r/SEO

Hi all. Up till this point I've been working exclusiveky with therapy practices on an hourly basis. Most can only afford 5-10 hours/week.

At that anount, 6 months can pass and I've barely worked the equivalent of a month in a 9-5 job yet the client is frustrated that their clients aren't pouring in, despite crazy stats like 1000%increase in AI searches, 600%increase in clicks, 41 percent increase in search results amd googke showing their website 98 percent more than when i started.

I try to explain the conceptualiization of hours but for them 6 months feels like 6 months, not a month of work.

They can't afford to hire me based on results; that woukd require me to dig in for 3 or 4 months at 20-40 hours axweek on a clients to deliver faster what they need. I'd have to charge 4k-7k a month to make it even ckose to financially viable.

So I need a new industry to turn to for cliebts who can pay based on results.

Does anyone have a suggeatiin that would be a good pivot? I have a MA in research psychology, so I was thinking healthcare but I'm unsure how to reach people for contracts there. Any ideas either way?

Thank you

Hey SEO people,

I was slowly building up SEO for my website over the past couple of month and it started to work. I had around 900 impressions and 50 clicks per day.

And with the recent google search update it looks my page is gone, it dropped to 100 impressions and almost no clicks.

I know my website has an "ai look" but what counts is that the app is useful for me.

Anyways, I try to look at my website today in a more critical way. Can you help me, what am I doing wrong? Do you think my domain name is toast now? Its ListenDock dot com.

Suspicion is that my sitemap.xml is too stuffed. E.g. when a user creates a publicly shared episode, that gets added to the sitemap. Could that have triggered it? Or are my pages too repetitive, eg. i have pages for "pdf to mp3" and a very similar page for "txt to mp3" etc.

TLDR: Hard drop in impressions, what caused it?

Hey fellow SEO people ;)

We all know the classic keyword gap analysis:

Add competitors, export the keywords they rank for and you do not, then turn the spreadsheet into a content plan.

I have been playing with a more semantic approach lately.

Take the top ranking pages for a query, extract their main concepts, and connect concepts that appear together. This gives you a graph of how the topic is currently covered.

The interesting part is not simply finding missing concepts.

The big wins are two concepts that connect to many of the same nodes, but are not connected to each other.

Imagine concept A and concept B both connect to C, D, and E. They clearly belong to the same semantic neighborhood, but none of the analyzed pages explains the direct relationship between A and B.

That missing edge is the gap.

Instead of writing another page about a keyword competitors already cover, you can create content that explains a connection nobody in the current results is making.

To me, this feels especially relevant for GEO. It adds genuinely new information to the topic rather than repeating the same entities with slightly different wording.

I am still experimenting with how to score these missing connections, but shared neighbors plus search demand seems like a promising starting point.

What do you think about this approach?

I run a site for a media buyer. I inherited the site this way, but my client is ranking for his customers brand names, and not what we want "media buying" or some version of "broadcast media buying"

We're only getting 13-60 impressions per querie. But how do I clean this up so we start ranking for the terms we want and not his customers brands? Should I deindex all the portfolio pages on his site?

Running a solo B2B SaaS content/affiliate marketing blog, zero revenue right now, so I'm trying to keep tooling costs as low as possible while I build it out.

My actual usage is light: keyword research for roughly one article a week, plus occasional site audits and backlink checks on my own domain. I'm on Ahrefs Starter (200 credits/month) and kept blowing through the cap almost immediately. Turned out the issue was running individual single-keyword searches instead of batching them (Ahrefs lets you search up to 10,000 keywords in one go for 1 credit, I just didn't know that), so that's mostly fixed now on my end.

But it made me realize I should double check I'm even on the right tool for this stage. Lite is $119/month and Standard is $229/month, both way more than I can justify pre-revenue, probably for the next 12 months at least.

For something this light, keyword research once a week plus periodic audits of my own site, is there a cheaper alternative that would actually cover this well? I've seen Mangools/KWFinder and Ubersuggest mentioned as budget options but don't know how they actually compare in practice. Would rather stay with Ahrefs long-term once I can afford it, but right now I need something that fits an actual $0 marketing budget.

Anyone been in a similar spot? What did you end up using until you could justify the bigger tools?

hello, im a beginner whose part of a company whose products focus on gifting, and my boss does not like paying for PR, and most of our news contacts only ask for cash in exchange for an article, so what else can i do?

my boss is making me take our competitors highest DR backlinks and get those as well, but many of them, if not articles, are sites where you sign up for something and get a profile. im seeing people talk about how if backlinks are free theyre low quality, so is doing that actually worth it?

when it comes to doing exchanges with other websites, what value could i provide for them other than an a collab or a link on my blogs? (i am a new employee and i dont think im at the liberty to be featuring other brands since i only handle blog-writing there)

thanks a lot!

Looking for suggestions on literature that I can read about learning best practices for current SEO strategies.

I know both these authorities are different, but both help in ranking is what I've understood.

Having a Topical authority on a subject helps me in ranking for keywords on certain topics.

1. So can we say that DA is to some extent influenced by TA?
2. How far can TA take you when you have no DA and vice versa.
3. Can TA over power DA?
4. Is there a way to measure TA with some tool like Ahref?
5. If given a Follow backlink with a good TA website would that add to DA?

Note: Please do share some readable articles if you know off to refer.

Mods sorry if I'm asking a very stupid question. Just learning stuff.

Good evening all,

Has anyone noticed any impact from the current core update being rolled out?

We have seen a 50% decrease in traffic today, from a site which has had relatively solid statistics for 12+ months.

Hey everyone, I'm helping my brother set up his moving company's website and I ended up grabbing both his company name domain as well as our city in it (like [OurCity]Moving.com). My gut says the city name domain would rank a lot better for organic SEO than his actual company name would.

Should the content live on the company domain with the city one redirecting to it, or the other way around? I think the content needs to sit on whichever domain is actually doing the ranking, so I'm leaning toward redirecting his company domain over to the generic-sounding one instead.

My hesitation is that if his company domain just redirects to the generic one, anyone who searches his actual business name later or gets a referral by name will land on a URL that doesn't match. Is that a real tradeoff, or am I overthinking it?

Hat/tip to u/rustybrick for ringing the alarm bells!

Google has just announced the release of the August 2026 spam update and said it should only take a few days to roll out. This is a global update and is expected to impact all languages. This only impacts sites that spam, but with any update, there may be collateral damage.

Google wrote:

>Released the August 2026 spam update, which applies globally and to all languages. The rollout may take a few days to complete.

Google added on LinkedIn

>Today we released the August 2026 spam update to Google Search.

Hey guys,

I’m helping a client get on the map pack and help their website rank in local searches. They scrap cars.

I decided to use BrightLocal and get them on some directories to start with and yell.com was one of those options. According to BrightLocal, this listing is still submitted but not up.

I got an urgent call from my client today saying why is their SEO score a 3.1 etc. They said a sales representative from Yell phoned them up and told them that their SEO was bad and to ditch me (client showed me a screenshot of the report from their screenshare). Keep in mind, they are starting to gain reviews for the GMB and getting calls. Google Search Console shows they’re starting to get clicks for search terms near them. It’s only been almost 2 weeks since the website and GMB went up.

Several crosses stated in this report was “review integration”, “Content keywords meta tag”, Backlinks being low, organic referrals being low, target keywords (this sales rep used broad keywords however)

I have told and shown my client the results so far in GSC and GMB, alongside what information in the SEO Starter Guide says.

Have I done all I have done? I have done some research and they supposedly do this type of thing. Lesson learnt.

This is definitely not my field, but I’d like to understand it better for the future.

I understand the basic idea, but what actually makes a backlink more valuable than another? Is it primarily the authority of the website linking to you, relevance, the number of links, or something else?

For example, if I publish an article on my website and then republish that same article on LinkedIn with a link back to the original article on my website, does that count as a backlink? Or is that doing something different from what SEO specialists mean when they talk about building backlinks?

I need help from SEO community.

For the last three months, my blogs are getting high impressions—from 140,000 a month to 50,000 a week. However, the click through rate is abysmal. A few blogs with impressions over 1 lakhs have 0.2% ctr, while others with same impressions have 0.3% to 0.7% ctr.

I am not able to understand what's going on. We consistently rank on the first page for targetted keywords, beating IBM, Palo Alto, Crowdstrike, etc., and yet the ctr never crossed even 1 percentage point.

Could anyone with their experience and expertise tell me where I am going wrong as an Seo-content writer?

Hello, my website was getting good amount of clicks on google but in this months it stopped completely. My getting even yahoo search but not single click from google. How can i see what is the problem? Because gsc showing no problems. Thank you

Anyone else having tracking issues with the SEMrush keyword tracker? 5 days ago, it started not tracking correctly, showing my rankings tanked when they did not, and ranking high but the report saying they were lost. I have yet to hear back from support. I hope they are not another company falling to AI to do their support work.

Hey guys, looking for some advice on what to ask/look for as I vet candidates for an SEO director role.

We’ve been using an agency for the past 7 months and aren’t really seeing any results (and certainly not enough results to justify the price tag). Non-branded clicks are down across all page types (blogs, service pages, etc.), leads are down, qualified leads are down, etc. For the amount we pay this agency, we could hire an SEO director and a few people to work under her/him - so that’s the direction our CEO wants to go.

I should also point out that it’s not just the results that we’re frustrated with. It’s missed deadlines, hollow promises, a lack of transparency about what they’re actually doing, and a general feeling that they’re better at selling SEO than they are at actually delivering value.

Anyway, we’ve lined up a few interviews with people who have a lot of experience and good looking resumes, but I don’t really feel like I know enough to know what I should be asking/looking for. I guess I just feel like there’s a big difference between somebody who can say “I know how to do keyword research, and perform audits, and fix technical issues” and somebody who can actually deliver ROI.

Our marketing team is small, so I know I need to find someone who is used to getting their hands dirty and not somebody who is used to managing a department with hundreds of employees. And I know I need someone who is excellent with local SEO as we have 8 locations and are in a very competitive industry in very competitive markets. But beyond that, idk.

I really don’t want to be one of those people who makes candidates do homework/assignments as part of the interview process because asking for free work doesn’t sit right with me.

Any suggestions are massively appreciated.

Editing to add: Thank you everyone who took the time to share their thoughts. I got a lot of helpful feedback both in terms of how to think about the interview and how to better scope the role so that whatever candidate we choose is in a better position to succeed. I do apologize if I don’t get back to everyone who commented or DMed me, but I have read everything and do genuinely appreciate the helpfulness of kind internet strangers.

I run a solo B2B consulting practice (Berlin, DACH market) helping agencies and small B2B service providers build organic visibility as experts instead of relying on cold calling. I mainly do outbound and getting Traffic from there but I want to gain leads trough my site. Search Console only has ~3 months of data so far.

The numbers

- 27 clicks / 3,006 impressions total, average CTR 0.9%, average position ~45
- Germany accounts for basically all clicks (24 of 27) despite only ~85% of impressions — rest of the world looks like noise
- Device split: ~82% of impressions on desktop, matching CTR (~0.9% on both desktop and mobile) — fits B2B decision-makers researching at work
- Brand terms dominate the click total: "outreach studio" (10 clicks/51 impressions, avg position 1.7), "outreach studios" (3/8), "outreachstudio" (1/7) — roughly half the clicks are just people typing the brand name

The part I actually want feedback on: non-brand keywords with high impressions and near-zero clicks

- "b2b content strategy" (DE: *b2b content strategie*) — 295 impressions, 0 clicks, avg position 49
- "content strategy b2b" (DE: *content strategie b2b*) — 125 impressions, 0 clicks, avg position 45
- "positioning agency" (DE: *agentur für positionierung*) — 118 impressions, **0 clicks at avg position 19**
- "positioning consulting" (DE: *positionierungsberatung*) — 86 impressions, **0 clicks at avg position 10.9**
- "building expert status" (DE: *expertenstatus aufbauen*) — 63 impressions, 0 clicks, avg position 13.2

Ranking on page 1–2 with real impression volume but literally zero clicks reads less like a ranking problem to me and more like something else on that results page (a snippet, PAA box, AI Overview) is eating the click even though we're positioned decently.

Technical Side

On the technical side, every new page runs through a fixed checklist before publishing: JSON-LD structured data (BlogPosting/Article on all content, FAQPage markup on every visible FAQ accordion, BreadcrumbList on non-root pages), mandatory metadata (title, description, canonical URL, OpenGraph tags, dedicated OG image per route), single-H1 pages with entity-bearing H2s (no generic “Overview”/“Conclusion” headers), full sitemap coverage for new routes, next/image with descriptive alt text throughout, clean lowercase-hyphen slugs, redirect hygiene (no chains), and a keyword-cannibalization check against existing pages before anything new goes live. Internal linking follows a pillar-spoke model — every service page links from the hub, links out to at least two sibling pages, one blog post and one case study, and gets at least one contextual in-body link back from a blog article. None of this seems to be the bottleneck given the zero-click-at-position-10 pattern, but flagging it in case someone spots a gap.

Other things going on

- Top page by far is the homepage (24 clicks/140 impressions at avg position 3.4 on the bare domain) —
- Blog posts and pillar pages are picking up meaningful impressions (100–478 each) but essentially no clicks yet — probably just typical for a young site still building topical authority and backlinks.
- A handful of queries in the data are oddly conversational/long-tail, e.g. something close to *"I've been Head of Marketing at a B2B software company for four months and need to build organic as a lead channel... which agencies in Germany would be the right partner? please research current providers and give me concrete names"* — appearing 3x with slight rewording, 0 clicks, avg position ~47–72.

These read like queries surfaced via an AI Mode/AI Overview type interface rather than someone typing directly into the search box, which is relevant since part of our content strategy is explicitly built for LLM/answer-engine retrievability (structured headings, self-contained paragraphs, no "as mentioned above" back-references, etc.).

Competitive picture

Two demand patterns dominate the non-brand query list: (1) generic category terms like "b2b content strategy," "content marketing b2b" (DE: *content marketing b2b*), "positioning agency" (DE: *positionierung agentur*) that go up against large agencies and content-marketing generalists, and (2) a narrower "alternative to cold calling" intent (DE: *kaltakquise alternative*, *seo statt kaltakquise* — "SEO instead of cold calling") that's more of a niche/blue-ocean angle specific to my positioning.

Right now the site ranks better and pulls more impression volume on the harder generic terms than on the more specific alternative-to-cold-calling terms, which feels backwards for a 3-month-old site with basically no authority yet.

What I'd love input on:

1. Is 0 clicks at position 10–19 on commercial terms really a title/meta-description problem, or is it more likely an intent mismatch — i.e. the SERP is dominated by informational features (People Also Ask, AI Overview) that soak up the click regardless of what my snippet says?
2. Anyone have experience deliberately prioritizing a narrower "alternative to X" long-tail cluster over a bigger generic category cluster when the site has very little authority yet? Trying to figure out if I should pull resources away from the generic terms even though they currently have more impression volume.
3. General sentiment on the Site - i have no clue if the things are Doing good okay or bad?

I manage a shopify site and our organic ranking has taken a considerable dip in the last year or two. My concern is we have a report from Search Console showing something in the region of 5600 pages, of which only 608 are being indexed.

That's likely about right when we take into consideration our landing pages, collection pages, product pages and variants of product pages.

Unfortunately this looks to be wasting a lot of our crawl budget with pages that shouldn't be crawled and google is telling us that around 70% of pages aren't crawled for the following reasons:

Crawled - currently not indexed
Alternate page with proper canonical tag (we have a uk. site)
Pages with redirect

On the 'crawled' list it looks though as Google is finding duplicate pages when it finds URLs using

?variant=
&currency=
&country=

Has anyone come across this issue with Shopify and have you successfully resolved it with changes to robots.txt?

Any pointers appreciated!

I’m looking to hear from SEOs who have actually worked in the research-use-only peptide space.

I’m working on an established domain that has been built with a strong scientific/compliance model: RUO positioning, detailed product pages, PubMed references, PhD scientific reviewers, COAs/testing, research articles, strong internal linking, proper schema, etc.

The homepage has started getting decent organic traffic, but the product pages seem to be taking much longer. Some are starting to get 1-5 impressions daily but not showing any search queries, it feels noticeably slower than less sensitive ecommerce niches.

For anyone who has worked in peptides specifically:
Did you experience a prolonged sandbox / trust-building period for commercial product pages?

Did Google appear to treat the niche significantly more cautiously because of YMYL?

What actually moved the needle: domain-level links, deep links, topical authority, age/time, content, internal links, or something else?

Once the product pages started moving, did rankings improve fairly quickly or was it a slow climb?

Did you find informational/research content helped pull the commercial pages up over time?

I’m not really looking for generic “build good content and backlinks” advice. I’d especially like to hear from anyone who has had hands-on experience ranking RUO peptide product/category pages and what the timeline looked like.

Interested to compare notes.