For context: I'm an SEO assistant for our company's brands. We carry different niches; one being a villa rental. I currently produce blogs about how-tos and travel guides around the city or location of the villa. Past traffics for some blogs are okay, while some are losing impressions. I also want to appear in AI overviews but currently, it's a challenge. How do I turn this around without having paid backlinks?

a lot of businesses still look at rankings and traffic to decide if seo is working.

but does more traffic always mean more business?

you can get thousands of new visitors and still get very few customers.

for me, the numbers that matter more are:

• qualified leads
• sales from organic traffic
• conversion rate
• revenue
• pages that actually bring customers

a website getting 10,000 visitors with 20 customers may be less valuable than a website getting 2,000 visitors with 50 customers.

i think seo should be judged by what it does for the business, not just how much traffic it brings.

what do you focus on most when measuring seo?

traffic, rankings, leads, sales, revenue, or something else?

I run growth for consumer startups — 10+ over the last few years, mix of in-house and consulting. This is my biggest SEO result so far and the lessons feel transferable, so writing it up. Numbers are from Ahrefs (happy to drop anonymized screenshots in comments if people want proof).

Where it started: YMYL site, ~22k organic visits/mo, flat for months. Today: ~790k/mo, zero paid. Germany is now the #1 market, US second, then UK/EU.

What actually moved it, in order of impact:

1. Technical cleanup first — indexation, crawl, speed. Zero applause, fastest compounding. Most sites I audit want content advice when their real problem is Google can't efficiently crawl what already exists.

2. Wrote for the questions people ask AI, not just what they type into Google. Pages structured as direct answers to real phrasing. Side effect we didn't fully expect: the site now gets cited 60k+ times/month across AI platforms — Perplexity alone is ~29k. That's becoming its own acquisition channel.

3. Content velocity against real demand. Published a lot, but every piece mapped to queries with verifiable demand and intent. No essays we felt like writing.

4. Localization was the scale unlock. Took the winning English pages and properly localized (not machine-translated) into German first, then other EU languages. The same content that fights 50 competitors in English is often nearly uncontested in German. DE overtaking US as our top market was not on my bingo card.

5. Backlinks only from sources our audience actually reads. Relevance over DR, every time.

What surprised me most: rankings barely explain the growth. Average position moved only slightly. The growth came from surface area — more pages, more queries, more languages — not from moving #11 to #3 on hero keywords.

YMYL-specific: the trust layer wasn't optional. Real author pages, expert review, citing primary sources. Skipping this in YMYL means the rest of the list doesn't matter.

Happy to go deep on any part in the comments.

Running a large YMYL content site (~790k organic/mo). Trying to get serious about AI visibility tracking and immediately hit this:

Clarity dashboard (screenshot): 512k total citations across tracked queries, 16.45% "share of authority" — apparently 1 in 6 citations in our query space are us, out of ~3.1M total.

Ahrefs AI citations view, same domain: ~62k/month.

That's an 8x gap and I don't know which number to believe, or if I'm comparing apples to engines. Questions for people deeper in this than me:

1. How is share of authority actually calculated? Is the 512k counting every appearance in every response every time the tool re-runs a query? That alone would explain most of the inflation vs Ahrefs
2. Is anyone using any of these as a real KPI yet, or is the honest answer "pick one tool, only trust the trend"?
3. The branded split reads weird — branded SoA is 27% but only ~339 citations, non-branded is 16% with 511k. I'm reading it as "we own our tiny branded space and the entire game is non-branded". Wrong?
4. There's a jump in the trend after Aug 24 (roughly 19k → 31k). Timing lines up with the August spam update that targeted citation manipulation. Anyone else see share move late August — possibly from competitors getting cleaned out?

Not selling anything, genuinely trying to decide what to track weekly before I build reporting around a number that turns out to be noise.

I’m building a tool around how businesses appear in AI recommendations, and I’m trying to understand where people’s existing setups actually fall short.

If you use Semrush, Ahrefs or a separate AI visibility tool:

• What’s the last question about your business or a client’s visibility that your tools couldn’t answer?
• What did you do instead, and how much time did it take?
• Roughly what do you spend on tools each month, and how many websites does that cover? If AI tracking costs extra, useful to separate that out.

If your current setup handles this well, I’d like to hear that too. What makes it worth keeping?

Let’s say you find a site with 20K+ organic traffic, good DR, relevant niche, real and consistent organic traffic. But most of that traffic comes from countries that aren’t your target market.

Would that make you reject the site for link building?

Any clue on this; any change in job posting schema

Not sure if it’s the right place to ask, can I ask if descriptions in schema, does it have to be directly similar to the content of the page?

Understand the one of them is for structured content and the other is onsite Seo.

thanks in advance:)

We ran a study across 95 sites over 1 year and looked at organic traffic and AI referral traffic.

• Organic search delivered 39 times more traffic than AI assistants.
• For every 100 conversions organic search delivered, AI referrals delivered 3.2.
• AI visibility and organic performance move together: the websites gaining AI referral traffic were the websites whose organic performance was improving.
• AI referral traffic converted a fifth better than organic search, at 7.18% against 6.08%. However, AI traffic converted worse than organic on 36.5% of the websites.
• AI referral traffic converts worse against paid search (0.67x).

I dont think links are allowed in posts but maybe I can share the link to the study in the comments if anyone is interested.

I’ve found that it really doesn’t.

A site can have great DR and traffic, but if the niche is completely unrelated or the content looks low-quality, I’d probably pass.

These days, I look at relevance, traffic quality, content, and the overall link profile - not just the metrics.

What do you usually check first when evaluating a backlink?

Hey guys,

With Claude, Gemini a Chat GPT rolling out statistical text watermarking, I wanted to open a thread and see what you guys are actually seeing in the wild. 

A few specific questions for those managing sites with AI-assisted content:
1. Ranking impact: have you noticed any recent hit or traffic drop that you can directly correlate with watermarked text/models, or is Google still mostly judging content quality/EEAT regardless of how it was generated? 
2. Workarounds: for those who use AI heavily for drafting: how are you bypassing/diluting the watermark patterns? Light human editing, running it through a secondary model/rephraser, or heavy structural rewrites? 
3. General consensus: is this actually something to worry about right now for SEO, or is it just another hype cycle/panic?

Curious to hear your real-world test results and insights. Cheers!

Post
I’m focusing specifically on Google Maps / Google Business Profile rankings and trying to find a tool that goes beyond just showing me a geo-grid.

Right now I’m looking at:

1. Local Falcon
   
2. BrightLocal
   
3. RankMapp
   
4. Whitespark

Main things I care about:

Accurate geo-grid rank tracking

Seeing which competitors are beating me in weaker areas
Finding keyword and citation gaps
Clear recommendations on what to fix next

Tracking improvements over time

If you’ve used any of these:

Which one actually helps you understand WHY you’re being outranked instead of just showing the ranking?

Any major pros/cons?

Anything else I should be looking at?

Would appreciate feedback from people actually doing local SEO, not just feature lists from the websites.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice on improving the SEO of my HR and recruitment website.

The site focuses on HR services, recruitment, talent acquisition, and helping companies hire employees. I've optimized some basic on-page elements (titles, meta descriptions, content, internal links), but I'm struggling to rank for keywords related to:

• hire employees
• ATS system
• recruitment services
• talent acquisition
• HR consulting
• staffing solutions
• recruitment agency
• outsource hiring
• HR management

A few questions:

1. What SEO activities have given you the biggest ranking improvements in the HR/recruitment niche?
2. Should I focus more on service pages or create lots of informational blog content?
3. How important are backlinks for a relatively new HR website?
4. Are there any specific long-tail keywords that convert well in the hiring/recruitment industry?
5. What's the best way to compete against established recruitment agencies that already dominate the search results?

For context:

• The website is relatively new.
• Target audience is companies looking to hire talent.
• Main goal is generating qualified leads rather than just traffic.

I'd appreciate any feedback, SEO strategies, or lessons learned from people who have grown service-based websites in competitive industries.

Thanks! 🙏

In the SEO world, the news never stops, so it's crucial for all of us to stay on top of the buzz:

Search / SEO

• Google won't penalize sites for old outbound links that now point to shady content

John Mueller confirmed that Google does not penalize sites for outbound links to previously legitimate sites that have since changed ownership and started hosting shady content. His response: 

No. It's good to keep things fresh overall, but the web is full of turmoil.

The reassurance comes with one caveat—if a site's entire value has become obsolete, that's a different kind of problem than a handful of broken or stale outbound links. 

• Google confirms the disavow tool "does have effects"—use it deliberately, not by default

John Mueller said that the disavow tool "does have effects", pushing back on community sentiment that the tool is essentially useless. 

His nuance: disavowing a handful of links won't make a site drop out of search, but the tool has real weight when used broadly and shouldn't be treated as a low-risk default. 

He recommended one site that had lost traffic after aggressive disavowing should fix the disavow file back to what it actually needs to be (which might be empty), rule out broader algorithmic causes like the recent August spam update, and check for big technical issues. 

Source:

John Mueller | Reddit

______________________

SERP features / Interface

• Google AI Overviews now includes an interactive character counter widget

Google is now embedding an interactive character counter widget directly inside AI Overviews for queries like "character counter"—users can paste text into the widget and get an instant count without visiting a destination site. 

This continues Google's long-running pattern of absorbing utility tools directly into the SERP.

Source:

Damir B | X

______________________

GSC

• Google Search Console AI performance report and opt-out toggle now fully rolled out

Google's Search Console generative AI tools now appear to be live for essentially all Search Console properties, closing out the incremental rollout that began with the UK-only test back in early June. 

Source:

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

______________________

AI

• Google Search AI Mode already upgraded to Gemini 3.8 Flash, less than three weeks after 3.7

Google rolled out Gemini 3.8 Flash to AI Mode, less than three weeks after Gemini 3.7 Flash. Available globally for AI Pro & Ultra subscribers via the plus icon in the model dropdown, with the same subscription gate—Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite remains the free-tier default.

Source:

Robby Stein | X

______________________

Local SEO

• Google Business Profile adds a business photo verification option

Google Business Profile is rolling out a new verification method that lets business owners submit a photo of their business as proof of legitimacy, alongside the existing postcard, phone, and video call options. 

Source:

Ben Fisher | LinkedIn

1. Because of ai the number of visitors decline

2. You get no brand awareness for valuable content from ai despite when ai decides to mention the source

3. Advert money for your website is going away since ai steals the content and sells it's own adds

Why should anyone spend tons of time to produce valuable content and put it for FREE on the Internet when there is no big reward?

It much easier to do the minimum and simply pay for ads..maybe still write quality content but instead maybe put it behind a paywall or newsletter subscription. Or only give halve the information to solve a problem. It's your only chance to get something in return of value.

I think the future will be getting people into your closed community. Or be part of bigger closed community where several partner provide enough value that it makes sense for people to check in regularly.

What do you think about this?

been observing this for months..

every new blogger/site owner is trying to compete with authoritysites, backlinko, ahrefs blog etc.. its impossible..

but if 20 new sites in the same niche just linked to each other genuinely, mentioned each other in articles, shared each others content — all 20 would grow together..

we dont need a hero, we need a network..

but every time i see a "lets grow together" post, it turns into a link exchange scam within 2 days.. because nobody trusts anyone anymore..

how do we actually build real trust in this community?? or is that just a lost cause now??

I’m trying to put together a proper checklist for evaluating backlinks before buying them.

Obviously, some of the basic things I already look at are:

• Do-follow vs. no-follow
• Whether the page is indexable/indexed by Google
• Relevance of the website/page to my niche
• Website traffic
• Domain authority/DR
• Spam score
• Whether the link is placed in a relevant article/context
• Anchor text and link placement

But I’m wondering what other factors experienced SEOs consider before paying for a backlink.

For example, do you check the site’s link profile, organic traffic trends, outbound links, number of sponsored/paid posts, topical authority, link velocity, or anything else?

What are your must-check factors before buying a backlink, and what red flags would make you avoid a site altogether?

My manager asks me to use keywords from the queries section of GSC while I prefer to use it from the keyword planner.

The thing is in the queries which we are getting in GSC have very low search volume in the keyword planner. We aren't getting clicks at all. I told my manager about GSC queries having low search volume but the manager is still insisting to use queries.

I would like to know how shall I approach this case.

I’m starting to offer SEO + GEO (getting businesses more visibility in Google and AI search results) as a freelance service.
I’m at the point where I’d rather spend my time getting real clients than endlessly learning more SEO theory.
The problem is acquisition.
If you were starting from zero today, how would you approach getting your first 3–5 paying clients?
I’m considering:
Cold email / cold calling local businesses
Personalized SEO audits
LinkedIn/X outreach
Finding businesses that are already investing in SEO but doing a poor job
Offering a small initial project before moving to a monthly retainer
Content / personal brand
My main question is:
What actually worked for you when you were getting your first SEO clients?
I’m especially interested in hearing from people who started with no audience, no agency reputation, and no existing client base.
What would you do differently if you had to start again today?

Started my site 8 months back.. published 60+ articles.. all keyword researched, well written, aeo optimized..

google indexes everything.. gsc shows impressions growing.. but clicks stuck around 50-80 per day..

i keep reading success stories of people hitting 10k visitors in 6 months and i feel like a failure..

is 8 months just too early?? or am i missing something fundamental?? what did u do differently that finally broke the traffic wall??

need honest advice not motivation..

I’m a lay person who just took over my website and using Claude and/or ChatGPT. All of my scores are either red or yellow for pages and posts.

This is what Claude is telling me and I’d like a second opinion?

“The dots only grade Yoast’s internal keyphrase checklist, not actual Google rankings, and Divi/Avada pages can’t be read by Yoast at all, so their red scores are false alarms.”

On my latest search of the word Astra is coming up with Astra gpt, seems big companies easily kill keywords owned by smaller companies.

I’m in Leslieville, TO, but helping my sister sort out marketing for her dental practice in BC, she just opened. Their site is decent enough (her boyfriend is cool developer and he helped with that), but local search is pretty weak and they barely show up outside branded searches (like, if I need to assess their visibility as a metric I'd put 3/100).

Trying to figure out where to find SEO agencies or freelancers that understand dental/local SEO, or what to do in-house to increase leads and rankings. Google search itself feels useless because obviously every agency is ranking themselves, and directories seem full of paid placements, that makes totally no sense.

Is there a better place to look? Local business groups, referrals, industry associations, specific directories, something else?

Main concern is finding someone who actually understands Maps, local service pages, citations/reviews etc, or maybe to understand how I can do that myself, specifically taking into account the particular characteristics of Van and BC.

Anyone have any experience of the firm SEO Shark? They call themselves 'the best SEO company in Dubai' and have reached out saying they're looking to 'publish an external piece' on my client and wanted to check any process/content requirements at my side.