68 articles published
The best SEO hire I ever made wasn't in New York, London, or even Austin. It was a technical SEO specialist in Cebu who found a crawl budget issue our in-house team had missed for eight months. That single fix recovered 23% of our indexed pages within six weeks.
I counted 11 active SEO subscriptions on our company credit card. Eleven. Three of them pulled ranking data from the same source. Two offered nearly identical backlink databases. One hadn't been logged into since someone on the team "needed it for a quick audit" eight months prior.
One of my clients held the number-one organic position for their most valuable keyword. Rankings steady. Content quality high. And their organic traffic from that keyword dropped 34% in a single quarter. The culprit wasn't a competitor outranking them or a Google penalty.
I spent three weeks migrating our agency's keyword tracking from one platform to another and discovered something uncomfortable: the rankings we'd been reporting to clients for months were off by an average of 4.3 positions.
"Position 1" is a lie. I'm staring at a keyword where my client technically ranks first organically, yet the link sits 1,200 pixels below the fold, buried under an AI Overview, a People Also Ask box, and a shopping carousel. The click-through rate? A dismal 2.3%.
I switched rank trackers three times in the past eighteen months. Not because I'm indecisive, but because the tool that worked perfectly for tracking Google positions became borderline useless once AI search started eating 60% of the clicks that used to flow through traditional blue links.
Akamai reported a 300% surge in AI bot traffic this year, and publishers took the hardest hit. That number alone should change how you think about your keyword strategy.
Facebook told us we drove 100 sales from a campaign. GA4 said we drove 10. Same campaign, same week, same product. And my CMO wanted to know which number to put in the board deck.
I pulled up a client's blog index and counted 247 published posts. Then I sorted them by business objective. Seventy-one percent mapped to... nothing. No specific goal, no target audience segment, no funnel stage. Just topics someone thought sounded interesting on a Tuesday morning.
Most B2B companies are sitting on 200+ blog posts that generate almost nothing. No leads. No rankings. No compounding returns. The posts exist in isolation, each one fighting for attention against every other page on the internet, with no structural advantage whatsoever.
A client once showed me their marketing dashboard with a proud grin. They were spending $14,000 a month on Google Ads and generating what looked like solid lead volume.
Forty-seven percent of our client's DuckDuckGo traffic converted at a higher rate than their Google organic traffic. I stared at the report for a solid minute before I believed it.