Upload the GIF right here. Now your business logo moves for Gmail. This increases open rates a ton because so other few businesses have moving email icons. Look. Look at these. Which ones stand out? You tell me. 22% of the global population use. This is Gmail. It has 75% of the US market share. This is a five minute low hanging fruit opportunity that anybody with a business can do.

It’s almost unfair that Gmail allows this. Take your business logo, give it to Google's VEO3, say animate this logo with a looping animation... Channel strategy should follow where attention and response are actually moving, not only where a team already publishes. Main topics: Media channel strategy.

It’s almost unfair that Gmail allows this. Take your business logo, give it to Google's VEO3, say animate this logo with a looping animation. You can give extra detail to make it more brand specific. It'll export as an MP4. So Google "MP4 to gif", pick one on the list. Go to Manage your Google Account. Go to change profile picture. Upload the gif right there. Now your business logo moves for Gmail. This increases open rates a ton because so other few businesses have moving email icons - you stand out. 22% of the global population uses Gmail. It has 75% of the US market share. This is a five minute low hanging fruit opportunity that anybody with a business can do.  #marketinghacks #digitalmarketing #emailmarketing #growthhacks


I do SEO audits for people all over the world. Just this week alone I've done SEO audits for someone in TEL Aviv, in Los Angeles, in New York, in London, in Dublin and obviously a few in South Africa. And most of them, the ESIA orders are just terrible. I don't understand how people are selling their SEO services either as freelancers, full time employees or even agencies. And the results are so bad. I'm telling you, the more that I look at it, I think that a lot of these SEO providers out there are really scam artists. I think they go around and telling people all this big jargon and they use all these fancy language. And I think their angle is that they know that most business owners or marketing managers have really little understanding of SEO. So they can't call them out. Now this is one of the reasons why I make these videos. If you are paying for SEO, I'm telling you now, please just get a basic understanding of it. You can watch videos like mine. There are a lot of other good content people out there that you can learn a lot about SEO. You can go on website blogs like a Trefs and Semrush and others and you can get a basic of SEO. That you can start asking your providers the questions also when you're dealing with S. E. O. Professionals, before you do, ask for references from the other clients. Not only ask them about the results, but ask them, do they explain what they're doing? If you need an s L order on your website, please send me a message or drop a comment below and I'll try my best to get one to you.

Don’t get caught by empty SEO promises. SEO is full of big claims lik...


Gemini 3 Flash came out this week and I wanna talk about why this is actually a big deal and something worth paying attention to. So you might know Gemini 3 came out a while back. Gemini 3 Flash is the smaller, faster version and all the large language models have one of these nano or flash versions. It's the model you want to use if you need a quick answer and don't want to spend a lot of tokens. So why would we care about the faster, dumber version of G P t 3? Well, 1, because it turns out it's not nearly as dumb as we assumed it would be. And 2, because it tells us a lot about Google's plan for search. When you look at the most popular benchmarks, Gemini 3 Flash is actually very close to Gemini 3 Pro. It's even beating Gemini 3 Pro on a few benchmarks. Now there is one major flaw with these benchmarks, but I'll get back to that. I wanna talk about why this is really worth paying attention to. It's the reason that Google has always been so focused on speed and efficiency. It's because they understand that the real prize is not making the best chatbot, but the best search experience. They need to replace their own traditional search results before ChatGPT does. And at the rate Google's moving right now, it looks like this will probably happen sometime in 2026, which is why at our SEO agency, we're entirely focused on getting our clients to be recommended by large language models. However, Google still has one glaring problem to overcome, hallucinations. Gemini 3 flash isn't helping them. And this brings us back to the problem with these benchmarks...

Gemini 3 Flash came out this week and I wanna talk about why this is actually a big deal and something worth paying attention to. So you might know Gemini 3 came out a while back. Gemini 3 Flash is the smaller, faster version and all the large language models have one of these nano or flash versions. It's the model you want to use if you need a quick answer and don't want to spend a lot of tokens. So why would we care about the faster, dumber version of G P t 3? Well, 1, because it turns out it's not nearly as dumb as we assumed it would be. And 2, because it tells us a lot about Google's plan for search. When you look at the most popular benchmarks, Gemini 3 Flash is actually very close to Gemini 3 Pro. It's even beating Gemini 3 Pro on a few benchmarks. Now there is one major flaw with these benchmarks, but I'll get back to that. I wanna talk about why this is really worth paying attention to. It's the reason that Google has always been so focused on speed and efficiency. It's because they understand that the real prize is not making the best chatbot, but the best search experience. They need to replace their own traditional search results before ChatGPT does. And at the rate Google's moving right now, it looks like this will probably happen sometime in 2026, which is why at our SEO agency, we're entirely focused on getting our clients to be recommended by large language models. However, Google still has one glaring problem to overcome, hallucinations. Gemini 3 flash isn't helping them. And this brings us back to the problem with these benchmarks. These benchmarks do a good job of measuring how often the models get a certain question correct. However, there's no penalty for an incorrect answer. So while Gemini 3 Flash does get more correct answers than almost any other model, it's also one of the models least likely to say I don't know, which means it still has a high hallucination rate. In fact, over 90% of the time that it doesn't know the answer, it will still give a confident answer. Google is well aware of this issue, which is why they continue to experiment with hybrid solutions, experiments like Google's web view, where AI responses are mixed in with traditional search results. Regardless of what you think of the quality of Google's search results, they still have by far the most sophisticated search engine and they're going to continue taking advantage of that. Gemini 3 Flash is already being used in Google's AI mode. My prediction is that in early 2026, we're going to see more of these hybrid solutions that mix AI responses with traditional search results. And by the end of 2026, Google will find some version of AI mode that feels better than traditional search results to the average user

What Gemini 3 Flash Means for Search – Google's racing to replace its own search before ChatGPT does. The problem?... The creator predicts Google will test hybrid search experiences that mix AI responses with traditional results. Main topics: AI search / hybrid results, Risk/avoid / AI hallucinations.

What Gemini 3 Flash Means for Search – Google's racing to replace its own search before ChatGPT does. The problem? When it doesn't know something, it gives a wrong answer 90% of the time instead of saying "I don't know." #GoogleAI #SEO #TechNews #AISearch

AI search / hybrid results
Risk/avoid / AI hallucinations


Have you seen the big news? Similarweb have just opened pre registration for the 2026 Digital 100. One of my favourite reports of the year. If you haven't seen it before, the Similarweb Digital 100 showcases the fastest growing websites and apps out there and it cuts across all different industries and all different countries. This report is great because it shows you who are the next big players and it shows you where digital growth is really happening. If you want first access when this Digital 100 drops in January, I've put a link below. Go check it out and pre register now.

Search features can vary by country and surface, so visibility checks need location-aware monitoring. Main topics: Search feature availability monitoring.

Similarweb Digital 100 (2026): Winners List Coming Soon   Similarweb’...


There are all these new tactics for being recommended by large language models. Now some of them feel a little silly or even spammy, and I hear a lot of people asking, sure, these work right now, but are they really gonna continue working? And so I just wanna talk about why I think a lot of these tactics are going to continue working for the foreseeable future, and which ones you might want to avoid. The tactics that are especially effective right now, that are different from just traditional SEO, could collectively be summarized as recommendation spam. You essentially want to spam recommendations for your brand all over the websites that these large language models trust. The most common form of this is probably spamming Reddit comments. I think the most effective form is spamming listicles. This is where you create like top 10 best lists and put yourself at the top. Incredibly effective even when it's on your own website. It can be done effectively using press releases or on any sites where users can post their own content, like YouTube, LinkedIn articles, or Medium. Yesterday I was watching a webinar with several SEOs, one of them being Ethan Smith, who I regard as one of the smartest people in GEO right now. Ethan was asked when he thinks these tactics will stop working, and his response was never, they're never going to stop working. He said the most egregious versions of them might get penalized, anything that's truly preventing the models from giving good recommendations, but by and large it would just be too difficult or too expensive to fix entirely...

There are all these new tactics for being recommended by large language models. Now some of them feel a little silly or even spammy, and I hear a lot of people asking, sure, these work right now, but are they really gonna continue working? And so I just wanna talk about why I think a lot of these tactics are going to continue working for the foreseeable future, and which ones you might want to avoid. The tactics that are especially effective right now, that are different from just traditional SEO, could collectively be summarized as recommendation spam. You essentially want to spam recommendations for your brand all over the websites that these large language models trust. The most common form of this is probably spamming Reddit comments. I think the most effective form is spamming listicles. This is where you create like top 10 best lists and put yourself at the top. Incredibly effective even when it's on your own website. It can be done effectively using press releases or on any sites where users can post their own content, like YouTube, LinkedIn articles, or Medium. Yesterday I was watching a webinar with several SEOs, one of them being Ethan Smith, who I regard as one of the smartest people in GEO right now. Ethan was asked when he thinks these tactics will stop working, and his response was never, they're never going to stop working. He said the most egregious versions of them might get penalized, anything that's truly preventing the models from giving good recommendations, but by and large it would just be too difficult or too expensive to fix entirely. And I tend to agree with them. Most of the pushback I've seen on this take is it's from other SEOs. SEOs that would prefer to just keep doing what they've always been doing and who really hate this idea that they have to change their methods. It's a really good excuse to not have to learn something new. And honestly, I've fallen into this trap myself in the past. I've been doing SEO for about 16 years, and maybe about 10 years ago I got it into my head that Google's getting a lot smarter and therefore these spammy tactics aren't gonna keep working. One example of a tactic I stopped using temporarily was service area pages. If you're, say, a plumber in Houston, it doesn't necessarily make sense that you would have a page about your plumbing in every city around Houston and every neighborhood within Houston. You can just have one page that says you serve the greater Houston area. However, if you want to rank in those neighborhoods and cities, this is incredibly effective. And 10 years ago I thought, you know what? Google's gonna figure this out. Google doesn't want this to be effective. It's super spammy. But after a few years went by and these pages just became more and more effective. I eventually gave in, and guess what? They're still very effective today. The truth is, service area pages aren't causing a big issue for Google, and Google is incentivized to spend as little money as possible. It just simply wouldn't be worth the cost. The reality is, when someone goes to a large language model and they ask for a recommendation about which brand they should hire or which product they should buy, that large language model is going to look all over the internet for recommendations. That's really all they can do. Now, you might think well, eventually these models are gonna be smart enough to realize that the recommendation came from the brand's website or was probably placed by the brand themselves, but the truth is that would be way more expensive than just a simple search tool. It would have to be causing a serious issue for the large search engines to be forced into doing that. It's much more likely they'll handle it the same way Google has. They'll penalize the biggest offenders with manual actions. Instead of spending money having the models automatically vet every single web page on the internet, they can just manually identify the biggest troublemakers, brands that are spamming thousands of recommendations every week. So my advice: don't try to automate this. Don't do this at scale. Even if they never give out manual penalties for this, do you really want a bunch of spam about your brand out there on the Internet? However, I think it's equally as dangerous to ignore this tactic. In terms of the amount of effort required, I think it's the most effective form of digital marketing. Right now this video is getting too long, but tomorrow I'll do a video on how to do this in a smart way.

When will GEO stop working? After 16 years in SEO, I learned these "spammy" tactics never die. Here's why. #GEO #SEO #aimarketingtools #digitalmarketing Recommendation spam may work now, but the creator warns against automating it or doing it at scale because brand spam creates risk. The creator says service-area pages can still be effective for neighborhood and city rankings despite being seen as spammy. Main topics: GEO tactics / durability hypothesis, Local SEO / service-area pages, Risk/avoid / recommendation spam.

GEO tactics / durability hypothesis
Local SEO / service-area pages
Risk/avoid / recommendation spam


it's so simple that's all you have to do just do something stupid and silly that people aren't expecting it hooked me immediately I wanted to see what was happening and it kept me watching to the end cause it was just silly and it was only 12 seconds there's another thing with the 12 second video you can get multi watches so someone someone's gonna definitely watch to the end and people often watch it twice cause they're like what just happened they wanna see it again or then they go to the comment and while they're reading the comments it just keeps playing and playing and looping and looping all those count towards your watch time and it's also noteworthy that there's no dialogue they just put a song behind it and subtitles so this video is so easy to make you just come up with the idea think about how you want it to be and then you can do all of this in the editing

Video performance depends on basic production quality, hooks, and repeatable capture workflows as much as on the idea itself. Main topics: Video content production quality.

The views on this dentist's video are exploding. No talking. Just tex...


here's a tip to help you dramatically with your Google Ads when I look at Google Ads accounts and when I train staff to do it the biggest problem that people struggle with is keyword selection now when you're doing keyword selection with regards to Google Ads the most important thing that you have to look at is keyword intent what is the intent behind a keyword that a person searches for the easiest way to do it and I do it still is that when you are doing keyword selection open up a new search window and type that word in so for example let's say you're a plumber and you want to bid on the word block toilets go on to Google and search the word block toilets I almost guarantee you you're not gonna see other plumbers coming up in those organic results or even ads the reason is obvious a person is looking for blocked toilets probably just for informational stuff or how to do it themselves they're not looking for a plumber another example is let's say that you are a psychologist and you think hmm maybe depression will be a good word to bid on again open up Google type in the word depression I promise you the top results are not going to be from other psychologists they're going to be informational websites again this tells you that people that are searching this word are looking for information you can go do this for every single niche and every single keyword that you're selecting the most important thing with Google Ads like I've said before is trying to understand the intent remember with Google Ads if your text ad comes up and a person is clicking on that ad Google...

here's a tip to help you dramatically with your Google Ads when I look at Google Ads accounts and when I train staff to do it the biggest problem that people struggle with is keyword selection now when you're doing keyword selection with regards to Google Ads the most important thing that you have to look at is keyword intent what is the intent behind a keyword that a person searches for the easiest way to do it and I do it still is that when you are doing keyword selection open up a new search window and type that word in so for example let's say you're a plumber and you want to bid on the word block toilets go on to Google and search the word block toilets I almost guarantee you you're not gonna see other plumbers coming up in those organic results or even ads the reason is obvious a person is looking for blocked toilets probably just for informational stuff or how to do it themselves they're not looking for a plumber another example is let's say that you are a psychologist and you think hmm maybe depression will be a good word to bid on again open up Google type in the word depression I promise you the top results are not going to be from other psychologists they're going to be informational websites again this tells you that people that are searching this word are looking for information you can go do this for every single niche and every single keyword that you're selecting the most important thing with Google Ads like I've said before is trying to understand the intent remember with Google Ads if your text ad comes up and a person is clicking on that ad Google are going to charge you regardless so you have to make sure that you get the most out of your clicks only bid on keywords that there is a transactional or commercial intent because generally speaking other type of words are not going to get your conversion you're going to get clicks yes but you're not going to get the business I hope this makes sense keep on following me for more Google Ads tips

Google Ads performance depends on operational settings that can affect spend, targeting, measurement, or campaign continuity. Main topics: Google Ads account operations.

Use Google Search Results to Understand Keyword Intent for Google Ads...


Here's a local SEO ranking factor that you need to know review recency so the concept here is that getting reviews on a regular basis can help you rank better and if you're not getting reviews on a regular basis, then that's actually a problem Joy Hawkins did some research around this and they found that a business that stopped getting reviews their ranking started to drop but once they started getting reviews again, the rankings went back up so it's really important to have a steady stream of reviews coming in so how many reviews do you need? How often should you be getting them? Uh, the trick here is to match your competition so if your competition is getting, you know one review per month and you're getting two reviews per month then that's a good thing and so if your competition is getting 4 reviews per month but you're only getting two reviews per month then that's not enough you wanna try and match whatever your competition is getting so that you're slightly above them and that'll actually help you rank better in Google. Hope this helps follow for more tips. Hey, what are you looking for?

Review recency has increased in importance in this year’s Local Searc...


Several people from Google have been going on podcast in the last week telling people that Geo is just SEO. If you don't know Geo stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's the things you do to get recommended by large language models like ChatGPT or Google's AI mode. I'm just gonna set the record straight, explain why GEO is different than SEO why that matters and why you shouldn't take SEO advice from Google. Now it's true that everything that matters for SEO also matters for GEO which is why I would call GEO s E o plus. However, large language models have introduced some very new tactics that right now are very effective and the primary new tactic is what I'm calling recommendation building. One of the pillars of SEO has always been link building. If you want to rank in Google for any kind of competitive term, you need to build links to your website. These links can also help you get recommended by large language models but what's arguably more important is your brand being recommended by the pages that these large language models cite before giving a response. Now if you've been following Geo advice at all, you've probably heard me and other people saying that you need to get your brand mentioned on as many websites as possible. These large language models are looking all over the internet and the Noisiest brands are gonna get noticed the most and will be most likely recommended in their output. And while that generally is true, my view has evolved some as we've been doing this for clients. I've been able to sharpen up the strategy a bit...

Several people from Google have been going on podcast in the last week telling people that Geo is just SEO. If you don't know Geo stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's the things you do to get recommended by large language models like ChatGPT or Google's AI mode. I'm just gonna set the record straight, explain why GEO is different than SEO why that matters and why you shouldn't take SEO advice from Google. Now it's true that everything that matters for SEO also matters for GEO which is why I would call GEO s E o plus. However, large language models have introduced some very new tactics that right now are very effective and the primary new tactic is what I'm calling recommendation building. One of the pillars of SEO has always been link building. If you want to rank in Google for any kind of competitive term, you need to build links to your website. These links can also help you get recommended by large language models but what's arguably more important is your brand being recommended by the pages that these large language models cite before giving a response. Now if you've been following Geo advice at all, you've probably heard me and other people saying that you need to get your brand mentioned on as many websites as possible. These large language models are looking all over the internet and the Noisiest brands are gonna get noticed the most and will be most likely recommended in their output. And while that generally is true, my view has evolved some as we've been doing this for clients. I've been able to sharpen up the strategy a bit. Let's talk about a few surgical approaches that have very high returns for a little bit of effort. First of all, it's important to point out that the strategy is very much industry dependent. You need to know what kinds of pages large language models are citing when people ask about the products and services you offer. To do this, you're going to need a tool. There are about 100 out there. We use peak dot AI. And when you do this, what you're gonna find is that these large language models are citing the same pages over and over again, which is why a more surgical approach matters. Instead of spraying your brand mentions all over the internet, you can just place recommendations on those pages that large language models are siding over and over again. And for pages where you can't place a recommendation, you can try to replace those pages with your own. So let's talk about some of the most effective ways to do this. Probably the most effective is listicles. These are gonna be things like best product or service in area or for use case. And for most industries, there are hundreds of different combinations of products and Services and use cases that you can make listicles for. You want your brand showing up at the top of as many of these listicles as possible. But here's a few ways you can do that. A lot of these listicles are automatically generated by directories. In this case, you can often pay for top placement or just getting more reviews in that directory will automatically get you into these listicles. Other listicles are going to be on 3rd party sites or on the sites of companies in adjacent industries that aren't direct competitors. I recommend reaching out to the author of all these listicles and just asking what it would take to be listed at the top of their listicle. Most of the time you probably won't get a response but occasionally they just want like a hundred bucks which is easily worth it for a highly cited listicle. And sometimes there's an opportunity to do a reciprocal mention. I think this is going to become a very popular GEO tactic once people realise how effective it is. Essentially you recommend me in your listicle and I'll recommend you in my listicle. As long as they're not a direct competitor, it's a perfect trade. This is very similar to reciprocal linking in SEO. Except there's no risk of a penalty. So this is something we're starting to do more of. Most brands probably have dozens of high value reciprocal mention opportunities. Another type of page that's commonly cited by large language models are discussion threads, most often Reddit. And you probably noticed more and more brands are just spamming the retweets with mentions of their company. But don't worry, you don't need to spam Reddit to get the benefit. Cause like I was saying before, it's typically the same discussion threads that are cited over and over again. So you can be very surgical about it. And most of the time these highly sighted threads are 1, 2, 3 years old, meaning you can go leave a comment recommending your brand and it's unlikely moderators are even gonna see it. And the last highly sighted page type I'll talk about are articles. Now it's unlikely that you're gonna be able to get a recommendation for your brand in these existing articles, but if you look at the topics of the articles that these large language models are citing, often you can create similar content on your own website. But here's what most people get wrong. Just because the large language model is signing an article on your website doesn't mean they're going to recommend you. The content they retrieve from the article has to contain a recommendation for your brand. So that's why when we create these articles for clients, we always make sure the introduction of the article at least subtly recommends the brand. The best news about all these tactics is almost no one is doing this well right now. And I believe there's going to be a huge first movers advantage. If you can get your brand recommended by the large language models now, then when people use large language models to create content, you are more likely to show up in their content. It's never going to be easier than it is right now.

Recommendation Building: Google says GEO is just SEO. They're wrong. LLMs cite the same pages repeatedly—here's how to get your brand on those exact pages 🎯 #GEO #SEO... The creator frames GEO as SEO plus recommendation building: brand recommendations on pages LLMs cite, not only links and rankings. LLMs may cite the same listicles repeatedly, so credible inclusion on relevant list pages can influence recommendation opportunities. Old cited Reddit threads are presented as a tempting GEO surface, but brand-comment seeding is spam-adjacent and should be treated as risk/avoid...

Recommendation Building: Google says GEO is just SEO. They're wrong. LLMs cite the same pages repeatedly—here's how to get your brand on those exact pages 🎯 #GEO #SEO #aimarketingtools #DigitalStrategy #MarketingTips

Risk/avoid / paid or reciprocal mentions


Got me Edward. I finally figured out how to influence ChatGPT. If you use press releases the right way, you can influence AI. Ask ChatGPT what's the best AI SEO newsletter for CMOS? It says SEO Espresso, mentioned in this article. From Financial Content Best Aisue Newsletter for 2025. SEO Espresso takes the top spot. But this article came from a press release, and this press release was $6. From AB Newswire. An individual press release is $80. For $500 though, you get 83 press releases for a year. 500 / 83 six bucks. Just one press release did this. Imagine what 83 can do! Learn this tactic and more at compactkeywords.com!

If you use press releases the right way, you can influence AI. Ask ChatGPT, what's the best AI SEO newsletter for CMOs? It says SEO Espresso... SEO workflows benefit from specific research tools for keyword discovery, historical checks, backlink triage, citations, and search visibility diagnostics. Main topics: AI visibility / third-party mentions, Risk/avoid / press-release AI manipulation, SEO research and tooling workflow.

If you use press releases the right way, you can influence AI. Ask ChatGPT, what's the best AI SEO newsletter for CMOs? It says SEO Espresso. Mentioned in this article from FinancialContent, “Best AI SEO Newsletter for 2025, SEO Espresso Takes the Top Spot.” But this article came from a press release. And this press release was $6 from AB Newswire. An individual press release is $80. For $500 though, you get 83 press releases for a year. $500 divided by 83, six bucks. Just one press release did this. Imagine what 83 can do. Learn this tactic and more at compactkeywords.com #generativeengineoptimization #answerengineoptimization #searchengineoptimization #digitalmarketing


If you're struggling to understand what backlinks are and how they affect your rankings in search engine optimisation, I really think you should take a look at this video and save it for later. Now in order to understand what backlinks are, I want to show you an analogy from a movie made in the 1980s. The movie is called Can't Buy Me Love. The premise in the background of the movie is basically there's this nerd in high school and he goes to the most popular girl in school and he said, I'm gonna pay you to be friends with me because basically if people see that you're friends with me, I'm gonna get some of your popularity passed on to me and then I'm gonna become popular as well. Just take a look at this quick clip. What are you talking about? Are you high? I wanna rent you. You wanna rent me? Yeah, you pretend you like me and we go out for just a few weeks and that will make me popular. Just going out with me is not gonna make you popular. Well, I have $1,000 it says it will. Good to see all ladies. You're beautiful. That's right. Mom, Dad, send money please. I'm broke, lady. Now the idea is very similar with regards to search engine optimisation and backlinks in a natural, the way that backlinks work is that if you get a backlink from a popular website or that Google sees as Authoritative, you are getting some of that popularity juice or called authority down to your website. What Google is saying is if this website is popular and authoritative and referring down to your website, that means that your website must be quite good as well...

If you're struggling to understand what backlinks are and how they affect your rankings in search engine optimisation, I really think you should take a look at this video and save it for later. Now in order to understand what backlinks are, I want to show you an analogy from a movie made in the 1980s. The movie is called Can't Buy Me Love.

The premise in the background of the movie is basically there's this nerd in high school and he goes to the most popular girl in school and he said, I'm gonna pay you to be friends with me because basically if people see that you're friends with me, I'm gonna get some of your popularity passed on to me and then I'm gonna become popular as well. Just take a look at this quick clip. What are you talking about? Are you high?

I wanna rent you. You wanna rent me? Yeah, you pretend you like me and we go out for just a few weeks and that will make me popular. Just going out with me is not gonna make you popular.

Well, I have $1,000 it says it will. Good to see all ladies. You're beautiful. That's right.

Mom, Dad, send money please. I'm broke, lady. Now the idea is very similar with regards to search engine optimisation and backlinks in a natural, the way that backlinks work is that if you get a backlink from a popular website or that Google sees as Authoritative, you are getting some of that popularity juice or called authority down to your website. What Google is saying is if this website is popular and authoritative and referring down to your website, that means that your website must be quite good as well.

Now I know it's a simple analogy, but that's in a natural what backlinks are. If you can get backlinks from good authoritative websites to yours, you are building up the authority and the popularity of your website because those other websites are popular.

Understanding Backlinks Through Can’t Buy Me Love ❤ 🥰 In Can’t Buy M...


yesterday I posted a video about reaching 100,000 followers on TikTok as I mentioned in my video I've got a lot of followers as well on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook and all other social media platforms now the No. 1 question that people ask me when they hear these stats is do I monetize and get paid from these social media platforms the answer is no I don't in South Africa for example people don't get paid for posting on TikTok Instagram Facebook and YouTube I have started investigating it but I haven't put too much effort into it the reason I've made over 500 videos is not to get paid by the social media platforms I do it to grow my business I own a digital marketing agency and I've been doing this for nearly 20 years so thank god I've got a lot of skills I wanna try flex my skills to show people look I know what I'm doing and hopefully you might wanna come to me so I can help you in your business also another reason why I make these videos is to train my staff and to train other people and small business owners that they can learn a little bit how to do digital marketing themselves thank god as a result of these videos my business has grown quite a lot I get people from all over the country in fact all over the world contacting me to help them with SEO Google Ads and all other forms of digital marketing now the point of this video just like the other one was god forbid not to boast but to give you encouragement please start making video content today no matter what niche or field you are in if you are passionate and you know a lot about your business which I'm...

yesterday I posted a video about reaching 100,000 followers on TikTok as I mentioned in my video I've got a lot of followers as well on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook and all other social media platforms now the No.

1 question that people ask me when they hear these stats is do I monetize and get paid from these social media platforms the answer is no I don't in South Africa for example people don't get paid for posting on TikTok Instagram Facebook and YouTube I have started investigating it but I haven't put too much effort into it the reason I've made over 500 videos is not to get paid by the social media platforms I do it to grow my business I own a digital marketing agency and I've been doing this for nearly 20 years so thank god I've got a lot of skills I wanna try flex my skills to show people look I know what I'm doing and hopefully you might wanna come to me so I can help you in your business also another reason why I make these videos is to train my staff and to train other people and small business owners that they can learn a little bit how to do digital marketing themselves thank god as a result of these videos my business has grown quite a lot I get people from all over the country in fact all over the world contacting me to help them with SEO Google Ads and all other forms of digital marketing now the point of this video just like the other one was god forbid not to boast but to give you encouragement please start making video content today no matter what niche or field you are in if you are passionate and you know a lot about your business which I'm sure that you do you will get followers and you will get business just start making content today

I Don’t Make Content to Monetise Platforms 💸💸💸 I don’t create content...