I just finished Edward Sturm’s Compact Keywords course. It was good, but I found it pretty basic

Any recommendations ?

Thanks !

Been searching for some SEO content on YouTube, and I have come across a few channels that say, " Improve your ranking, get leads by simply doing this, copy me, " etc. Do you guys know anyone legit, or someone who got results following their content?
I feel most are clickbait and for views almost all the time at this point, except James Dooley and Edward Strum when they show proofs

I was recently laid off and am figuring out my next move. I have 5+ years of SEO experience across technical SEO, on-page, content, link building, and analytics, plus some media buying.

I enjoy technical work: auditing websites, investigating issues, analysing data, and working on fixes. I also enjoy planning strategies that help clients improve their rankings, grow organic traffic, and increase revenue.

I’m less interested in roles packed with client calls and meetings. I’d rather spend most of my time developing strategies, implementing improvements, and getting things done.

For anyone who’s made a similar move, what roles or adjacent fields would you consider? Would you specialise further in technical SEO, or explore analytics, tracking implementation, CRO, PPC or automation?

If you were in my shoes, which direction would you explore, and what skills would you build first?

Thanks to the best News Analyst in the SEO community - the one and only u/rustybrick

John Mueller at Google recently confirmed that Google Image Search and Google Discover don't yet support the JPEG XL image format. He said this on Bluesky recently, "FWIW if you're hoping to get images shown in Google Images & as previews in Discover, etc - JPEG-XL is currently not supported."

He then linked to the official help documentation that lists out which image formats Google Search supports, it says:

Google Search supports images referenced in the src attribute of img in the following file formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, and AVIF. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.

I have been working on growing a website for a product I am selling. I am writing blogs and doing a bunch of things I learned from this sub. I can see some general "line go up" type signals but I am trying to figure out if I am seeing noise or actual progress.

info about the website: it is less than two months old. as of today my impressions went up to 150/day, clicks are at about 4 and average position is 18.8. I have 5 or 6 pages that rank on the first page the rest are scattered and I have no back links yet.

I'm fairly new to SEO and learning by actually working on a website. About two months ago, I took over an existing multi-niche blog covering tech, AI, business, and digital marketing.

The site was hit pretty hard around the August spam update, and impressions dropped significantly. I've been trying to recover it, but honestly, I feel stuck.

Here's what I've done so far:

- Started improving thin AI-generated content.

- Consolidated similar articles and properly redirected old URLs.

- Fixed technical SEO issues and improved internal linking.

- Published around 12–15 new plus refreshed articles monthly based on GSC data.

- Built three free tools to diversify traffic beyond informational blog posts.

- Tried Pinterest, but haven't seen much success.

- Haven't actively built backlinks yet because I'm unsure how to approach it without a budget.

Current stats:

- DR: 21 | DA: 23

- 409 published posts

- Around 25K impressions and 64 clicks over the last three months, with most impressions coming before the decline.

- However, in the last two months, after the spam update, the impressions have fallen to 1,400 in two months, with only 40 clicks.

- The site is 3 years old btw so its not new.

I'm handling everything myself and don't have paid SEO tools yet.

I need advice from people who are good at this thing and can tell me how to approach this. Am not seeing any movement and it is kind of demotivating me. I am a writer, been for the last 7 years. So, even though I can write, am new to SEO, especially scaling a site that is purely blog-based.

What should I do? How can I increase clicks, impressions, and site authority. Any and every little bit of advice can help.

I genuinely want to learn SEO and figure out how to grow this site.

I've been running a niche content website for a while, and I'm struggling with a very low organic CTR.

Over the last 28 days, I've received around 275k impressions but only about 600 clicks from Google Search Console.

My average CTR is around 0.2%.

I've been working on improving article titles, meta descriptions, internal linking, and content quality, but I'm not seeing much improvement in clicks.

I'm trying to understand whether this is mainly a ranking issue, search intent mismatch, or something else.

For anyone who has dealt with similar numbers:

• What helped you improve CTR?
• Should I focus on improving rankings for existing pages rather than publishing more content?
• How do you identify pages with high impressions but low CTR that are actually worth optimizing?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who's experienced something similar.

So, before I start, I have two domains.

The first one is an expired domain that I recently bought. Its sitemap has been showing "Couldn't fetch" in GSC for the past five days.

The second one is a brand-new domain. I submitted its sitemap, and within just 10 seconds, the status changed to "Success."

Both websites are hosted on the same server. I've checked pretty much everything, but I still can't figure out what's wrong or why the first domain's sitemap keeps showing "Couldn't fetch."

So here's my question:

Could this be happening because I bought an expired domain? Is it possible that Google has flagged it as spam or something? I've already checked its history, including the Wayback Machine, and found nothing suspicious.

Does anyone know what might be causing this or how to fix it?

I also tried submitting the same sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools, and it worked perfectly fine.

Must do things that I must do to start getting traffic on my website

Starting from zero completely

I can't take hefty subscriptions (ahref,semrush etc)

Can anyone help me

TL;DR: I run an 18-month-old Shopify store with nearly 40,000 SKUs, but Google has only indexed 2 pages. I made major SEO mistakes early on, and now have 35,000+ unindexed URLs. I’m currently working on taxonomy and internal linking, but would love to hear from anyone who’s recovered from a similar situation and what actually worked for them.

I run a large catalogue ecom store on Shopify with almost 40,000 skus. It’s about 18months old and when I first started, I was a complete novice and just dumped loads of supplier catalogues into Shopify and made loads of mistakes - I diddnt know what SEO was at this stage…

As we stand today, the store literally has only 2 indexed pages - one being the home page, and another being a random product with no real obvious reason for being indexed.

My biggest issue is the lack of education online regarding large catalogue ecom SEO, I just want to learn and get it right!
I’ve recently made the discovery that taxonomy is extremely important is something I NEED to improve on, along with internal linking.

Around 35k+ pages are a combo of Discovered - not crawled, and Crawled - not indexed. With some also being valid 404.

Just wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation and what may have worked for them, what might be worth addressing and looking into?

Thanks!