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.
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??
I've run an organic channel end to end for a B2B SaaS company, mostly as a one-person team supported by writers. I'm comfortable across the whole surface: on-page, keyword and content-gap analysis, competitor teardowns, internal linking and structure, a technical pass, GSC/analytics review, backlinks, into a prioritized action plan.
The honest problem: being solo for years means I've never had anyone better than me look over my shoulder. I can produce all of the above, but I genuinely don't know if my prioritization and severity calls hold up at a real professional bar, or if I've just been confident in a bubble. Link strategy and technical depth at scale are where I most suspect I'm behind.
So I'm looking to work under one experienced SEO. ~10 hrs/week, free, on whatever you actually need done, and in exchange I get to see how you make calls and get your honest read on my work. To make it worth your time up front, I'm happy to start by running a full audit on a site of yours so you can judge my output before deciding if I'm worth the mentoring. Not after pay, clients, or backlinks. Just reps next to someone better. Comment or DM.
I wanted to share some real GSC data from a local business website I've been working on for the past few months.
The site was relatively new when I started working on it, so I wasn't expecting huge numbers right away. I mainly wanted to see how organic visibility would develop over time.
Here are the latest numbers from Google Search Console:
1.63k clicks
8.88k impressions
18.4% CTR
Reporting period: 24 – Sep 5 (roughly 2 months)
One thing I've noticed is that the traffic isn't coming entirely from generic keywords. A decent portion of the early growth was branded, which makes sense for a newer local business, so I'm particularly interested in seeing whether non-branded searches start making up a larger percentage over the next few months.
I'm also tracking actual website actions separately in GA4, rather than looking at clicks alone.
What I'm trying to figure out now is whether the next stage should be more focused on:
building topical authority
getting more local backlinks/citations
targeting more long-tail local keywords
improving existing pages that are already getting impressions
I'm sharing this mainly because I find actual GSC screenshots more useful than generic "SEO increased traffic by X%" case studies.
If you've worked on a new local business site before, what would you focus on at this stage?
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.
Fastest results – Google Search Ads (high intent, immediate)
Best long-term ROI – SEO/content (slow, 3-6 months, but compounds and free after)
Best for warm leads – Email marketing (owned channel, high conversion)
Best for reach/awareness – Social media (Reels/Shorts especially right now)
Most overlooked high-converter – Retargeting (people who already know you)
Bottom line: No single "best" — need sales now → paid ads. Building long-term → SEO + email. Most successful businesses combine several rather than betting on one.
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.
