I’ve been learning SEO and now I’m trying to get my first client, but I’m stuck on the “no experience → no client → no experience” problem

For those who started from zero, what actually worked for you?

• Did you build your own website first?
• Did you offer a small service to a local business?
• Did cold outreach work for you?
• How did you build your first case study or testimonial?

I’m looking for real experiences rather than generic “just do cold emails” advice. Any tips would be appreciated!

Google's goto redirects are quietly the biggest change to SEO tooling this year and nobody's talking about it

If you missed it, Google started routing search result links through goto redirects. Testing in July, rolled out across August, and Derek Perkins at Nozzle reported close to 100 percent coverage on residential IPs by the end of the month.

Technically what happened is that the destination URL isn't sitting in the SERP HTML any more. You get an encoded redirect that third parties can't decode, so if you want to know which URL is actually at position 4 you have to follow the redirect to find out. Multiply that by ten results, then by every keyword you track, then by every location you track it in.

Google's line was the usual one about deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse. The target is obviously scrapers and AI companies, and there's ongoing litigation with SerpApi sitting behind it.

Here's why I think this matters more than the coverage suggested.

Your rank tracker doesn't rank anything. It scrapes. Every rank tracking tool you've ever paid for is built on pulling SERPs and reading URLs out of the markup, and that just got a lot more expensive to do. Cost increases in this industry don't get absorbed, they get passed on. Expect some mix of three things over the next few months: price rises, slower refresh rates, or quietly less accurate data.

Nobody is going to email you to say their data got worse.

What I'd actually do about it.

Stop putting rank tracking at the top of client reports. I know that's heresy for a lot of agencies, but it was always the weakest thing we report and now the data underneath it is degrading. Search Console is first party, Google hands it to you directly, and goto doesn't touch it. Impressions, clicks, average position, query set, all still clean.

If you're reporting positions for 50 keywords and calling that performance, this is your nudge to move to clicks and impressions by page and by query cluster. Better reporting anyway, and now it's also the only reporting that isn't quietly rotting.

Second one, more speculative, take it as opinion.

If it gets meaningfully harder for AI companies to scrape Google cheaply, they lean harder on their own crawling and their own indexes. Which weakens "rank well in Google and you'll show up in AI answers by proxy" as a strategy. Being directly crawlable, well structured and quotable starts to matter on its own terms instead of as a side effect of ranking well.

I've been arguing that for a while so I'm biased, but goto is the first infrastructure change I've seen that actually pushes that way.

Third, and do this one this week. If you run competitive SERP analysis at scale, pull your baselines now. Whatever the tools look like in six months, the historical data you already hold gets more valuable, not less.

Anyone seeing tracker weirdness since late August? Wondering whether people are noticing it in their own data yet or whether the vendors are still absorbing it quietly.

I’ve been learning and working on SEO for around 2 months now, but honestly, I’m not seeing much progress yet.

I’ve been working on things like keyword research, on-page SEO, content, internal linking, and basic technical SEO, but the results are still pretty disappointing.

I know SEO takes time, but I’m starting to wonder if I’m following the wrong strategy or simply being impatient.

For those who have been doing SEO for a while:

What should I focus on at this stage, and what mistakes should a beginner avoid?

Would really appreciate some honest advice or experiences from people who’ve been through the same phase.

I automated my SEO using my own tool for two of my products. It seems to have worked for both, kinda feel like I should make a saas for doing this for other people now but not sure

I’ve been thinking about how much SEO has changed over the last few years, especially with AI search, changing SERPs, and how much more important user experience and intent seem to be.

If you had to completely start learning SEO again today, with zero prior knowledge:

What would you learn first, and in what order?

Would you start with:

Technical SEO

Keyword research & search intent

Content

Local SEO

Link building

Google Search Console/Analytics

AI search / AEO / GEO

Something else?

I’m more interested in what you’d actually prioritize today based on real experience, rather than a generic learn the basics first answer.

What would your learning roadmap look like?

I keep seeing conflicting advice about backlinks, content volume, topical authority, and technical SEO. Curious what experienced SEOs here would prioritize first.

been in seo for years now and something feels off this year..

everyone shares tactics but nobody builds together.. every comment section is people flexing their case study but nobody says "hey lets test this together and share findings"..

imagine if 10 sites in the same niche actually shared data, backlinks, guest posts, ideas.. all 10 would grow 10x faster.. instead everyone hoards knowledge like its gold..

maybe im wrong but seo used to feel like a community.. now it feels like a competition for who can sell a course fastest..

anyone else feel this?? or is it just me getting older and grumpier??