Mar 20 2025
How to Beat Amazon at SEO

Ted Kubaitis once managed organic search for a retailer with 25,000 SKUs and 500 categories. He feared competing against Amazon for rankings until he realized most of its product pages had zero external links. Then an epiphany hit.

“All it took was 25 backlinks,” he told me.

Ted is now the founder of SEO Tool Lab, a prominent agency and software provider, and the host of “SEO Fight Club,” a YouTube show.

He and I spoke last month at a conference. I asked him about today’s SERPs, keyword priorities, content marketing, and, yes, competing against ecommerce giants.

The entire audio of that conversation is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.

Eric Schwartzman:  Search engine result pages have changed dramatically over the last few months.

Ted Kubaitis: Right. There are keywords now where the first organic result is below the fold — effectively page two. Those keywords aren’t worth targeting anymore.

The Google search result page is now a universal search. It’s multiple blended result sets — ads,  products, “People also ask,” local packs, all kinds of things are now above organic listings.

Search engine optimizers must consider two things: Where do I rank organically, and where does the listing appear among all those options?

Schwartzman: What are the best keywords to target for an online store?

Kubaitis: It’s an important question because if the targeting is wrong, the SEO is wrong. It requires a lot of time and effort to figure out. I would start with the names of products and categories. Names are so impactful.

Look at the links in SERPs; many are the actual search terms. A merchant might have a “Gifts and Delights” category, but how many people search for “gifts and delights”? What the heck is a delight? I guarantee “gifts and delights” is a zero-volume keyword.

So even if you rank number one, you’ve won nothing. But if you change the name to “Unique Gift Ideas,” you will now have a search term worth winning. Go through all of your categories and product names. Make sure they’re all named something that has search volume.

Google Trends can help identify those high-volume names. Look at the trending cluster topics for ideas. Consider, too, adding a widget or word cloud to a product page with keyword variants and even typos.

Merchants with multiple SKUs of a single item could name each with a top keyword variant.

Schwartzman: How did you learn ecommerce SEO?

Kubaitis: I was a web developer for a large online retailer. They saw that I was good with SEO, so I took it over as a primary responsibility. I ended up doing SEO for that retailer for almost 20 years. I helped them grow from $5 million in annual revenue to $65 million with a $40 average cart size. So a lot of carts. High volume, low margin. We had 25,000 SKUs across 500 product categories.

We competed against Amazon and all the big marketplaces. A lot of sellers think they can’t compete against those sites, but Amazon’s product pages often have zero external backlinks. You can beat them with 25 backlinks. I spent years being afraid to compete with Amazon. I finally mustered up the courage; all it took was 25 backlinks.

Don’t make my mistake.

Schwartzman: Let’s switch to content marketing. Ecommerce stores often launch blogs to attract traffic for products. What are your thoughts about that?

Kubaitis: Blogs can help, but executing the strategy is often flawed and ends up causing more harm. Most online retailers have a problem with keyword cannibalization between their home page, categories, and product pages. Then they publish blog posts that overlap with the same keywords.

A better ecommerce strategy involves multiple websites. For example, a seller of high-end poker tables could launch a blog site about poker rules, professional tournaments, and related — and then advertise the tables there. The seller would have multiple marketing assets and free advertising. The seller can test keywords that the store couldn’t otherwise target. And since they’re on different domains, they’re not cannibalizing each other.

I tell retailers a blog is helpful on a different domain, but four out of five have a problem when it’s on their ecommerce sites.

Schwartzman: Tell us about your company, SEO Tool Lab.

Kubaitis: Our primary tool is called Cora. It uses statistical analysis to determine which elements on your website and your competitors’ impact rankings for a keyword. Cora reduces the possibilities from thousands to a few dozen to focus on.

Plus, we host a weekly YouTube show called SEO Fight Club. It’s an open debate and peer review of SEO tactics, tools, and trends.

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Mar 19 2025
High-Quality Conversions: How To Optimize Your Website & Boost Growth via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

Ready to turn your site into a powerful growth engine in 2025? 

Watch on-demand as we unpack the strategies top brands use to optimize their sites for better search performance and more conversions in our exclusive webinar.

You’ll learn:

  • A comprehensive look at the five core focus areas of website optimization, and why they matter.
  • Practical tactics for improving keyword targeting, site structure, page speed, CTAs, and more.
  • The best tools and resources to track performance, identify opportunities, and refine your optimization strategy.

With Zack Kadish, Sr. SEO Strategy Director at Conductor, we’ll provide actionable optimization strategies you can start implementing on your website immediately.

Whether you’re new to website optimization or looking to fine-tune your approach, this webinar will equip you with the knowledge and tools to maximize your website’s potential.

View the slides below, or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

Unlock Local SEO: Online Review Trends Broken Down by Industry

Join us as we explore data-backed insights into the impact of reputation management, revealing key trends in customer feedback and review behaviors.

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Mar 19 2025
Bad SEO Advice: 4 Tips to Ignore

Tools to optimize search engine rankings often provide automated audits with reports and recommendations. The findings typically include detailed explanations, which are handy for SEO learners.

But the findings are often harmful in my experience, as they suggest actions that are low priority. They are unlikely to improve performance, and they distract from worthwhile tactics that can move the needle.

Do-it-yourself SEO is possible, provided the doer understands helpful practices versus those that waste time.

Here are common SEO recommendations to ignore.

Title Tag Length

Google truncates title tags in search results to roughly 60 characters. Many SEO tools therefore flag longer titles as a weakness.

This is false. Google considers the entire title to assess relevancy, even if partly cropped. Hence a longer title can help a page rank higher.

Instead of shortening title tags, consider rewriting them with the critical keywords at the front to appear prominently in SERPs and attract clicks.

Hreflang Usage

Hreflang is an HTML attribute informing search engines which language to show for a specific geo region.

SEO tools frequently report the absence of an hreflang tag as an error. In reality, the tag is pointless for single-language sites, and since 2016 Google has ignored it altogether.

Moreover, modern web browsers and accessibility screen readers programmatically determine the language.

Hence, hreflang tags are unnecessary for all sites — single- and multi-language.

HTML Headings

Many themes and content management systems use HTML headings inconsistently. For example, a page could contain two H1 headings, no H2s, or multiple H3s preceding an H2.

Certainly HTML headings should appear sequentially when possible, but it’s sometimes difficult without changing a theme, and it’s unlikely to improve rankings. Thus I advise clients to ignore sequential placement if it requires much time or money.

Make sure to use HTML headings and include keywords, but ignore recommendations for precise order.

Word Count

For years, search engine optimizers have claimed word count as an important ranking factor. Some studies have claimed longer pages rank higher. Many SEO tools suggest pages of 1,000 words or more.

It’s nonsense. For years Google representatives have stated the number of words (or links) on a page is irrelevant. Likely, bloated pages are actually harmful if humans ignore them, prompting algorithms to classify them as unhelpful.

A page should be the minimum length to satisfy and help a user. If that’s 200 words, so be it. Write for humans, ignore “minimum word count” recommendations, and focus instead on searchers’ intent.

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Mar 18 2025
New Cybersecurity Bot Attack Defense Helps SaaS Apps Stay Secure via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Cybersecurity company HUMAN introduces a new feature for its HUMAN Application Protection service called HUMAN Sightline. The new Sightline enables users to defend their SaaS applications with detailed analyses of attacker activities and to track changes in bot behavior. This feature is available as a component of Account Takeover Defense, Scraping Defense, and Transaction Abuse Defense at no additional cost.

Human is a malicious traffic analytics and bot blocking solution that enables analysts to understand what bots and humans are doing and also block them.

According to the Human Sightlines announcement:

“Customers have long asked us to provide advanced anomaly reporting—or, in other words, to mark anomalies that represent distinct attacks. But when we started down that path, we realized that simply labeling spikes would not provide the information that customers really need…

…We built a secondary detection engine using purpose-built AI that analyzes all the malicious traffic in aggregate after the initial block or allow decision is made. This engine compares every automated request to every other current and past request in order to construct and track “attack profiles,” groups of requests thought to be from the same attacker based on their characteristics and actions.

Beyond visibility, secondary detection allows HUMAN’s detection to adapt and learn to the attacker’s changing behavior. Now that we can monitor individual profiles over time, the system can react to their specific adaptation, which allows us to continue to track and block the attacker. The number of signatures used by the system for each profile increases over time, and this information is surfaced in the portal.”

Search Engine Journal Asked Human About Their Service

How is this solution implemented?

“HUMAN Sightline will be a new dashboard in HUMAN Application Protection. It will be available in Account Takeover Defense, Scraping Defense, and Transaction Abuse Defense, at no additional cost. No other bot management product on the market has similar capabilities to HUMAN Sightline. HUMAN’s new attack profiling approach segments malicious traffic into distinct profiles, so customers can identify the different profiles that make up each traffic volume. Analysts can understand what each is doing, their sophistication, their capabilities, and the specific characteristics that distinguish them from other humans and bots on the application. This allows HUMAN to bring attack reporting to the next level, serving as both a bot blocking solution and a data-centric, machine learning-driven analyst tool.”

Is it a SaaS solution? Or is it something that lives on a server?

“Our Human Defense Platform safeguards the entire customer journey with high-fidelity decision-making that defends against bots, fraud, and digital threats. HUMAN helps SaaS platforms provide a safe user journey by preserving high-quality customer interactions across online accounts, applications, and websites.”

Is this aimed at enterprise level businesses? How about universities, are they an end user that can implement this solution?

“This solution is aimed at organizations that are interested in expanding its bot traffic analyzing capabilities. Enterprise level businesses and higher education can certainly utilize this solution; again, it depends how committed the organization is to tracking bot traffic. HUMAN has long been helping clients in the higher education sector from evolving cyber threats, and HUMAN Sightline will only benefit these organizations to protect themselves further.”

Read more about Human Sightline:

Human Sightline: A New Era in Bot Visibility

Featured Image by Shutterstock/AntonKhrupinArt

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Mar 18 2025
[SEO & PPC] How To Unlock Hidden Conversion Sources In Your Sales & Marketing Funnel via @sejournal, @calltrac

 This post was sponsored by CallTrackingMetrics. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Did you know 92% of all customer interactions are from phone calls?

And very few know how to track conversions from phone calls.

Brands meticulously track clicks, impressions, and online interactions through SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and data-driven strategies.

Yet, one critical piece is often missing: offline conversions.

Many high-intent customer interactions, especially in industries like healthcare, legal, home services, and B2B, happen over the phone.

If you’re in an industry that receives any number of calls, you may be struggling to connect these calls to your digital marketing efforts, leading to:

  1. Inefficient marketing strategies.
  2. Wasted ad spend.
  3. Difficulty proving ROI.

How do you fix this? Call tracking.

By leveraging AI-powered tools and advanced attribution technology, marketers can bridge the online-offline gap, ensuring no lead goes unnoticed.

How To Attribute Sales To Phone Calls

TL;DR: Historically, you could not attribute conversions to phone calls; now, you can.

Yes, offline conversions can be tracked.

And despite the high percentage of customer interactions happening over the phone, many brands fail to track which ad or campaign led to those calls.

This could stem from knowledge gaps, tight budgets, or reluctance to integrate more technology into their stack.

Without call attribution, businesses are left guessing about what’s driving revenue.

What Is Offline Conversion Attribution?

Offline conversion attribution is the process of linking your online marketing efforts to offline sales or actions.

It helps you understand which digital marketing channels and campaigns contribute to offline conversions, such as in-store purchases, phone call inquiries, or signed contracts.

How Offline Conversion & Phone Call Attribution Works

By paying attention to phone call conversion data, you can:

1. Connect Online Interactions To A Phone Call: A user clicks on a digital ad, visits a website, fills out a form, or calls a business after seeing an online campaign.
2. Store User Data In One Place: Data from these interactions (such as email, phone number, or a unique tracking ID) is captured and stored.
3. Match Callers With Offline Events: When a purchase or conversion happens in-store, over the phone, or through a sales team, businesses match it back to the initial online touchpoint.
4. Analyze & Optimize Webpages With Content That Converts: You can analyze which digital campaigns, keywords, or ads drive the most offline conversions, optimizing their marketing strategy accordingly.

What You Can Do With Phone Call Conversion Data

When you introduce a tool that acts as Google Analytics for phones, you’ll be able to:

  • Improve ROI Measurement: Helps businesses understand the real impact of digital marketing on offline sales.
    Enhance Ad Targeting: Enables better retargeting of high-intent users.
    Optimize Budget Allocation: Allows marketers to invest more in channels that drive actual sales, not just clicks or website visits.
    Bridge the Online-Offline Gap: Particularly important for industries like retail, automotive, healthcare, and B2B, where many transactions happen offline.

Examples of Offline Conversion Attribution

  1. A customer finds your business through organic search.
  2. They see a retargeting ad on Facebook.
  3. Finally, they click a PPC ad and call to book an appointment.

Without call tracking, the PPC ad might receive full credit, even though SEO and social played key roles. Choosing the right attribution model ensures data-driven marketing decisions.

Best Tools for Offline Conversion Tracking

  • Google Ads Offline Conversion Tracking
  • Facebook Offline Conversions API
  • CRMs like HubSpot or Salesforce
  • Call tracking software like CallTrackingMetrics

SEO & Call Tracking: Connecting Organic Efforts To Real-World Conversions

Gain Keyword Attribution Beyond Clicks

Rankings, traffic, and forms typically measure SEO success fills. But what about phone calls? Call tracking technology with dynamic number insertion (DNI) allows businesses to:

  • Identify which organic search queries lead to phone calls
  • Optimize content around real customers’ questions and concerns
  • Understand which landing pages drive the most offline conversions

For example, if multiple callers reference a specific product-related question, that insight can inform new blog topics or FAQ pages to improve SEO efforts, driving even more right-fit traffic into your sales funnel and conversion metrics.

Optimize For True Local SEO

Local search is a major driver of inbound calls. When combined with call tracking, businesses can finally understand:

  • Which local listings (Google Business Profile, Yelp, etc.) generate the most calls?
  • What information do customers search for before calling?
  • How to refine location-based content for higher engagement

How Call Insights Can Strengthen Your SEO Strategy

Phone calls aren’t just conversions—they’re valuable sources of customer insights that your teams can use to refine ad strategies, train teams on sales pitches, and identify areas for growth in your content strategy. Each conversation has the potential to reveal the common questions, pain points, and content gaps that businesses can address to improve their marketing performance.

1. Identify FAQs for Stronger Content

Often, customers call a company’s support phone number when they can’t find information online, either about a product or service they’re considering buying or one they’ve already purchased. By analyzing call transcripts, businesses can spot recurring questions and proactively address them in blog posts, FAQs, or product pages.

For example, if a home services company frequently gets calls asking, “Do you offer emergency repairs on weekends?”, this signals a need to make that information more visible on their website. A dedicated service page or blog post could reduce unnecessary calls while improving customer experience.

2. Refine Your Website Messaging

If callers repeatedly ask about pricing, product differences, or service details, your website messaging probably isn’t clear enough.

For instance, an e-commerce brand selling fitness equipment might notice that callers often ask, “What’s the difference between your basic and premium treadmill?” Adding a simple comparison chart or explainer video can help lessen confusion and improve conversions.

3. Fill Content Gaps To Reduce Sales Friction

Repeated calls about the same topic are a good indicator of missing or unclear content. A B2B SaaS company, for example, might receive frequent inquiries about integrating with a particular CRM or social platform. Instead of solely relying on customer support, the marketing team could identify this pain point and create a step-by-step guide or video tutorial to address it, which would reduce friction and improve self-service for prospects.

PPC & Call Attribution: Maximizing ROI With Better Insights

Tracking clicks alone doesn’t reveal the full ROI of PPC campaigns. Many conversions, especially phone calls, happen offline and go untracked. Without attribution, businesses may waste ad spend and overlook high-intent leads. This section explores how call tracking connects PPC efforts to real conversions, improving marketing efficiency.

Paid Search: Wasted Spend Without the Full Picture

A high cost-per-click (CPC) doesn’t guarantee strong ROI if businesses aren’t tracking offline conversions. Without call tracking, marketers risk:

  • Over-investing in underperforming keywords
  • Missing opportunities to optimize campaigns for call-driven leads
  • Failing to attribute revenue-generating phone calls to PPC efforts

When a business fails to account for ROI in the form of phone calls, they’re losing an opportunity to accurately account for their real CPC and allocate resources accordingly.

Call Tracking + Google Ads = Smarter Bidding

PPC campaigns are only as effective as the data behind them. Without tracking phone calls, businesses risk misallocating budgets to keywords that drive clicks but not conversions. Integrating call tracking with Google Ads provides a clearer picture by linking calls to the specific campaigns, ad groups, and keywords that drive valuable conversions.

With AI-powered call scoring, marketers can identify high-intent leads and adjust bidding strategies based on actual conversion data—not just clicks. This ensures ad spend is focused on quality leads rather than wasted traffic.

Retargeting with First-Party Data

Not every caller converts immediately. Call tracking allows businesses to retarget high-intent leads with personalized follow-ups. By analyzing call topics, marketers can tailor ads or email sequences to address specific customer concerns, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Additionally, integrating call data with CRM platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce ensures sales teams can nurture prospects effectively, preventing lost opportunities. By combining PPC insights with offline conversions, businesses gain a clearer understanding of customer behavior, leading to smarter ad spend and more targeted outreach.

Back To Basics: Omnichannel Attribution & The Power Of Call Data

As marketing shifts to a mix of online and offline tactics, attribution models must evolve. By integrating call tracking with Google Analytics, CRM systems, and automation tools, businesses can gain a complete view of the customer journey.

A company that integrates CallTrackingMetrics with Google Analytics and its CRM can:

  • See exactly which campaigns drive calls.
  • Automate follow-ups based on conversation insights.
  • Optimize for higher-value interactions.

AI & Conversation Intelligence

Call tracking is no longer just about recordings or basic attribution. AI-driven call analysis provides deep insights, such as:

  • Customer intent and sentiment analysis.
  • Common objections that impact sales.
  • Automated lead qualification based on real conversations.

By leveraging AI, businesses can better understand customer needs, improve sales strategies, and ensure marketing efforts are driving meaningful engagement. Implementing AI-driven call tracking empowers teams to make data-backed decisions that enhance both customer experience and conversion rates.

Proving Marketing’s True Impact

Marketers are often challenged to prove ROI beyond what we might call “vanity metrics”, like impressions and clicks. Though these have a place in any strategy, these metrics don’t necessarily move the needle toward sales goals.

Call tracking, on the other hand, delivers revenue-focused attribution, showing exactly how digital marketing contributes to bottom-line growth. This kind of revenue-focused attribution can help an entire company analyze past efforts and accurately forecast revenue based on real campaigns, real calls, and real results

Case Study: This study from CallTrackingMetrics demonstrated how AI-driven call tracking optimized PPC ROAS and improved lead quality​.

Want to see how conversation intelligence can improve your marketing performance? Check out our guide to building an effective omnichannel communications strategy.

Ready to get to work? Book a demo with our team and see how CallTrackingMetrics’ products can help you.

BOOK A DEMO NOW

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by CallTrackingMetrics. Used with permission.

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Mar 17 2025
Google Researchers Improve RAG With “Sufficient Context” Signal via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google researchers introduced a method to improve AI search and assistants by enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models’ ability to recognize when retrieved information lacks sufficient context to answer a query. If implemented, these findings could help AI-generated responses avoid relying on incomplete information and improve answer reliability. This shift may also encourage publishers to create content with sufficient context, making their pages more useful for AI-generated answers.

Their research finds that models like Gemini and GPT often attempt to answer questions when retrieved data contains insufficient context, leading to hallucinations instead of abstaining. To address this, they developed a system to reduce hallucinations by helping LLMs determine when retrieved content contains enough information to support an answer.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems augment LLMs with external context to improve question-answering accuracy, but hallucinations still occur. It wasn’t clearly understood whether these hallucinations stemmed from LLM misinterpretation or from insufficient retrieved context. The research paper introduces the concept of sufficient context and describes a method for determining when enough information is available to answer a question.

Their analysis found that proprietary models like Gemini, GPT, and Claude tend to provide correct answers when given sufficient context. However, when context is insufficient, they sometimes hallucinate instead of abstaining, but they also answer correctly 35–65% of the time. That last discovery adds another challenge: knowing when to intervene to force abstention (to not answer) and when to trust the model to get it right.

Defining Sufficient Context

The researchers define sufficient context as meaning that the retrieved information (from RAG) contains all the necessary details to derive a correct answer​. The classification that something contains sufficient context doesn’t require it to be a verified answer. It’s only assessing whether an answer can be plausibly derived from the provided content.

This means that the classification is not verifying correctness. It’s evaluating whether the retrieved information provides a reasonable foundation for answering the query.

Insufficient context means the retrieved information is incomplete, misleading, or missing critical details needed to construct an answer​.

Sufficient Context Autorater

The Sufficient Context Autorater is an LLM-based system that classifies query-context pairs as having sufficient or insufficient context. The best performing autorater model was Gemini 1.5 Pro (1-shot), achieving a 93% accuracy rate, outperforming other models and methods​.

Reducing Hallucinations With Selective Generation

The researchers discovered that RAG-based LLM responses were able to correctly answer questions 35–62% of the time when the retrieved data had insufficient context. That meant that sufficient context wasn’t always necessary for improving accuracy because the models were able to return the right answer without it 35-62% of the time.

They used their discovery about this behavior to create a Selective Generation method that uses confidence scores and sufficient context signals to decide when to generate an answer and when to abstain (to avoid making incorrect statements and hallucinating).

The confidence scores are self-rated probabilities that the answer is correct. This achieves a balance between allowing the LLM to answer a question when there’s a strong certainty it is correct while also receiving intervention for when there’s sufficient or insufficient context for answering a question, to further increase accuracy.

The researchers describe how it works:

“…we use these signals to train a simple linear model to predict hallucinations, and then use it to set coverage-accuracy trade-off thresholds.
This mechanism differs from other strategies for improving abstention in two key ways. First, because it operates independently from generation, it mitigates unintended downstream effects…Second, it offers a controllable mechanism for tuning abstention, which allows for different operating settings in differing applications, such as strict accuracy compliance in medical domains or maximal coverage on creative generation tasks.”

Takeaways

Before anyone starts claiming that context sufficiency is a ranking factor, it’s important to note that the research paper does not state that AI will always prioritize well-structured pages. Context sufficiency is one factor, but with this specific method, confidence scores also influence AI-generated responses by intervening with abstention decisions. The abstention thresholds dynamically adjust based on these signals, which means the model may choose to not answer if confidence and sufficiency are both low.

While pages with complete and well-structured information are more likely to contain sufficient context, other factors such as how well the AI selects and ranks relevant information, the system that determines which sources are retrieved, and how the LLM is trained also play a role. You can’t isolate one factor without considering the broader system that determines how AI retrieves and generates answers.

If these methods are implemented into an AI assistant or chatbot, it could lead to AI-generated answers that increasingly rely on web pages that provide complete, well-structured information, as these are more likely to contain sufficient context to answer a query. The key is providing enough information in a single source so that the answer makes sense without requiring additional research.

What are pages with insufficient context?

  • Lacking enough details to answer a query
  • Misleading
  • Incomplete
  • Contradictory​
  • Incomplete information
  • The content requires prior knowledge

The necessary information to make the answer complete is scattered across different sections instead of presented in a unified response.

Google’s third party Quality Raters Guidelines (QRG) has concepts that are similar to context sufficiency. For example, the QRG defines low quality pages as those that don’t achieve their purpose well because they fail to provide necessary background, details, or relevant information for the topic.

Passages from the Quality Raters Guidelines:

“Low quality pages do not achieve their purpose well because they are lacking in an important dimension or have a problematic aspect”

“A page titled ‘How many centimeters are in a meter?’ with a large amount of off-topic and unhelpful content such that the very small amount of helpful information is hard to find.”

“A crafting tutorial page with instructions on how to make a basic craft and lots of unhelpful ‘filler’ at the top, such as commonly known facts about the supplies needed or other non-crafting information.”

“…a large amount of ‘filler’ or meaningless content…”

Even if Google’s Gemini or AI Overviews doesn’t not implement the inventions in this research paper, many of the concepts described in it have analogues in Google’s Quality Rater’s guidelines which themselves describe concepts about high quality web pages that SEOs and publishers that want to rank should be internalizing.

Read the research paper:

Sufficient Context: A New Lens on Retrieval Augmented Generation Systems

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Chris WM Willemsen

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Mar 17 2025
Agentic AI In SEO: AI Agents & Workflows For Ideation (Part 1) via @sejournal, @VincentTerrasi

For more than two years, a new concept has been emerging called Agentic SEO.

The idea is to perform SEO using agents based on language models (LLMs) that perform complex tasks autonomously or semi-autonomously to save time for SEO experts.

Of course, humans remain in the loop to guide these agents and validate the results.

Today, with the advent of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other powerful LLM tools, it is easy to automate complex processes using agents.

Agentic SEO is, therefore, the use of AI agents to optimize SEO productivity. It differs from Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which aims to improve SEO to be visible on search engines powered by LLMs such as SearchGPT, Perplexity, or AI Overviews.

This concept is based on three main levers: Ideation, Audit, and Generation.

In this first chapter, I will focus on ideation because there is so much to explore.

In our next article, we will see how this concept can be applied to auditing (full website analysis with real-time corrections), and how missing content can be generated using a “Human in the Loop” – or rather “SEO Expert in the Loop” – approach.

AI Agents And Workflows

Before presenting detailed use cases regarding ideation, it is essential to explain the concept of an agent.

AI Agent

Image from author, February 2025

AI agents need at least five key elements to function:

  • Tools: These are all the resources and technical functionalities available to the agent.
  • Memory: This is used to store all interactions so that the agent can remember information previously shared in the discussion.
  • Instructions: Which define its limits, its rules.
  • Knowledge: This is the database that contains the concepts that the agent can use to solve problems; it can use the knowledge of the LLM or external databases.
  • Persona: Which defines its “personality” and often its level of expertise, including, in particular, its way of interacting.

Workflow

Workflows allow complex tasks to be broken down into simpler subtasks and chained together logically.

They are useful in SEO because they facilitate the collection and manipulation of data needed to perform specific SEO actions.

Furthermore, in recent months, AI providers (OpenAI, Claude, etc.) have moved from simply offering the model as such to enriching the user experience.

For example, the Deep Research feature in ChatGPT or Perplexity is not a new model, but a workflow that allows complex searches to be performed in several steps.

This process, which would take a human several hours, is carried out by AI agents in a few tens of minutes.

Image from author, February 2025

The diagram above illustrates a simple SEO workflow that starts with “Data & Constraints,” which feeds a tool called “Tools SEO 1” to perform a specific action (such as SERP analysis or scraping).

Next, we have two AIs (IA 1 and IA 2) that intervene to generate specific content, and then comes the “HITL” (Human In The Loop) step before reaching the deliverables.

Although AI and automation play a central role, human supervision and expertise remain essential to ensure quality results.

Use-Case: Ideation

Let’s start with ideation. As you know, AI excels at opening up possibilities.

With the right methods, it is possible to push AI to explore every conceivable idea on a topic.

An SEO expert will then select, refine, and prioritize the best suggestions based on their experience.

Numerous experiments have demonstrated the positive impact of this synergy between human creativity and artificial intelligence.

Below, Ethan Mollick’s diagram posted on X (Twitter) illustrates a benchmark of the creative process with and without AI:

The figure shows the distribution of creativity scores (from 0 to 10) assigned to different sources: ChatGPT, Bard (now Gemini), a human control group (HumanBaseline), a human group working with AI (HumanPlusAI), and another group working against AI (HumanAgainstAI).

The horizontal axis represents the perceived level of creativity, while the vertical axis indicates the frequency of each score (density).

We can see that the curve corresponding to HumanPlusAI is generally shifted to the right, meaning that evaluators consider this human+AI collaboration to be the most creative approach.

Conversely, the average scores of ChatGPT and Gemini, although high, remain below those obtained by the human-machine synergy.

Finally, the HumanBaseline group (humans alone) is just below the performance of the Human+AI duo, while the HumanAgainstAI group is the least creative.

AI alone can produce impressive results, but it is in combination with human expertise and sensitivity that the highest levels of creativity are achieved. Let me give you some concrete examples.

Tools Like Deep Research

Among the tools available, Deep Research stands out for its ability to conduct in-depth research in several steps, providing a valuable source of inspiration for ideation.

I recommend using this open-source version; if you prefer, you can also use the OpenAI or Perplexity versions.

How Does It Work?

This diagram describes the operation of the Open Source Deep Research tool.

It generates and executes search queries, crawls the resulting pages, then recursively explores promising leads, and finally produces a detailed report in Markdown format.

Image from author, February 2025

There are several steps to using Deep Research:

  1. Enter your query: You will be asked to enter your query. You must try to be as precise as possible. Do not hesitate to ask ChatGPT or Claude to create your DeepResearch search.
  2. Specify the depth of the search (recommended: between 3 and 10, default: 6): How many topics can be found in each iteration?
  3. Specify the depth of exploration (recommended: between 1 and 5, default: 3): If the crawler finds an interesting topic, how many pages deep will it explore?
  4. Refinement: Sometimes, you need to answer follow-up questions to refine the direction of the search.

With this open-source version, you can turn this open-source project into a real SEO tool. I have identified more than four use cases:

  • Competitor Content Analysis: The tool can automate the collection and analysis of competitors’ content to identify their strategies and spot opportunities for differentiation.
  • Long-Tail Keyword Research: By analyzing the web, it can identify specific keywords with high potential and less competition, facilitating content optimization.
  • SERP Analysis: It can collect and analyze search engine results to understand trends and competitors’ positioning.
  • Content Idea Generation: Based on in-depth research, it can identify relevant topics and frequently asked questions in a given niche.

For example, you can install CursorAI, a code generation tool, and ask it to modify the code to create a SERP analysis. The tool will easily make all the necessary changes.

With Agentic SEO, it is possible not only to customize and improve existing tools but, more importantly, to create your own tool to suit your specific needs.

On the other hand, if you are not a developer at all, I advise you to use a no-code solution.

No-Code Agent Workflow Tools

Here is an example of a no-code tool called Dng.ai.

We use a CSV file provided by Moz, which we analyze using an agent capable of processing the data, generating Python code, and extracting all the necessary information.

In blue, you have the input fields that serve as a starting point; then, in orange, you have tools like scrapers, crawlers, and keyword tools to extract all the necessary data; and finally, in purple, you have the AIs that identify all the clusters that need to be created.

Image from author, February 2025

The agent then compares this data with the topics already on your site to identify missing content.

Finally, it generates a complete list of topics to create, ensuring optimal coverage of your SEO strategy. There are many no-code tools for building Agentic workflows.

I won’t list them all, but as you can see here on this tool, an interface is automatically generated from the workflow, and all you need to do is specify your topic and a URL and press the run button to get the results in less than two minutes.

Image from author, February 2025

Explore The Full Potential Of This Tool For Yourself

I leave you to appreciate the results of a tool that is built from the SEO data of any tool.

Image from author, February 2025

I think I could have made more than two hours of video on YouTube just on the ideation aspect, as there is so much to say and test.

I now invite you to explore the full potential of these tools and experiment with them to optimize your SEO strategy, and next time, I will cover audit use cases with Agentic SEO.

More Resources:

Featured Image: jenny on the moon/Shutterstock

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Mar 17 2025
Unlock Local SEO: Online Review Trends Broken Down by Industry [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

Are you ready to transform your approach to online reputation management? With the evolving landscape of digital marketing, understanding how customer feedback impacts your business is crucial for success.

Why This Webinar Is a Must-Attend Event

Join us for our insightful webinar on March 26, 2025, titled “Unlock Local SEO: Online Review Trends Broken Down by Industry.” Dive into data-backed strategies from GatherUp’s analysis of tens of thousands of businesses to uncover the real impact of online reputation management.

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • Key Trends in Customer Feedback: Explore the latest trends in review volume, customer feedback, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
  • Star Ratings and Trust: Understand how new data on star ratings can significantly affect customer trust and conversion rates.
  • Best Practices for Reviews: Gain actionable strategies for increasing positive reviews and driving customer loyalty.

Expert Insights From GatherUp’s Specialists

Join our expert panel, including seasoned professionals from GatherUp, as they provide actionable optimization strategies that you can start applying to your website immediately. Whether you’re new to online reputation management or looking to fine-tune your approach, this webinar will equip you with the knowledge and tools to maximize your website’s potential.

Live Q&A: Get Your Questions Answered

Don’t miss the live Q&A session following the presentation, where our experts will answer your most pressing questions about reputation management and customer engagement.

Don’t Miss Out!

Embrace the future of reputation management in 2025. Join us live to stay ahead of the competition. Equip yourself with the knowledge to leverage customer feedback for better business outcomes.

Can’t attend live? No worries—register anyway, and we’ll send you the recording. Transform how you manage your online reputation. Register today!

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Mar 17 2025
Top SEO Podcasts For 2025 via @sejournal, @martinibuster

The pace of change in search marketing has accelerated, and the stakes for keeping up to date have never been higher. This year’s selection of podcasts reflects a growing sophistication and expertise in the industry, a reaction to the intensity of pressure from AI and the erosion of organic search. The following SEO podcasts have been chosen for their grasp of what’s happening right now, publishing frequency, and willingness to embrace a more expansive perspective on all aspects of search marketing.

1. Crawling Mondays by Aleyda Solis

  • Host: Aleyda Solis.

Crawling Mondays is by International SEO specialist Aleyda Solis. Her podcast covers the latest news related to SEO every Monday all year long. Each podcast is a concise summary of recent developments. Episodes clock in at 10 minutes or less, giving her audience a quick way to catch up and be up to date.

Aleyda also publishes special episodes on topics that matter to digital marketers. Those episodes range from 30 to 45 minutes long. Recent episodes featured an interview with Danny Sullivan, a discussion on whether ecommerce sites should produce informational content, how to to achieve programmatic content that’s not spammy and an in-depth discussion of JavaScript SEO.

Available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube

2. Good Signals SEO Office Hours Podcast

  • Hosts: Michael Chidzey, Jo Turnbull, Ruth Turnbull.

The affable hosts of the Good Signals SEO Office Hours podcast step into the gap left by Google’s essentially defunct SEO Office Hours show, offering their own take on discussing user-submitted questions. Every week features different guests, lending each episode a fresh perspective on SEO and a sense of community.

Watch on YouTube.

3. SERPs Up

  • Hosts: Crystal Carter & Mordy Oberstein.

SERPs Up is a Wix SEO podcast focusing on questions and how-to’s relevant to publishers, in-house teams, agencies, and freelance search marketing professionals. They publish episodes weekly, with each episode lasting about thirty minutes, making them easy to commit to during those small pockets of free time.

Each episode covers a novel topic useful to most professionals. Recent episodes have focused on subjects like unifying offline and online marketing, thinking beyond algorithms, whether there’s such a thing as too much data, and email marketing.

Listen to the SERPs Up podcast on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify

4. The Majestic SEO Podcast

  • Host: David Bain

The Majestic SEO Podcast is a long-running and prolific podcast hosted by David Bain. It focuses on a diverse range of topics that are directly and indirectly related to SEO, including accessibility, user experience, AI search trends, and SEO itself. Their treatment of SEO is expansive, covering topics ranging from mining the sales team for customer insights to omnichannel marketing and examining what the phrase ‘Expert Content’ really means.

Host David Bain also looks ahead at developing trends by exploring concepts like agentic AI. Some episodes take a broader approach, stepping outside traditionally considered SEO topics—such as an interview with a psychology expert on how psychological principles could be applied to SEO.

SEO is a highly subjective field, and it’s easy for biases to narrow the range of discussion. That’s why it’s refreshing that Bain takes an expansive approach, welcoming a wide variety of guests and perspectives to the Majestic SEO Podcast.

Available on Spotify and YouTube.

5. Webcology

  • Hosts: Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger.

Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger, hosts of one of the longest-running SEO podcasts, discuss the latest news and issues top of mind in the SEO community. Both hosts have decades of experience and draw from a deep well of knowledge, giving each topic the benefit of their considerable expertise.

Listen to new episodes on Apple,  Spotify, and RedCircle.

6. The SEO Mindset Podcast

  • Hosts: Tazmin Suleman and Sarah McDowell.

Hosts Sarah and Tazmin publish a weekly podcast about the experiences of life as a search marketing professional. Recent episodes discuss how to create a successful conference speaker pitch, how to enjoy networking, and how to make time for breaks. Google and its competitors never sleep. How does one keep up while also balancing career growth and personal fulfillment?

Covering both the personal and professional sides of the industry, their discussions provide insights, advice, and relatable stories for listeners navigating similar paths.

Sarah shared:

“Whilst there are amazing SEO podcasts out there, Tazmin and I saw that there aren’t many that just focus on soft skills, personal growth, and career development.

Yes, some touch on these topics, but we definitely saw an opportunity to create a podcast that solely focuses on giving SEO professionals actionable tips and advice, so they can optimize their careers, not just the algorithms. Cheesy tagline, but true!

Go on and give some of our episodes a try!”

Listen to the SEO Mindset Podcast at Amazon Music, Apple, and Spotify.

7. SEO Pioneers

Host: Shelley Walsh

SEO Pioneers interviews search marketing experts, many of them with decades of experience, about important topics of today as well as the history of SEO. It’s a great way to understand what’s happening from the unique perspective of experience and time.

This approach provides a deeper context for current industry trends, showing how SEO principles have evolved alongside emerging technologies, algorithm updates, shifting demographics, and user behavior.

SEO Pioneers offers listeners the opportunity to hear directly from those who have helped shape SEO.  John Mueller even credited the show as ‘one to watch’ on Google Search News.

Listen and watch on YouTube.

8. Near Memo Podcast

  • Hosts: Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal.

The Near Memo podcast discusses Local Search SEO, covering both current developments and broader industry trends. Recent episodes have explored Google Business Profile (GBP) issues, AI’s role in local search, and the growing challenge of review fraud, providing insights that help businesses and marketers stay on top.

Recent episode topics explored Google Business Profiles, new Google Maps features, and navigating Google reviews.  Hosts Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal bring decades of experience to the podcast, and it shows.

Listen at: Amazon, Apple, Pandora, Spotify, YouTube.

9. Marketing O’Clock

  • Hosts: Greg Finn, Jessica Budde, Christine ‘Shep’ Zirnheld, and Julia Meteer.

The Marketing O’Clock podcast delivers news and insights about paid advertising, as well as topics related to search and eCommerce. In an industry that can sound like an echo chamber, Marketing O’Clock offers its own unique blend of news, making it a great way to keep up with current events that may have been overlooked. Recent topics include Instagram’s new advertising format that enables creators to get paid and Bitly’s addition of interstitial advertising to shortened URLs.

Their podcast is released every Friday. Add it to your calendar and tune in to the latest episodes.

Listen to new episodes on Apple, and Spotify, and YouTube.

10. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard

  • Host: Jason Barnard.

Past episodes in 2024 and 2023 covered SEO, but in 2025, Jason is shifting focus to conversations with successful digital founders about their experiences launching, scaling, and selling online businesses. Topics include building trust, managing reputation, growing an AI-driven platform serving millions of students, leveraging personal visibility for business growth, and recognizing when shifts in customers, products, or services signal it’s time to consider rebranding and how to navigate that transition.

Available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

11. Google Search Off The Record

  • Hosts: Gary Illyes, John Mueller, Lizzi Sassman, Martin Splitt.

Search Off the Record is an informal podcast about search and SEO from Google’s perspective. Topics range from a behind-the-scenes look at search crawlers and indexing to the considerations that went into rewriting Google’s SEO Starter Guide, search ranking updates, and the concept of quality in search.

Two factors make Google’s podcast notable:

  • Variety: There’s no other podcast that relates search and SEO from the search engine’s point of view.
  • Authoritative source: The fact that it’s created by Google is a compelling reason to tune in.

The podcasts tend to ramble in the beginning with some extended banter and kidding around. But once the hosts get going, the insights start.

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and in the Google Search Central YouTube channel.

12. EDGE Of The Web

  • Host: Erin Sparks.

Edge Of The Web offers a roundup of the week’s SEO news with coverage of topics like Google updates, LinkedIn analytics, content authenticity, and Meta advertising, plus guests like Paula Mejia of Wix, Lidia Infante, and Britney Muller.

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

13. Clarity Digital Podcast

  • Host: Al Sefati

Clarity Digital podcast  is a relatively new podcast that’s been highly active for the past few months. Its guests have decades of experience across a range of marketing topics that cover SEO and adjacent topics, reflecting the reality that modern SEO and marketing are intersecting more now than at any other time in search marketing history.

Recent episodes covered AI’s role in writing with Amanda Clark, branding and SEO strategies with Ash Nallawalla, and modern social advertising tactics with Akvile DeFazio.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

14. Search With Candour

  • Host: Jack Chambers-Ward.

UK-based Jack Chambers-Ward hosts a wide-ranging SEO podcast that sometimes offers challenging points of view, proving that SEO is a truly subjective topic. Recent episodes featured guests like Mordy Oberstein discussing branded search and a lively discussion with Itamar Blauer about Google and AI Search, raising the question of how much trust must erode before Google starts losing market share. Some of the topics explored invite different perspectives, and the podcast is at its best when embracing that dynamic.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, and watch on YouTube.

2025 SEO Podcast Shows

There are a few new additions this year, and a few dropped off because they stopped publishing. This year’s list is the strongest to date because of the high quality of the commentary and the wide topics covered which will appeal to search marketing professionals, business owners and creators.

More resources:

Featured Image: Jacob Lund/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Mar 13 2025
Google Search History Can Now Power Gemini AI Answers via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google announced an update to their Gemini personal AI assistant that increases personalization of responses so that it anticipates user’s needs and feels more like a natural personal assistant instead of a tool. Examples of how the new Gemini will help users is for brainstorming travel ideas and making personalized recommendations.

The new feature rolls out first to desktop and then to mobile apps.

Gemini With Personalization

Google announced a new version of Gemini that adapts responses to a user’s unique interests. It does this based on their search history which enables Gemini to deliver responses with a higher level of contextual relevance and personalization. Google intends to expand personalization by integrating other Google apps and services, naming Photos and Images as examples.

Google explained:

“In the coming months, Gemini will expand its ability to understand you by connecting with other Google apps and services, including Photos and YouTube. This will enable Gemini to provide more personalized insights, drawing from a broader understanding of your activities and preferences to deliver responses that truly resonate with you.”

How Personalization Works

Users can share their personal preferences and details like dietary requirements or their partner’s names in order to obtain a greater degree of personalization in responses that feel specific to the individual. Advanced users can allow Gemini to access past chats to further improve the relevance of responses.

Google’s access to search history and data from other apps may give it an advantage that competing apps like ChatGPT may not be able to match.

Personalization Is Opt-In

There are four key points to understand about personalization in Gemini:

  1. Personalization is currently an opt-in feature that’s labeled “experimental.”
  2. Users need to choose to use Personalization from the model drop-down menu in order to activate it.
  3. Gemini asks for permission to connect to search history and other Google services and apps before it uses them for personalization.
  4. Users can also disconnect from the feature.

That means that millions of Gemini users won’t suddenly begin accessing an increasing amount of information from a contextual AI assistant instead of search. But it does mean the door to that happening exists and the next step is for Google users to open it.

What Publishers Need To Know

This update increasingly blurs the distance between traditional Search and Google’s Assistant while simultaneously making information increasingly accessible in a way that publishers and SEOs should be concerned enough to research to identify how to respond.

Considerations about privacy issues may keep Google from turning personalization into an opt-out feature. And while personalization is currently an opt-in from a drop-down menu because it’s still an experimental feature. But once it’s mature it’s not unreasonable to assume that Google may begin nudging users to adopt it.

Even though this is an experimental feature, publishers and SEOs may want to understand how this impacts them, such as if it’s possible to track personalized Gemini referral traffic or will it be masked because of privacy considerations? Will answers from Gemini reduce the need for clicks to publisher sites?

Read Google’s announcement:

Gemini gets personal, with tailored help from your Google app

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Tada Images

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