The State of SEO in 2025–2026: How to Measure, Adapt, and Thrive in a Decoupled Search Landscape

Caleb Turner on July 15, 2025

The search landscape in 2025–2026 presents both profound challenges and unprecedented—yet exciting opportunities. The emergence of AI-powered search interfaces (like Google’s AI Mode and ChatGPT-style interactions) has disrupted traditional SEO models. Executives and marketing leaders are grappling with a crucial question: How do we measure SEO performance when the connection between impressions, visibility, and traffic is increasingly blurred?

This article outlines a clear, structured framework for measuring SEO in this new era. Focusing on input metrics, channel metrics, and performance metrics, while offering practical guidance for organizations to navigate and succeed in the future of search.

I. Understanding the Decoupling: Traffic Down, Impressions Up

The foundational insight for SEO in 2025–2026 is the “great decoupling”: impressions are increasing, yet traffic is decreasing. Search engine results are no longer a linear, trackable funnel where a keyword ranking translates cleanly into a click.

Key Drivers:

AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews) reduce the need to click through to websites.
Search console limitations: There’s no equivalent console for AI environments, making it hard to gauge visibility.
Crawlers lack JavaScript rendering, so SEO teams must ensure content is served in HTML and is readily accessible.

This disruption demands a new mindset. Instead of measuring SEO purely as a performance channel, we must also embrace it as a branding and visibility channel, akin to social media or PR.

II. Three Stratified Layers of Measurement

To understand and communicate SEO performance in this AI-driven landscape, measurement must be stratified into three key layers:

1. Input Metrics (What You Control)

These are the levers SEO teams actively manage to influence visibility:

Content relevance scores: Use models to score how well passages of content align with user queries—especially synthetic AI prompts.
Competitor comparison: Benchmark content relevance against sites appearing in AI citations.
Indexability: Ensure content is properly indexed and can be crawled (avoiding reliance on JavaScript rendering).
Bot activity tracking: Monitor how frequently bots request your pages (via logs) to infer visibility across AI platforms.
Technical health: fixing broken links, optimizing XML sitemaps, improving mobile performance.

Why it matters: These metrics reflect SEO effort and foundational health. While they don’t tie directly to ROI, they inform higher-order outcomes like visibility and traffic.

2. Channel Metrics (How You’re Seen)

These measure visibility and share of voice across platforms—even when user behavior is opaque.

Citation appearance frequency: Are you cited in AI answers (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.)?
Visibility and share of voice: Tools like Profound.ai provide snapshots of how often and where your brand appears.
Sentiment analysis: Gauge tone and context of mentions across platforms.
Competitor visibility benchmarking: Compare brand visibility in key channels vs. rivals.

Caution: These metrics are probabilistic, not deterministic. They lack absolute accuracy due to the black-box nature of AI engines. But with consistent methodology, you can get precise trend data over time.

3. Performance Metrics (What Converts)

While visibility is critical, outcomes still matter. Performance metrics help you assess business impact.

Traffic and referral volume: Track click-throughs to your site (using GA4 or similar).
On-site engagement: Time on site, bounce rates, and session duration remain essential indicators.
Conversion actions: Leads, purchases, newsletter signups—standard KPIs still apply.
Lift studies: Correlate campaigns with subsequent traffic or brand lift (especially when direct attribution is impossible).

Key takeaway: Although attribution is harder, ROI measurement still exists, especially when paired with thoughtful experimentation (e.g., pre/post visibility studies in ChatGPT or Google AI results).

III. Strategic Reporting for Different Stakeholders

Understanding who needs what data is critical in shaping your SEO reporting and communication.

For CMOs and Executive Teams:

Focus on high-level visibility and brand performance.
Show traffic and conversions.
Break visibility into three categories:
- Brand protection: Are people seeing and engaging with your brand positively?
- Category visibility: How do you perform for non-branded industry terms?
- Long-tail specificity: Are you capturing niche but high-intent queries?

For SEO Managers:

Dive deeper into input metrics like content scoring, ranking shifts, crawl stats, and prompt analysis.
Develop frameworks for prompt taxonomy tracking to understand conversational intent.
Monitor bot activity and integrate clickstream data sources like Datos or SimilarWeb for AI-derived referrals.

IV. Tracking Prompts and Redefining Funnel Models

Search is no longer a clean funnel. With conversational AI, users ask multi-turn prompts that don’t always build on each other linearly.

The Challenge:

Prompt chains are hard to track: Subsequent questions often lack reference to the first.
Search intent is messier: Traditional categories (navigational, informational, transactional) fall short.

What to Do:

Start building a new taxonomy of prompts:
- Use machine learning or clustering to group related queries.
- Focus on entity-based tracking rather than keyword tracking.
Advocate for “also asked” datasets for ChatGPT and similar tools.
Track topical coverage over exact matches to ensure visibility across semantic variations.

V. Future-Proofing SEO Strategy

Here’s a blueprint for adapting and thriving in the evolving SEO environment:

1. Adopt Branding-Minded Thinking

Treat SEO as both a traffic driver and a visibility channel. Just like social media, the goal isn’t always a click—it’s awareness, perception, and presence.

2. Monitor New Metrics Religiously

Set up dashboards that reflect the stratified model:

Input (content quality, indexation)
Channel (AI visibility, share of voice)
Performance (engagement, conversions)

3. Invest in Visibility Platforms

Use tools like Profound.ai, Datos, SimilarWeb, and custom log analysis to monitor visibility in AI ecosystems.

4. Prepare for Attribution Limitations

Don’t expect clean lines between exposure and ROI.

Use proxy metrics (like sentiment and citations) as indicators.
Run pre/post experiments to estimate impact.

5. Educate Up and Down

CMOs: Ask your teams to deliver visibility + performance metrics.
SEO Teams: Prepare leadership for a branding-oriented, less attributional future.

VI. Looking Ahead: Ranking’s Role Isn’t Dead—Just Evolving

Contrary to popular belief, rankings still matter—but as an input, not a goal. Even as AI interfaces dominate, they’re still underpinned by traditional ranking models (e.g., RAG—Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

If the major platforms stop showing the “10 blue links,” third-party platforms like Ahrefs or Majestic may recreate ranking-based models to simulate that layer. So, ranking visibility will remain a valuable signal, but not the primary KPI.

Conclusion: Embrace the Complexity, Drive the Clarity

The new SEO frontier is complex, decentralized, and fragmented. Yet it offers an exciting opportunity for marketing leaders and technical SEOs to reshape their strategy around influence, visibility, and user experience—not just clicks.

By adopting a layered measurement strategy, building new taxonomies, and embracing AI as a visibility partner rather than an adversary, brands can position themselves for durable relevance in the next era of search.

Next Steps:

Audit your current SEO reporting and identify gaps in the three-layer framework.
Start tracking AI citations and build prompt-specific monitoring.
Schedule leadership alignment sessions to reframe expectations and educate stakeholders.

The brands that thrive in 2025–2026 won’t cling to outdated KPIs—they’ll be the ones shaping meaningful visibility in a world where awareness comes before the click.

The New State of Search in 2025 and Beyond: Optimizing for AI Mode and LLM Discovery

Caleb Turner on June 16, 2025

If you’ve felt whiplash from Google’s nonstop updates: AI Overviews, generative snippets, and now the full rollout of AI Mode into core results, you’re not imagining it. Search is undergoing its most radical transformation since the birth of PageRank. And the implications extend far beyond Google. In a world where LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are actively retrieving, reasoning, and rewriting content, visibility is no longer measured in blue links.

In this guide, you’ll understand how AI Mode works under the hood, what Google recommends explicitly (and what it doesn’t say out loud), and how to structure your content for retrieval augmented generation(RAG), across Google and the new class of LLM-native search engines.

1. From “Ten Blue Links” to a Web of AI Summaries

For decades, SEO meant chasing organic rankings. But in 2025, users expect a different experience: conversational, multimodal, and personalized. Google’s AI Mode, which rolled out U.S.-wide on May 20, 2025, doesn’t just augment results, it replaces traditional listings with AI-generated summaries that quote from multiple sources simultaneously.

This is not a Google-only story. Platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini also synthesize content from across the web, using similar pipelines: chunking, embedding, retrieval, reranking, and LLM generation. Your content might be cited without ever earning a click, or worse, it may not be retrieved at all if it’s not semantically aligned.

AI Mode’s secret weapon is deep personalization: Google fuses data from Gmail, Calendar, Chrome, Maps, and YouTube to tailor summaries. The shift is clear: we’ve moved from “optimize for keywords” to “optimize for meaning.”

2. Google’s AI Mode: The Stack That Writes the Answers

To demystify how your content is selected and quoted in AI Mode, here’s a breakdown of Google’s layered system, most of which is mirrored by other LLMs and is what RAG consists of:

Layer	Role	How it Works
BERT / T5	Linguistic interpreters	Translate queries to understand intent and direction.
Vector Embeddings	Semantic mapmakers	Place ideas in conceptual space; “jaguar” the car ≠ “jaguar” the animal.
ScaNN Retrieval	Ultra-fast content locators	Fetch the most semantically relevant chunks in milliseconds.
Hybrid Rerankers	Rational judges	Combine keyword scores and semantic scores; pick the most coherent passage.
Gemini Flash/Pro	Creative summarizers	Compose a humanlike response from many retrieved sources.

Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity all use a variation of this stack. The question is no longer, “Is my page ranking?”. It’s, “Is my content retrievable, relevant, and reusable in an AI summary?”

3. The AI Optimization Imperative: What Google (and Others) Recommend

Google’s own blueprint, published May 21, 2025, provides clarity, but with nuance. These principles aren’t just best practices for Google—they apply to any LLM-powered platform that retrieves and assembles answers.

✅ Do:

Create original, human-centric content – Generic rewrites vanish from summaries. Depth wins.
Ensure crawlability – Don’t accidentally block Google-Extended, GeminiBot, or GPTBot.
Optimize structure for readability – Use headings, schema, and direct answers.
Include rich media – Images and videos can appear in multimodal answers.
Use preview controls wisely – Overrestrictive snippet settings can remove you entirely.
Verify your structured data – If it misaligns with visible content, it may be ignored or penalized.

❌ Don’t:

Chase AI placement hacks – Prompt templates change daily.
Stuff with synonyms – Semantic distance matters more than density.
Block LLMs for “content protection” – You’ll be excluded from the answer graph.

Note: Traditional SERPs and classic SEO are not obsolete—but they are rapidly shrinking in importance. Many users will still browse organic results, especially for transactional queries. However, AI-generated responses, smart assistants, and multimodal summaries are becoming the default interface for information retrieval. SERPs now represent just one channel among many in the optimization landscape.

4. An AI-First Optimization Framework

Below is the exact workflow our agency uses when auditing sites for AI Mode and LLM optimization. We’ve even specified tools that you can use at each stage purely for the education of the reader. This is not an endorsement and we have no affiliation with any of these brands:

Open the gates to AI crawlers

Audit robots.txt and server logs for Google-Extended, Google-LLM, GeminiBot, and GPTBot.
Remove legacy disallow rules on JS, CSS, or /api/ endpoints; AI models fetch full render trees.

→ Tool: logflare.app, openai.com/gptbot

Generate question-driven topic clusters to mimic “Query Fan-Out”

De-duplicate and cluster by user intent (how, why, cost, vs).
Prioritize clusters based on traffic opportunity and business value.

→ Tool: alsoasked.com

Draft semantically rich content

Begin each section with a concise 1–2 sentence direct answer (<80 words).
Support with original research, media, expert commentary.
Use H2/H3 subheads as natural language questions.

→ Tool: surferseo.com

Validate vector-level alignment

Embed draft paragraphs using OpenAI or TensorFlow.
Compute cosine similarity between your content and target queries.
Iterate until ≥ 0.85 similarity is achieved.

→ Tool: Screaming Frog SEO Spider v22.0

Monitor AI citations & mentions

Track when your URL appears in Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, etc.
Set alerts for declines; rework and refresh passages accordingly.

→ Tool: tryprofound.com

5. Case Study Snapshot: A Cross-LLM Win

A health brand published an article titled “Are stainless steel bottles safe during pregnancy?” using this methodology:

Opened with a 70-word evidence-based answer.
Embedded lab-test data (image) and a 45-second expert video.
Verified 0.91 cosine similarity with key intent queries.
Appeared in Google AI Mode, Perplexity responses, and ChatGPT citations.
Result: 28% increase in time-on-site and a 17% higher cart-to-visit rate from AI referrals.

6. FAQ: What This Means for SEO

Is SEO dead?

No—but it’s evolving. Optimization now includes vector alignment, retrievability, and AI authority.

Do I need new pages just for AI Mode?
Not at all. Structuring your existing content with questions and direct answers serves both AI and human audiences.

What metrics matter now?
Track AI citations, retrieval frequency, and embedding scores. Legacy KPIs like CTR and bounce rate are secondary in zero-click environments.

7. Action Checklist (Print This)

✅ Allow GPTBot, GeminiBot, Google-Extended
✅ Refresh content clusters quarterly
✅ Lead each H2 with a sub-100-word answer
✅ Verify cosine similarity ≥ 0.85
✅ Track citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google
✅ Validate structured data and crawlability
✅ Optimize for conversions and engagement—not vanity metrics

8. Final Thoughts

The AI era isn’t on the horizon, it’s here. AI Mode is becoming the standard lens for Google Search, and LLM-native discovery platforms are competing directly for user attention. Success now means thinking like a retrieval engine, not just a rank chaser.

Ready to thrive in this new landscape? Start with our AI Optimization Checklist, then audit your five highest-traffic pages using LLM-aware tools.

The future of search rewards those who are findable, quotable, and semantically aligned.

Modern Google Search Is Written in Numbers: A Marketer’s Guide to Vector Search

Caleb Turner on May 24, 2025

Introduction: Why Your Keywords Are Losing Their Super-Power

If you still measure SEO success by how many times you can squeeze “best running shoes” into a paragraph—stop the treadmill. Google is no longer looking for an exact text match; it’s looking for a conceptual match. Behind the scenes, the engine turns every query and every document into long lists of numbers called vector embeddings and then asks an algorithm named ScaNN to find the closest pairs. In this numeric universe, “heart attack symptoms” finds its soul mate in “signs of myocardial infarction,” even though not a single word overlaps.

1. From Keywords to Meaning

Back in the dial-up days, ranking was glorified pattern matching: say “blue widgets” five times, win a medal. Vector search re-labels the task as meaning matching. It encodes queries and pages into multidimensional vectors where geometric distance = conceptual similarity. That’s why conversational queries like “my phone got wet and won’t turn on—help!” can surface posts titled “reviving a water-damaged smartphone” even though you never typed the word “reviving.”

Why that matters

Broader questions answered. Google can safely jump from slang to scientific jargon without scaring the user.
SEO shifts focus. You now optimise for topical depth and context, not just a single two-word phrase.

2. What Exactly Is an Embedding?

An embedding is a vector—hundreds or thousands of floating-point numbers—that acts like a GPS coordinate for ideas. Two embeddings that point in almost the same direction signal “these pieces of content are basically talking about the same thing.”

Creating those vectors once required PhDs and GPU farms; today a single API call or drag-and-drop notebook in Vertex AI spits them out faster than your intern can ask, “Do we charge extra for semantic optimisation?”

3. ScaNN—Google’s “Find-the-Needle” Algorithm

Once everything is a number, you still need to locate the nearest neighbors in a haystack of billions. Enter ScaNN (Scalable Nearest Neighbors)—Google’s open-sourced speed demon that performs that lookup in milliseconds.

In 2024 Google released SOAR, a tune-up that adds clever redundancy so ScaNN can run even faster and cheaper without blowing out your cloud budget—handy when your product catalogue is larger than a Netflix binge list.

4. How Vertex AI Uses ScaNN

Inside Google Cloud, Vertex AI Vector Search (sometimes still called “Matching Engine”) stores your embeddings, builds an index, and quietly delegates the “find the closest vectors” chore to ScaNN.

Marketers can already play: upload a product feed, ask Vertex AI to embed the titles and descriptions, and voilà—“shoes like this one” recommendations appear without writing any C++ or sacrificing any goats to the ML gods.

5. AI Overviews and the “Query Fan-Out” Party Trick

Patents titled “Generative Summaries for Search Results” describe a workflow where Google splinters your single question into a dozen smart sub-queries, fetches the best passages via vector search, and lets Gemini compose the final paragraph you now know as an AI Overview (AIO).

Because ScaNN already runs in the same infrastructure, many experts assume the identical stack powers AIO—no official badge from Google yet, but the puzzle pieces line up like a well-optimised internal-link structure.

6. vec2vec—One Vector Space to Rule Them All?

Researchers from Stanford and DeepMind introduced vec2vec, a pint-sized neural net that can translate embeddings from one model’s “language” (say, open-source BERT) into another’s (say, Google’s Gemini) without paired data. If it holds up, you could generate vectors with a free model, convert them, and still rank in Google—saving API tokens for more important things, like Friday coffee.

7. Do You Need to Be a Coder?

Conceptual level (no code): Know that short distance in vector space means “these two texts are buddies.” That alone improves how you design content clusters.
Low-code level: Use cloud UIs, Zapier, or a Google Sheet add-on to fetch embeddings and store them. Your résumé still reads marketer, not engineer.
Full-code level: Dive into Python scripts to fine-tune models, tweak ScaNN hyper-parameters, or self-host FAISS if you enjoy living dangerously.

Most SEOs only need level one and two; level three is for people who think “Friday night” and “CUDA kernel” belong in the same sentence. (No judgment… okay, maybe a tiny bit.)

8. What This Means for SEO & Content Strategy

Go deep, not wide. Cover your topic so comprehensively that the vector space around it looks like downtown Manhattan at rush hour—crowded with your content.
Write like a human. Semantic models adore clarity and punish keyword salad.
Structure for sub-queries. Use logical headings, FAQs, and schema so Google’s fan-out routine has plenty of passage candidates.
Watch the tools. Vertex AI’s public dashboards give early hints of how Google “sees” your page numerically; treat it like a free MRI for content health.

9. Key Takeaways (Pin These to Your Virtual Fridge)

Vector search turns content into numbers and finds meaning through math.
ScaNN is Google’s rocket engine for that math and likely sits under AI Overviews.
SOAR makes ScaNN faster; vec2vec might make it universal.
You don’t need a CS degree—just curiosity and the courage to let go of keyword crutches.

With that foundation, your SEO playbook is officially ready for the semantic era. Now excuse me while I go translate this conclusion into a 1,536-dimension vector—apparently that’s how the cool kids say goodbye.

The Future Is Semantic: Why Vector Embeddings Will Re-Write Your SEO Playbook

Caleb Turner on May 23, 2025

From Keyword Tweaks to Content Engineering

Remember when SEO success meant sprinkling the right keywords in title tags and praying for backlinks? That era is fading fast. Google’s AI Mode and its expanded AI Overviews now synthesize answers directly in the SERP, citing passages—often buried deep inside a site—rather than the traditional homepage snippets. In fact, 82 percent of citations in AI Overviews point to pages tucked two or more clicks away from the front door.

If Google is willing to dig that far beneath the fold, it’s clearly valuing topic depth and semantic relevance over surface-level keyword placement. Welcome to the age of Relevance Optimization—the discipline that treats visibility as a measurable engineering challenge instead of an “optimization” afterthought.

Why Semantic Optimization Matters

Search Queries Are Now Semantics, Not Strings

Google’s 2013 Hummingbird overhaul replaced purely lexical (word-matching) scoring with semantic understanding—essentially asking, “What does the query mean?” rather than “Which words appear?” That shift only intensified with every language-model upgrade since.

Generative AI Needs Precise Context

Large language models (LLMs) like Gemini 2.5 or GPT-4 break user prompts into sub-queries, retrieve semantically similar passages, and stitch them into coherent answers. If your content isn’t structured for easy extraction—think tight paragraphs, clear headings, and complete subject-verb-object statements—AI may skip you in favor of a competitor who writes with vectors in mind.

Behavioral Metrics Still Close the Loop

Click-through rates, dwell time, and “pogostick” abandonment remain crucial. But they’re now the second filter. First, you must be retrieved from vector space; only then can engagement metrics prove you deserve to stay visible.

Vector Embeddings 101: Coordinates for Meaning

A vector embedding is a mathematical representation of a chunk of text (or an image, or an entire site) translated into hundreds—or thousands—of numerical dimensions. Think of it as an address in “meaning space.” LLMs learn to place semantically similar pieces of content near one another; the closer two vectors are, the more alike their meaning.

How the Process Works

Tokenize: The model breaks sentences into tokens (words or sub-words).
Project: Each token is mapped to a high-dimensional coordinate based on training data.
Aggregate: Tokens combine (often via averaging or attention mechanisms) into a single vector for the entire passage.
Compare: When a user searches, their query is embedded the same way. A cosine-similarity calculation measures how close that query vector is to every document vector in the index.
Return: The engine ranks documents whose vectors sit nearest to the query—before any traditional ranking factors kick in.

Why Embeddings Trump Exact Keywords

Imagine two pages:

Page A: “A marathon is 26.2 miles long.”
Page B: “How far do runners travel in a marathon?”

Old-school keyword matchers might miss Page B for the query “marathon distance.” Vector embeddings recognize the semantic equivalence because both vectors converge in meaning space.

EEAT in a Vector World

Google’s quality framework—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EEAT)—is increasingly modeled with embeddings. Authors, pages, and entire domains are vectorized; Google can then calculate how consistently an entity writes about a given topic. Publish 60 in-depth articles on periodontics, and your author vector crowds into the “dental expertise” cluster—boosting perceived authority without a single link-building outreach email.

Conversely, scatter content across unrelated niches (sneakers one day, marine biology the next) and your site vector diffuses—diluting topical focus and relevance.

Practical Steps to Optimize Relevance

1. Chunk Content into “Fraggles”

AI Overviews rarely quote whole articles; they lift fraggles—tiny, self-contained passages that answer a micro-question. Keep sections concise (roughly 50-150 words) and laser-focused on a single idea. Use descriptive H2/H3 headings so retrieval systems pinpoint the right paragraph instantly.

2. Embrace Semantic Triples

Write sentences that explicitly frame relationships: Subject → Predicate → Object.

“Vector embeddings map words to high-dimensional space.”
The clearer the predicate, the easier it is for retrieval algorithms to detect your answer.

3. Expand Vocabulary with Contextual Entities

Include synonyms and closely related entities—LLM, cosine similarity, semantic hashing—to beef up contextual signals. This isn’t keyword stuffing; it’s adding semantic scaffolding that clarifies the topic’s perimeter.

4. Use Structured Data Everywhere

Schema markup remains the fastest way to hand AI “feature-rich” metadata. As knowledge graphs merge with LLMs, JSON-LD becomes a lighthouse in the semantic fog, guiding both ranking and answer synthesis.

5. Audit with Embedding-Based Tools

Modern SEO suites now offer relevance scores based on cosine similarity to a topic vector. Treat anything below your chosen threshold as a candidate for revision or pruning. That’s Relevance Optimization in action—quantifying what used to be a gut check.

Common Myths Busted

Myth	Reality
“Just add more keywords; LLMs will figure it out.”	Keyword density is noise in a semantic model. Quality, structure, and topical focus win.
“AI Overviews kill organic traffic, so why bother?”	Early data shows click-through rates drop, but the traffic that does click is highly qualified. Don’t forfeit that edge.
“Author bios satisfy EEAT.”	They definitely help, but true authority comes from a body of semantically consistent work.
“Vector SEO is only for big enterprise sites.”	Any CMS can output structured data, and free embedding APIs let even small blogs test cosine similarity.

The Road Ahead: Search Without Blue Links?

As AI Mode rolls out, entire industries are bracing for fewer clicks and more zero-click answers. Some publishers see this as existential; others see opportunity. Whichever camp you’re in, one fact is clear: semantic relevance is the new table stake. The brands that engineer content for machine comprehension—vector-friendly passages, structured context, demonstrable topical depth—will surface in chatbots, voice assistants, and whatever interface comes next.

Meanwhile, behavioral metrics still police quality. If users bounce from an AI answer back into the SERP—or worse, reformulate the query—that negative signal feeds the loop. Relevance Optimization thus spans both retrievability (be the right vector) and satisfaction (earn the engagement).

Key Takeaways

Vectors are the language of modern search. If your content isn’t embedding-friendly, it’s invisible to the first stage of ranking.
Deep pages matter. Google’s AI Overviews overwhelmingly cite internal resources, not homepages. Optimize accordingly.
EEAT is measured mathematically. Consistent topical publishing tightens your entity vector, signaling expertise without manual “author tag” hacks.
Structured data future-proofs visibility. As LLMs cross-pollinate with knowledge graphs, schema markup becomes non-negotiable.
Relevance Optimization > traditional SEO. Treat visibility as an engineering problem—quantify, iterate, and scale.

Ready to Engineer Your Future?

Semantic search isn’t coming; it’s here. If you’d rather lead than react, start embedding-minded content workflows now. Not sure where to begin? Book a strategy call with our team, and let’s turn your site into a machine-readable, AI-ready authority—before your competitors figure out why their keyword tweaks stopped working.

Lights, Camera, Action – But Is Anyone Watching? SEO for LA Businesses

Caleb Turner on November 7, 2024

Welcome to Los Angeles. It’s a city where the summers are endless, and dreams are as big as the traffic jams. You’ve got the perfect business, an absolutely killer location, and maybe even a celebrity endorsement (or at least a cousin who once saw Brad Pitt at a Starbucks).

But here’s the plot twist: If your business isn’t showing up in search engines, you’re basically another tree falling silently in an empty forest.

If you really want your business to be more than just another face in the LA crowd, you need to stand out. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the star of the show.

The LA Business Scene: Busier Than Sunset Boulevard

The scene is crowded, with over 244,000 businesses hustling in LA County. Standing out is about as easy as finding a parking spot in Santa Monica on a Saturday. While Hollywood does love to hog the spotlight, the entertainment industry only employs 4% of the population.

The real star is healthcare, commanding a hefty 11.9% of the workforce followed closely by industries like retail, hospitality, and manufacturing.

Shocking right? Well, not really, LA after all is much more than just a city for making movies, so unless you’re planning on performing a few tummy-tucks or rolling out the next big thing in retail, you’re up against some stiff competition.

In this bustling mix of industries, making your business shine as bright as the Hollywood sign requires a killer SEO strategy. Without it, you might just end up on page two of Google, or as I like to call it, The Bermuda Triangle of the Internet.

Did you know that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine? Before customers even think about stepping into your store or clicking “Add to Cart,” they’re on Google looking at their options. If your business isn’t showing up in those results, you’re missing out on customers.

So, unless you want to stay LA’s best-kept secret, it’s time to start thinking of SEO as your agent, working tirelessly behind the scenes to get you noticed by the people who matter the most.

A Quick Flashback: SEO's Journey in the City of Angels

Back in the mid to late 2000s, SEO in LA was more like an exclusive rooftop party—only the insiders were really invited. While most businesses at the time were busy splashing their logos on billboards along the 101 or cramming the airwaves with their advertisements, a quiet few were climbing their way up the Google ranks.

Let’s roll out the red carpet on how SEO developed right here in LA:

2005: Google Local Business Center made its debut and allowed LA businesses to pin their business on Google Maps. This made it possible for smaller businesses to show up right next to large chains when customers Googled “best coffee near me.”
2009: Google Places was the next big thing, giving businesses the ability to show off their reviews, ratings, and photos. In a city that’s slightly obsessed with image, this was like a digital facelift.
2011: Google+ Local attempted to merge with social media. While it didn’t exactly dethrone Facebook (nice try, though!) Mixing social profiles with business allowed LA businesses to engage more personally with their customers.
2014: Google My Business consolidated all of these tools into one platform. It was able to manage multiple locations, track insights, and offer customers the chance to interact with businesses.
2021: Google Rebranded to become what we now know today as simply “Google Business Profile.”

Throughout this evolution, technical terms like ‘local SEO”, “NAP consistency” (that’s Name, Address, Phone number), and “user-generated content” became as much of a part of the LA business lexicon as avocado on toast to locals.

How to Stand Out: SEO as Your Personal Publicist

Los Angeles is a city where everyone claims to be “kind of a big deal,” and using SEO is your chance to prove you actually are. Just being online isn’t enough. You need to absolutely steal the spotlight. Of course, by ‘spotlight,’ we mean ranking as high as possible on everyone’s Google search.

Businesses that appear on the first page of Google search results receive 95% of web traffic, so it’s quite a prestigious position to be in.

So, how do you make SEO your personal publicist? Let’s take a look at some SEO tips tailored just for the LA business crowd.

1. Keyword Casting: Directing the Right Audience to Your Site

Start by optimizing your website’s content with keywords your target audience is likely searching for. The key here is to be strategic. Don’t just ‘keyword stuff’ and hope for the best; focus on natural, engaging content that your customers are actually going to enjoy.

Next, enhance the user experience of your website. Ensure that it loads faster than a TMZ rumor and looks consistent across all devices. No one likes sites that fail to load, and as cool as a retro party is, they don’t want to see websites that look like they’re from the 90s.

Don’t forget about quality backlinks (links from someone else’s website to yours). These are nice little endorsements from industry insiders and can be arranged between businesses as a mutually beneficial relationship.

Maintain consistent business information across all online platforms. Nothing screams “unprofessional” louder than addresses that take your customers to the wrong place or phone numbers that go nowhere.

2. Local SEO: Navigating LA's Neighborhoods Without a GPS

Even though sometimes it feels like it, LA isn’t just one city. It’s a patchwork of vibrant neighborhoods, each with a unique vibe and customer base. Local SEO taps you right into these micro-markets like a true Angeleno.

Almost half of Google searches are looking for local information, and 76% of them end up acting on that information within a day. So, if you own a taco joint in Echo Park, you want to show up on Google when someone nearby is looking for “best tacos near me,” not when someone in Anchorage does.

To really master local SEO, start by claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile. Make sure your address, hours of operation, and contact information are correct and up-to-date.

Incorporate location-specific keywords into your website and its meta tags, but don’t commit the SEO sin of cramming in keywords like “xyz near me.” It looks bad, and it doesn’t work.

3. Mobile SEO: Reaching Customers Stuck on the 405

LA is a city on the move, except apparently for the traffic. LA traffic jams are the stuff of legends, and yes, there’s a way to take advantage of this.

With over 60% of Google searches now happening from mobile devices, you need to make sure your website looks great on the smartphone.

Picture it: Commuters are stuck in traffic, the exit for Signal Hill is fast approaching, and they’re hungry. If they search for “best vegan donuts Signal Hill” you want your website on page one and loading quickly on their smartphone. If your SEO game isn’t spot on, you’ve missed out on a customer with time (and hunger) and their hands.

To make sure you catch those hungry drivers, implement a responsive design that looks good on any screen with mobile-friendly navigation and big, hard-to-miss, and clear CTA buttons. Test your site on multiple devices to make sure your business is only ever a tap away.

4. Content Creation: Making Blockbusters, Not Box Office Bombs

Content is king, but in LA, there’s a lot of it. Quality content will set you apart. Businesses that maintain a regular blog receive 97% more inbound links, so unless you want your business to be the straight-to-DVD production no one asked for, invest in content that resonates.

Create engaging and relevant blogs that address your customer’s interests. If you don’t have the time to write these yourself (who does?), then hire writers to craft the content for you.

This is also the chance to incorporate contextual SEO keywords into your content to snag some of those Google searches, then redirect them back to your website. Integrate the keywords naturally.

Going back to our vegan food, here’s how a business might place keywords in their content:

SEO keyword: “plant-based tacos Echo Park”

Blog content: “Los Angeles is a haven for food enthusiasts, especially those seeking vegetarian and vegan cuisine in LA. From plant-based tacos in Echo Park to gourmet vegan sushi in Downtown, LA’s diverse culinary scene caters to every single palate”.

Don’t forget to keep your content fresh and share it on social media to amplify reach and encourage it to be shared far and wide.

5. Social Media Signals: Your Red Carpet Moment

In a city absolutely obsessed with social media (look at you, LA influencers), your online presence needs to be as polished as a celebrity’s Instagram feed.

Social media works by giving your SEO a nice little nudge. Over 50% of social browsers now use social media to research products, so if your last Facebook post was from 2015, here’s your chance for a comeback tour.

Start by engaging on platforms where your audience tends to hang out. Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn are great places to start. Share your high-quality, SEO keyword-pumped content that reflects your brand’s personality and really gets customers interacting via messaging and sharing.

Use #hastags strategically and join in on conversations that are both trending and relevant to your industry. Collaborate with local influencers to further amplify your message and start collecting those backlinks—they’re as valuable as gold.

Remember that every like, every share, and every comment boosts your website’s authority and gets your business close to the top of page one on Google.

Final Thoughts: The Cost of Being Invisible

If you’re an LA business, don’t neglect your SEO. If you do, you’ll be creating the next blockbuster and never releasing it. You invest time and resources into your business, so let it reach its full potential.

Businesses that prioritize SEO experience higher revenues and traffic than those that overlook it. And in a city where everyone is vying for attention, do you really want to be the best-kept secret? Embrace effective SEO strategies and make sure your business stands out in the bustling LA market and attack the customers you deserve.

Don’t just sit back and be the underdog in every business story. Take center stage and make SEO the headline act in your marketing strategy.

Facts Every WordPress SEO Expert Should Know

Caleb Turner on August 30, 2024

Teaming WordPress with SEO could be described as a perfect pairing. Although WordPress powers an impressive 43% of websites, simply installing a WP plugin doesn’t guarantee your site will rank on Google’s coveted first page. It’s not that straightforward, and if it were, we’d all be reigning champs of WordPress SEO.

The truth is to truly excel at WordPress SEO, you need more than just technical know-how. It requires strategic thinking, hands-on experience, and yes—a bit of patience too.

WordPress SEO isn’t purely methodical; there’s an element of finesse involved. From fine-tuning keywords to charm Google into favoring your structured data or enhancing image SEO and integrating breadcrumbs effectively, this article covers crucial techniques every aspiring WordPress SEO professional needs in their toolkit.

WordPress and SEO – Why It’s So Important To Get It Right

Think of WordPress as the most popular kid in school, capturing the attention of a whopping 43% of all web users. Peers like Shopify hover at a modest 4.5%.

Although the basic principles of SEO are uniform across different platforms, there’s an art to harnessing WordPress’s full capability.

Why stress over SEO? It’s your golden ticket to standing out in the digital crowd. Properly executed, it boosts your site’s visibility, draws in your target audience, and ramps up traffic—all adding up to increased authority and trustworthiness for your website.

When it comes to WordPress, this means leveraging tailor-made themes, SEO-focused plugins, and robust tools that propel your site from just ‘being’ online to leading the pack in search engine standings.

WordPress Plugins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Plugins for WordPress are what make the platform itself so famous, but they can be your best friend or your worst enemy when it comes to SEO.

With close to 60,000 free plugins available in WordPress, it’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed and inadvertently just “install all the things” until your WordPress site becomes a tangled, overlapped mess.

In saying that, there are some incredibly useful plugins I do encourage you to use when dealing with WordPress. Yoast SEO with over 10 million active downloads is definitely one of them, and yes, we’ll be mentioning it quite a bit in this article.

A word of warning: For every fantastic plugin, there’s always one that promises to be “the only SEO tool you’ll ever need.” That’s until the next update breaks your entire site.

Here’s a quick rundown:

The Good: Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO
The Bad: Plugins that haven’t been updated in years
The Ugly: Plugins that conflict with each other, causing site crashes

Now that we’ve covered our bases, let’s take a look at the top six facts that SEO experts need to know when creating SEO content for WordPress sites.

1. Keyword Optimization: Not Your Grandma’s SEO Anymore

Remember the good old days when SEO just meant cramming as many “best,” “top,” and “cheap” keywords into the content as humanly possible in a vain attempt to bait Google into throwing your content to page one?

Today, 68% of online experiences start with a search engine. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google, Yandex, or DuckDuckGo. SEO now drives over 1000% more traffic than organic social media.

It’s no longer about playing Tetris with keywords. Today’s SEO expert must have a firm understanding of concepts like search intent and semantic search to develop content that meets the needs of users.

With WordPress, you have some powerful tools at your disposal, like Yoast and Rank Math that make optimizing keywords far easier. These plugins help you use long-tail keywords and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) to write content that ranks and converts.

This isn’t just hearsay, 60% of marketers report inbound methods like SEO as their highest source of excellent quality leads.

2. Structured Data and Schema Markup: The Overlooked MVP of SEO

Structured data and schema markup may not always be the first thing that springs to mind when you think of SEO, but let’s give credit where credit is due.

These tools are like the understated wardrobe assistants who make sure a star shines on the screen – they set up your site to catch Google’s eye in just the right way.

With structured data, search engines can glide through your content with ease, making sense of what’s essential. This is how those snazzy-looking rich snippets come about – yes, we’re talking about those highlighted boxes or dropdown answers crowning some search results that subtly scream, “Click me!”

Now if you’re running a WordPress site and want these perks without feeling like you’ve stumbled into an espionage thriller trying to decipher code, plugins such as Schema Pro have got your back.

It really is plug-and-play: install one of them, pick from options like ‘Article’ or ‘Product,’ input some info, and voila!

For the more adventurous souls out there willing to get their hands metaphorically dirty with coding – manual insertion is also an option using JSON-LD script within your HTML canvas.

In all seriousness though, engaging with schema markup could very well elevate your visibility online and potentially improve click-through rates. And isn’t being noticed by Google pretty much half the battle won?

3. On-Page SEO: Crafting the Perfect Page Title and Meta Description

Moving up just one slot on search engine rankings can increase your CTR by 32%, so having a compelling page title and meta description is really important to make the most of this prestigious real estate.

While there are a few free SERP preview tools online, with WordPress, there are several plugins that can really make this task much more streamlined.

Plugins like All in One SEO and SEOPress allow you to quickly edit the meta title and descriptions while giving you all the relevant keyword suggestions and a lovely preview of what the search result looks like on both mobile and desktop.

Remember that creating a meta description and well, most on-page SEO is a bit like art. You need to entice readers without turning the SERP preview into a clickbait cliché.

4. Permalink Structure (Stop Using WordPress Default URLs, Please)

Permalinks are the forever URLs to your WordPress pages and posts and they play a huge role in WordPress SEO.

Clean and friendly URLs not only help search engines when deciding what your content actually contains but also make your links far more attractive to real users.

Imagine choosing between the default “www.example.com/p=123” and “www.example.com/delicious-chocolate-cake-recipe.” The choice is pretty obvious.

In WordPress, customizing your permalink structure is easy:

Post Name: “example.com/sample-post” – The best choice for SEO, making URLs clean and readable.
Day and Name: “example.com/2024/08/27/sample-post” – Good for news sites with frequent updates.
Month and Name: “example.com/2024/08/sample-post” – Similar to Day and Name but less specific.
Custom Structure: “example.com/blog/sample-post” – Great for more tailored URLs.

Try avoiding the default URL settings at all costs. It’s not just bad for SEO, but for the end users, it looks like your pages are hiding behind some hidden code.

Essentially, WordPress URLs should be as clear as the content they’re linking to.

5. Backlinks: The Double-Edged Sword of SEO

Backlinking is the lifeblood of SEO. They act like big votes of confidence from one site to another and tell search engines “Hey, this content and website are totally worth checking out.”

For WordPress SEO experts, backlinking can get tricky. Why? Along with all the genuine and well-thought-out backlinks, you’re also inundated with spammy requests from let’s say, some very “questionable websites.”

Who knew your blog about artisanal bread making could attract so many offers from online casinos in Romania, right?

To build high-quality backlinks in WordPress, focus on creating amazing content and then reach out to reputable sites that are within your niche.

WordPress plugins like Link Whisper can help you manage your internal links, but for the external ones, it’s all about building relationships. This is precisely why 74% of SEO experts generally end up paying for links, given that exact match anchors can get you five times more traffic.

6. Content is King, But Context is Queen

WordPress is all about content, and they say that content is king. But, let’s be real, context is definitely queen and she’s 100% running the show when it comes to SEO.

Sure, publishing high-quality and relevant content is crucial, but if it comes without any context, you’ve pretty much got yourself an empty castle (or more accurately, no visitors).

WordPress makes it super easy to create and manage SEO-optimized content with plugins like PrePostSEO, but don’t just focus on the keywords.

What do I mean by this? You have to consider the user search intent and just how your content will fit into their journey. A well-placed blog or a “just-in-time” update can make a huge difference.

So, let your content shine, but don’t forget who’s really calling the shots here: Queen content.

Summary

The internet is crowded, so mastering these WordPress SEO techniques is important for standing out.

From smart keyword optimization to smart meta descriptions and building backlinks, there’s a WordPress plugin that’s there to make your SEO life easier. So, leverage what’s available to you but don’t forget the core universal tenants of SEO because they apply to WordPress the same as with any CMS.

Remember, Google never sleeps, and neither should your strategy.

Facts Every Squarespace SEO Expert Understands

Caleb Turner on August 23, 2024

When you think of an amazing way to build an SEO-friendly website, you certainly will have several options to try out, including WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace. Well, developing a website that suits your brand vision and mission can be quite challenging, especially if you’re not a techie person and you’ll require the help and expertise of an SEO expert.

Squarespace has numerous easy-to-use templates and SEO tools to help your website rank effectively in Google SERPs. While you may see SEO as a science, experts like us view it as an art.

There is so much to learn about Squarespace SEO, which is why I have provided in this guide the top facts every Squarespace SEO expert understands, especially the Eureka that emanates when it’s obvious that we have attained expert status when it comes to Squarespace SEO.

As a firm looking to find Squarespace experts for your business website, the facts mentioned in this guide can help you narrow your search and hire the best hands. However, before we dive into the ocean of facts, let’s talk about what Squarespace SEO is, the tools it offers, and some best practices to follow.

Why Is Squarespace SEO Important?

In today’s digital world, if your business has a website, you’re among the many seeking to drive traffic to your pages and attract the right audience. Ultimately, you’re among the several companies looking to rank high on Google search pages for the services you offer.

Hence, hosting your website on Squarespace can’t get you the result your brand desires unless you understand the basic principles of smart SEO. Recall that I said “smart” SEO and not just SEO. Why? In the past. SEO centers on overwhelming your website with the right keywords, but times have changed.

Modern SEO practices and digital marketing are about making Google aware that your website is the go-to or authoritative site for sources of information related to the products or services your business offers. This entails a constant refining of algorithms, providing ideal content, using the right plugins, and optimizing your website speed, images, content, and keywords. Can you see why I said “smart’ SEO?

However, with Squarespace SEO, you can perform various effective optimizations to your website with the powerful embedded features in Squarespace. With the aid of a Squarespace SEO expert, you can take advantage of various features to help your website provide:

Regularly updated and relevant content
A unique, authoritative, and clear message
Sufficient traffic from the targeted audience, which indicates real interest. This can be achieved by employing the right marketing channel to drive traffic to your website.
Links to other websites and inter-linking to yours

Although WordPress seeks to be a leading content management and website hosting platform for several businesses, Squarespace is becoming more popular. As depicted in the boxed graph below, Squarespace is the home of thousands of firms and possesses numerous plugins you can utilize to enhance your website.

It’s understandable that as a business owner, your focus is geared towards your brand, the products offered, or services rendered rather than the draining exercise of battling with search engine optimization. Hiring a Squarespace SEO expert is essential to help you manage your website and incorporate the necessary SEO strategies to improve your website pages and content.

Top 5 Facts Every Squarespace SEO Expert Should Understand

Squarespace boasts tons and tons of advanced SEO built-in features that can improve your website. Knowing how to effectively use them to optimize your site is important to your brand’s digital success.

There are many aspects to SEO and loads of information out there. There’s technical SEO, off-page SEO, and various best SEO practices for companies. All these can easily make you feel overwhelmed.

However, with Squarespace SEO, you are ultimately free from the technicalities of SEO, as there are tools that can manage these technical aspects automatically. With that being said, here are the top five facts every Squarespace SEO expert knows and how they can use them to optimize your website and rank well on Google, Bing, and other user-based search engines.

You Can Easily Optimize Keywords on Squarespace

Keyword research is one of the important SEO practices. It remains the backbone of SEO, and this is no different when it comes to utilizing Squarespace. It doesn’t matter what hosting platform or builder you use, doing your due diligence to find the right keywords your website should aim for is highly crucial.

Keywords enable users to find your website when they type a particular phrase into search engines. Occasionally, these keywords are obvious and direct, for instance, dentist in Elkin, NC, which could be your target keyword for Elkin dentist, or indirect keywords, such as “dentist near me” or “teeth cleaning.” This is why performing good keyword research is crucial to enhancing your Squarespace SEO.

Squarespace Makes It Easy To Add High-Quality Content

On a Squarespace website, a major emblem for good SEO is high-quality content. Google loves fresh, authoritative, and valuable content for anyone who wants and needs it, and it’s your duty as a website owner or service provider to provide this content.

Squarespace makes it easy to include a blog section or tab on your site. There are also various themes you can automatically select to develop your blog section. Immediately after the blog section is created, don’t hesitate to dish out relevant information to your audience.

There are two available options when it comes to writing content for your website. You can write the content yourself or outsource to an SEO-oriented freelancer. Either of you can brainstorm to idealize the content your target traffic wants.

I recommend you examine the major questions your audience seeks answers to most and determine the pain points you aim to address with your product or services. Your desire to solve these problems should become a huge part of the SEO strategy you employ for your Squarespace website.

Link Building Is Intrinsic To Having An Optimized Squarespace Site

Link building is a core Squarespace SEO strategy that helps connect various parts of your website. Allow me to explain this example. Considering that you’ll be creating tons of content for your website, you’ll need a mechanism to connect one content to another relative content and other dedicated areas of your site. This kind of connection is called link building and is known to others as internal linking.

Internal links are links that direct visitors to other pages on your website. They are a great avenue for enhancing SEO on Squarespace sites, as they help users find relevant pages that can improve their overall experience.

Internal linking also helps Google recognize your site as authoritative, especially if it links to a niche that addresses your audience’s pain point. It also helps Google understand the most important pages on your Squarespace site.

However, you must work with a Squarespace SEO expert to carefully link pages on your site. This is also important to avoid going overboard with internal links. One thing to note is that the number of pages on your site will determine the variability of internal links at your disposal. Fewer pages mean fewer links, and vice versa.

In addition to edging your Squarespace website SEO, you’ll need to be meticulous about your anchor text to improve optimization. The anchor text is words or keywords you link to, which direct users to the desired pages. Lastly, don’t spam your readers with links to your newest products. Ensure the internal links add value to the users and direct them to useful or informative pages on your site.

SEO Page Titles and Meta Description Are Effective Click-Bait

SEO titles and meta tags (page titles and descriptions) are concise words appearing beneath any pages displayed in search engines. They easily tell your target audiences what should be expected on your page.

When this part of search engine optimization is done correctly, your Squarespace website can experience increased visitors in a short time. Google tends to automatically generate page titles and meta descriptions for pages that fail to include them, and this is not always effective.

You must include SEO titles and meta descriptions on all your pages, including product pages and blog posts. Your title and meta tags should generally be:

Provide precise and clear details about what your target audience will find if they click on your link.
Include the primary keyword you aim to target.

Here’s an example of an optimized Squarespace title tag and meta tag:

Optimized Alt-Tags For Images Enhances Visibility

Image alt-text is an essential ranking factor for your Squarespace website and shouldn’t be ignored when drafting a Squarespace SEO strategy. An alt-text help serves as your image meta description, which explains to Google why and when to display such an image, as related to queries from users.

The alt-text is a powerful SEO tool as it specifically:

Offer descriptions in situations where images are failing to load
Improves accessibility for users with screen readers and
Gives context to search engines as a means to improve your SEO

For your Squarespace site, you should use alt-text in blog images, cover pages, email campaigns, logos, product pages, gallery pages, and background pages.