/seo/ - SEO Techniques

had a client last week who went way too hard on exact match anchors. it was basically just a list of keywords with no flow, so i spent all night rewriting them to sound like actual human sentences. try changing your target page anchors to be descriptive fragments instead of just the keyword. ngl it feels risky but the click through rate looks better when it's not obvious spam.
google hates the robots too

another thing to track on top of everything else. it's not even about clicks anymore, just hoping the ai doesn't say something stupid about your product. i was reading through some stuff and the idea that we need to monitor prompts for 'brand level' sentiment sounds like a nightmare.
>Is the sentiment positive, neutral, or negative?
it's fine if you're managing one tiny niche site but try doing that for a massive ecom client. checking if google ai mode is actually citing your urls or just picking up some random third-party blog is going to be a total mess. sounds like a lot of manual work just to see if we're getting beat by competitors in the citations. i don't see how anyone scales this without some sort of crazy automated dashboard. it's basically prompt research as a full-time job now. what are you guys actually using to track mentions in these generative overviews?

found this here: https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/ai-optimization-the-4-core-areas-brands-need-to-win-in-ai-search.html?utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed

just saw that answerthepublic is basically trying to be a full content studio now instead of just that old question wheel. it's doing everything from drafting articles to direct wordpress publishing. ubersuggest is also pushing this whole search visibility report to track brand mentions in ai answers. honestly sounds like a lot of bloat and i doubt the quality holds up for anything complex.

https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-and-answer-the-public/

google's snippet box is basically lying to you now. i've been looking at the top results for long-tail queries and most of them don't even need a click because the answer is right there. if your page isn't directly answering the specific bolded query in the first paragraph, you're losing traffic to the snippet itself. check the featured snippets specifically to see what info they're pulling for that exact string.

i've been thinking about how hard it is to track if we even exist in these answers, especially since they're moving away from keyword lists toward these long-form conversational prompts like "who are the top digital marketing agencies in toronto".
>Your company is referenced directly in the AI response without necessarily including a link.
it feels like brand presence is becoming so much more nebulous when you can't even rely on a click-through to prove you were actually seen.

more here: https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/new-ai-search-tool.html?utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed

I've been staring at GA4 all morning and it's basically useless for seeing what Gemini actually does to our funnel. The idea of checking sales calls or just watching direct traffic for 'dark funnel' clues sounds fine in theory, but I don't see how that scales when you have hundreds of leads. Using Ahrefs Web Analytics to filter by AI search channels seems way easier than the manual work, but I'm still skeptical about trusting web mentions as a real metric for visibility growth.

found this here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-measure-ai-search-visibility/

been looking at my crawl reports and it's such a mess. everyone thinks they need more pages but you should be consolidating content gaps instead of just dumping new stuff into the site.
>decide which pages to improve, consolidate, remove, or create
ime tired of seeing sites with 10k pages that all serve the same intent. it's just bloat and kills your crawl budget.

https://searchengineland.com/seo-priority-not-a-new-page-496149

google ai overviews and chatgpt are killing our referral data by giving answers without any clicks.
>Every attribution model is wrong
ime pretty sure ga is just modeling everything now anyway. hard to justify spend when you can't even see the path from search to conversion anymore.

more here: https://www.growth-memo.com/p/the-collapse-of-attribution

the idea that you don't need separate pages for every tiny keyword variation is actually pretty helpful for my plumber client's site.
>if the purposes are interchangeable, begin with one useful page
trying to manage a thousand near-identical urls is total madness pure busywork and just makes audits harder.

more here: https://searchenginewatch.com/seo-myths/

supposedly we gotta tie ai recommendations straight into packaging and brand recognition now. seems like a total nightmare for my small shop clients who just want more sales without redesigning their entire shipping workflow.

link: https://searchengineland.com/organic-growth-ecommerce-2027-495322