Expert guides on choosing the right SEO agency, what to look for in an SEO audit, and how to evaluate proposals.
117 articles published
A plumbing company was spending $2,400 a month on keyword research tools and still missing the phrases their actual customers used. We dumped 600 Google Reviews into ChatGPT, ran five prompts, and found 23 long-tail keyword opportunities that none of their paid tools had surfaced.
The spreadsheet that finally changed my mind had 47 rows. I'd been running a DIY SEO tool stack for a mid-size ecommerce client, tracking every dollar spent on Semrush, Ahrefs, Surfer SEO, and a handful of smaller utilities. The monthly tool spend came to about $1,365.
I fired our SEO agency after discovering they'd been submitting AI-generated blog posts with fabricated statistics to our client's site for three months straight. Nobody on their team had read a single piece before hitting publish. The kicker?
Developers often treat site structure as whatever falls out of their framework's routing system.
Every site migration I've worked on has had at least one moment where someone on the team says, "Wait, why did our traffic just drop 40%?" The worst part isn't the drop itself. It's realizing the cause was entirely preventable.
I once hired an SEO agency with a portfolio so impressive it could make you weep. Gorgeous traffic graphs, hockey-stick revenue charts, glowing client logos from brands you'd recognize.
Enterprise SEO and local SEO are often mistaken for the same discipline at different scales. After spending years building search strategies for both a 12,000-page SaaS platform and a chain of 45 dental offices, I can tell you the mental models are fundamentally different. The tools overlap.
Seventy-four percent of all new web content published today includes AI-generated elements, yet purely AI-written content lands in top search positions only 13.5% of the time. That gap tells you everything about where this industry actually stands.
One of our client sites dropped 34% in organic traffic on March 14th. By March 29th, it had recovered all but 6% of that traffic without us changing a single page. Another client's site, one we hadn't touched in months, quietly gained 22% visibility over the same period.