Dave Elliott

From speaking to a number of senior stakeholders across a few businesses recently, I've discovered that the public perception of what "Technical SEO" is sometimes differs somewhat from my own - I've seen a few posts on here saying that Technical SEO is just pagespeed and CWV! Still, it made me think about how I'd define it, and I think for me technical SEO is about improving the Crawlability and Indexability (as in, making it possible for a page to be indexed) of a site, whereas "Content" SEO is about taking those foundations and making the pages more likely to be indexed and more likely to outrank competitors. Yes, there's some overlap there and both teams can always help each other out, but I'm absolutely sick of seeing people say technical SEO doesn't matter then listing five or six technical SEO fundamentals that should just be taken as given. Am I totally off piste here?

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The fundamental optimisations required to actually appear in Generative AI Platforms for relevant queries remain very similar to traditional SEO tactics (if you were already doing SEO correctly). However, whilst the tactics remain pretty much the same, these platforms and products have changed the search landscape in one major way. When it comes to informational intent queries – users are less likely to visit your website from a Generative AI Platform like ChatGPT or one of Google’s LLM driven AI features like AI Overviews. Essentially, the growth of these platforms and features is leading to an increase in “zero click searches” i.e. searches for which users never click through to a website. When it comes to Google’s own AI features, in the year after the introduction of AI Overviews, the number of impressions on Google increased 49% but the click-through rate fell 30% (according to a BrightEdge study) . In another Ahrefs analysis across 300,000 searches, top organic results lost 34.5% of their clicks when an AI answer was present. I have run multiple reviews of websites that have seen a drop in CTR since the introduction of AI Overviews, and have observed that AI Overviews are mainly reducing click-through rates for a certain subset of informational-intent queries that I call “immediate response” intent content. In other words, situations where users ask Google a specific, typically low-stakes, question for which they just want a quick answer. The hallmark of “immediate response” intent queries is that the users don’t really care that much about the source of the content and they have no intention of reading a comprehensive guide etc. As for standalone Generative AI platforms, whilst things were looking quite positive in terms of click through to websites, we’ve seen a significant reversal in this trend recently with one study showing that ChatGPT referral traffic dropped by 52% in August 2025 vs July 2025. This teaches us a valuable lesson – these platforms are constantly evolving and we cannot take for granted that any trends will persist in the long term. In fact SEO expert, Malte Landwehr, recently shared data that suggests that zero click searches are even more prevalent on ChatGPT and other AI platforms / features than on Google search. So whilst the tactics are familiar, the age of AI answers does require a fundamental shift when it comes to SEO at a strategic level. I'll discuss that in more detail in my next post. #geo #zeroclicksearch #seo

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I’ve seen teams spend five figures on SEO tools and still miss the obvious. One client came to me frustrated that rankings were flat. Their audit report was 60 pages long. Not one page mentioned internal linking. Their blog posts were isolated islands. Great content. Zero pathways. We mapped internal links in a single sprint. Rankings followed. An SEO audit should create clarity, not paperwork.

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I have access to Google's new Web Guide: An experimental AI-organized search results page. We knew this was coming, here is what I found... I ran a simple query “energy comparison uk” and what I saw wasn’t a list of blue links. It was an AI-organised, topic-clustered search result. Instead of ranking 1 to 10, the results were grouped under headings, most likely the result of query fan-out. Each topic-based group had a short summary (most likely AI-generated) and a “More” button to explore further. Authority sites like Uswitch, MoneySavingExpert, and Ofgem were pulled into different clusters based on semantic relevance, not just domain strength. What this means is: - Ranking is fragmenting - One page = multiple appearances - Traditional rank tracking is losing relevance Google Search Console needs to evolve with this! Right now, it tells us which queries drive traffic to which pages, but it has no concept of contextual clusters, fan-out subtopics, or which “topic group” your content was surfaced in. If Google is going to keep restructuring the SERP based on query fan-out and AI-curated themes, we need visibility into: - Which topic cluster our content appeared in - Whether it was part of an AI-generated summary or support material - How users navigated between clusters Until that happens, we’re trying to measure performance in an evolving search landscape using tools built for a simpler, linear one.

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Great to be featured today on the Ahrefs blog in their latest post "SEO for Financial Services: How to Build Trust and Rank Higher in 2025." SEO in the finanical services industry is slightly different to many others with it sitting under the YMYL category. Google relies more heavily on wider trust signals to determine the credibility of a brand in the financial services industry; things such as reviews, brand mentions, and brand searches have more weight assigned to them. After some recent case studies of success for clients in the financial services industry, I've contributed some tips & advice along with others on how to succeed with SEO. [link in comments] If you're a finance brand looking to gain an SEO advantage in 2025, this is a must read and if you have any questions on anything, feel free to drop me a message. #finance #seo #seoconsultant #RobMaySEO ------------------------ Hi, I'm Rob - A freelance SEO consultant with over 14 years experience. By constructing SEO strategies that put results and ROI at the heart of everything I do, my track record of delivering growth for clients speaks for itself. Get found online by your target customers and improve your SEO performance today.

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In what was originally supposed to be a short video (25 minutes later), this covers thoughts and priority areas for ecommerce SEO in 2026. Including: - Thoughts on content types and how to prioritise effectively - On-site navigation, using internal search data & internal link strategy - Passive link acquisition, digital PR and real blogger outreach - AI considerations such as top LLM referral sources and content structures And a load more. Link is in the comments!

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You know that wonderful feeling when you come back from holiday and find that Google have dropped a big change while you've been away? This time for me it was Google removing the num=100 functionality from search URLs. Aside from the obvious price increases that agencies, in-house teams and tool providers are going to face, it also means that SEOs are going to have to adapt to having less data to work with (unless you want to pay a lot more). But, the good news is that there's still a hell of a lot of actionable insights you can get from just the top 10 results. My suggestion is to save your rank tracking for the top 100 results to once a week/fortnight/month and keep your daily rank tracking to just the top 10 results (unless your rank tracker has found a way to absorb the costs for you!). The reality is that we love having as much data as possible, but we don't need to see the top 100 rankings every day. So it might seem like a huge change but I'm hoping it'll be more of a minor adjustment than anything else. I'm also late to the party with this one so keen to hear what anyone else thinks! #seo #google

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The JBH Link Mapper. What it is, what it does, and how it works for SEO and Digital PR (and GEO). Of all the tools I've been involved in building at JBH, the LinkMapper is one of my favourites. The reason it's my favourite is that it displays inbound links exactly as they should be displayed. This builds on the work by Albert-László Barabási in his famous book, Linked. The link mapper shows you the pages that act as hubs. These are popular pages of a website that gain links, and hubs show popularity. Ideally, your business's core assets should be the most popular. The problem is we live in an era of attention starvation. As a result, many of a brand’s core services, products, or category pages are starved of the necessary links and brand mentions they need for success. Which is where digital PR comes in. Digital PR is the manual process of generating links and brand mentions. And highly skilled digital PR builds these links and brand mentions to the core pages of a business, which are starved of link equity. In some highly competitive environments, adding new links and brand mentions gives almost instantaneous ranking increases leading to revenue. But that's not all. We've seen that the impact of brand mentions and links also leads to near-immediate revenue increases. The reason for this is that in the market, prospects are exposed repeatedly (through high-quality journalism) to a brand's positioning and expertise. Essentially, you're using digital PR to remind people you exist. This is like advertising, content marketing and link building rolled into one. As we move into an AI-powered search era, we already know that digital PR drives almost 75% of success in GEO (generative engine optimisation). The link mapper enables our team to quickly identify and visualise low-quality hubs by categorising links based on domain authority. Using a colour-coded system that works on domain authority, we can see pages that have lots of high-quality links and pages that have weak ones. Because the internet is a free-scaling network, links dissolve over time. Websites get deleted, links get deleted, web pages get deleted. This means you need to regularly update the brand mentions and links related to your brand's most valuable or key assets. Additionally, creating separate assets that become hubs of popularity in their own right can help drive internal links to your core page. An old-fashioned but still hugely successful SEO technique. The map serves as a quick signpost, allowing you to understand the ecology of your website. And it allows you to understand the extent of publicity your brand has gained. In other words, it allows you to quickly gauge your business's 'popularity', as more popular businesses tend to attract more links. I'm going to be writing a more detailed post on this for my newsletter this week. I think you'll love the deep dive. Stay tuned.

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I've seen quite a lot of discourse on here the past few days essentially saying the only good SEOs are those who put hours and hours into SEO outside of their 9-5... I've worked with a lot of truly great SEOs over the years and have built and managed teams with a huge spectrum of different characters and personality types, so I feel like I'm kind of qualified to say, I think that's nonsense. The key to a great SEO isn't how hard they hustle in their down time or how obsessed with search they are. It might be helpful, it might be exactly the type of person you want to work with, but it's not a pre-requisite to success. In some cases I'd actually argue a full and rich non-online life outside of SEO is far more useful for putting yourself in the minds of the equally varied humans you're trying to attract to your clients' sites. So whether you run 15 affiliate sites and spend your weekend evenings reading the Google Quality Guidelines before bed, or you genuinely don't think about SEO from the minute you leave the office, as long as you're getting results for your clients and remembering how to be human, I think you're good. Signed, a pretty great SEO who built herself a website only because she felt she had to to launch a freelance business and hasn't updated it in 365 days because she's been too busy optimising her clients' sites instead xoxo

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I'm not on the market for a new SEO agency job, but if I was, here's one way I would stand out from the crowd: A significant amount of agencies that manage their client's website put some tag to themselves in the footer of the client. We've all seen it before: "Marketing handled by Acme Corp". These send backlinks back to the agency's website. Which means that, using a site explorer backlink tool like Ahrefs, I could find the actual clients who belong to the agency I want to work for. I would then audit their client's sites to find areas of improvements. I'd leverage my findings to pitch the Head of SEO, creating a compelling narrative that is authentic to their actual clients and proves my expertise. In this competitive market, we have to do everything to stand out and be exceptional. Go the extra mile. Show me you know me, my pains, and my problems. Instead of another generic cover letter about how you "increased organic traffic by 200%," imagine getting an application that starts with: "I noticed your client, Acme corp, is struggling to rank for "Keyword". Here's three low-hanging fruits I'd go after to address that..." That candidate gets the interview. Every time. Most people won't do this level of research. They'll spray and pray with the same template to 50 agencies and wonder why they never hear back. But the ones who dig this deep? They understand that exceptional results require exceptional effort. What's the most creative job application approach you've seen in SEO? Pro tip: Most backlink auditors let you search for a specific phrase, so you can easily mine their backlink profile for keywords like "Built by", "Managed by", "Created by", etc.

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I haven't attended an SEO webinar in quite some time - being a bit removed from the day-to-day of running accounts will do that - but I'm so glad I made time for today's session: "Navigating the Future of Search" with Lily Ray, Kevin Indig, Ross Hudgens, and Steve Toth. I really, really enjoyed that! This wasn't your typical presentation. It was a fantastic, unscripted roundtable full of smart people openly debating what's actually working in SEO in 2026. Traditional SEO fundamentals still matter, of course, and in some cases, matter even more than before. While I had my assumptions about what "still works," this session cemented a lot of what I thought was right and introduced me to things I had no idea about: A few takeways here on things that matter in this new era and getting picked up and cited by LLMS: - Recency, freshness, and E-E-A-T (obvious, but good to get definitive confirmation that "this still matters") - Site speed and server response times remain critical - Declarative language over "if/should/could" statements (I genuinely didn't know this was a thing) - FAQs perform better outside of accordions (what?!) - Homepage clarity and specific pages for ICP mapping, particularly for B2B (industries, client sizes, use cases) - Log file analysis to track not just LLM referral clicks, but how often LLMs are crawling your site for information - The immediate effect of posting content on social media - particularly on high-authority sites - for pickup by LLMs - Brand synthesis across the web: ensuring your content is repurposed properly across channels and formats, creating a multimodal presence - The (unfortunate) power of pay-to-play, sponsored content, and syndication in today's landscape This webinar was an absolute goldmine. Huge thanks to the organisers and to Lily, Kevin, Ross, and Steve for sharing their time, their resources and knowledge so generously. Ah! Back in love with SEO today 🩷

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