Andrew Holland

When I started out in SEO, I lived in the world of content and links. Storytelling, on-page optimisation, building links, that was my lane. But when I joined TAL Agency I was pretty much thrown into technical delivery and realised pretty quickly how important it really is. Crawlability, indexation, structured data… it was like peeking behind the curtain of SEO and seeing how the magic really happens. Don't get me wrong, I'd always had a basic understanding of tech and the role is played, but I'd always shied away from talking about it, leaving it to the 'experts'. I started asking more technical questions in client meetings, sitting in on dev calls, and getting my hands dirty in site audits. I immersed myself in sitemaps, schema, and server logs. I taught myself how to properly use Screaming Frog and how to break down its recommendations into actionable tickets my clients could implement to drive results. Before long, I no longer identified as a content and link specialist, but a fully fledged SEO all rounder who can talk in-depth about technical issues and what they mean for results. It’s been the most rewarding shift in my career. If you’re in content or PR and curious about technical SEO: start small. Run a crawl. Check out Screaming Frog's in-depth documentation on what the issues mean. Join Women in Tech SEO and ask questions. Ask Chat GPT to break down more complex recommendations so you can fully understand what they mean. It’s not about becoming a developer; it’s about understanding how search engines see your work. It’s changed the way I work, and it might just do the same for you.

178

41 Comments

Most brands are doing SEO wrong in 4 layers. (And don’t realise which one’s holding them back.) Here’s the brutal truth: Every drop of visibility you're losing falls into one of these buckets... And in 2025? SEO isn’t one game. It’s 4 distinct battles you need to win: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) – The Citation Battle - Ranking isn’t enough, Are you cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity? - Think prompt phrasing, comparison blogs, expert lists No GEO = No mention = No trust AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) – The Snapshot Game - Own snippets, AI overviews, voice searches - Structure wins here: FAQs, schema, entity-rich answers No AEO = You don’t even show up AIO (AI Integration Optimization) – The Scale Factor - Plug into tools, APIs, workflows... let AI use your content - Think programmatic briefs, data-fed summaries, markdown chunking No AIO = No scale = Content chaos SXO (Search Experience Optimization) – The Conversion Engine - SEO isn’t just to rank, It’s to convert - Fast UX, scrollable layouts, mobile-first pages No SXO = Traffic that bounces Let’s take 2 real-world examples: DTC Brand Reality: AEO: Missed voice snippets and product schema GEO: No AI citations, poor content depth AIO: Manual content ops, no workflows SXO: Slow checkout flow, low conversions SaaS Startup Truth: AEO: Weak FAQs, no entity markup GEO: Blog lacks citations or prompt relevance AIO: No system for scaling blog or docs SXO: Long forms, high bounce on mobile You don’t have a traffic problem. You have a structure problem. Break SEO into 4: AEO: Gets you found in AI GEO: Gets you cited and trusted AIO: Gets you scalable content SXO: Gets you real conversions Common SEO Traps Long blogs, no structure = AEO fail No citations, no depth = GEO fail No workflow = AIO fail Poor design = SXO fail Your competitors ranking in ChatGPT? They cracked this. While you publish more posts and blogs randomly… They’re being retrieved, summarized, and chosen. Your next SEO breakthrough isn’t another post... it’s a new lens: AEO, GEO, AIO, SXO. Try These LLM-SEO Tools Built for AI visibility, citations, and structure: Semrush Enterprise AIO/AI Tool-Kit Peec AI Brandlight GrowthX AI AthenaHQ Cognizo Bluefish That’s how you rank and retrieve in 2025 and stay there. ♻️ Repost it to share with your network Follow me Madhav Mistry for insights on marketing

663

43 Comments

RANK TRACKING IS INCREDIBLY SHORT SIGHTED! Heres why. When you track rankings you are only tracking a TINY fraction of what your website gets served for in search. For example - if you tracked 100 keywords and those were used to report to clients - the client COULD interpret your performance based on those keywords. But the reality is, your domain likely gets served for TENS if not HUNDREDS of thousands of keywords. I've seen people OBSESS over a handful of keywords, completely ignoring the bigger picture. I've seen clients kick off historically because a few keywords showed a slight decline whilst hundreds of new keywords were served. It's insane. Tracking less than 1% of what your domain gets served for is a fallacy. Here's what you should be doing: 👉 1. Use TOTAL SERVED QUERIES for an entire domain - this can be a great indicator of "overall trajectory" Here's how you do it: https://lnkd.in/evHkQWmN 👉 2. Creating "Segments" for your domain and tracking the performance of those (query count, click, impression) Here's how you do it: https://lnkd.in/eDjUXtxA The benefits to shifting your reporting KPIS in this direction: 1. You can see the TRUE trajectory that content is on - we know SEO takes time, some content can take months to rank, query counting allows you to demonstrate the trajectory of what you are doing 2. You can see the TRUE number of queries across position groups and demonstrate growth BEFORE the clicks come - this can make it easier to keep clients engaged - a lot of SEO is deemed to be "fast paced, rank overnight" but that's FAR from reality, good sustainable SEO takes time 3. It's MORE attractive to demonstrate query growth by the thousands than the ranking changes of 10, 20, 50, 100 keywords 4. You can use this model to BETTER UNDERSTAND the relationship between what you are doing whether it's BUILDING LINKS or rewriting content and the impact it has Once you get the process and you can explain / demonstrate it to clients it becomes MUCH easier to demonstrate your progress and maintain client buy in / enthusiasm. It's ESPECIALLY effective if you create segments for KEYWORDS WITH CONVERSION behind them - because then you can report on total query counts and what position groups they are in - when you have data behind to show they have conversion potential. #seo #seotips

83

9 Comments

Caught up with a former MSO partner who left us for a cheaper SEO provider. They walked me through what their current SEO agency is delivering for a high four-figure retainer. For reference we were in the low five figure range for 13 locations. Here’s what they’re getting: • 3 to 5 blog posts every 60 days • Vague “technical SEO” • Reports focused on impressions, not clicks • No clear link building strategy or roadmap And the results were not helping either. Most non brand dispensary focused keywords all stuck positions 5 and below. I was seething. Not because we lost the account. More often than not, we get a call back at some point. But because they were lead to believe this McDonald’s of an SEO strategy would support growth in the name of value and price. Dispensaries deserve better than this. There are minimum standards every dispensary SEO program should meet, whether it’s handled internally or by an outside team: • A clear roadmap built around visibility growth • Top 3 rankings for “dispensary + city” and deal-related keywords for every location • Clear KPI reporting focusing on non brand traffic and revenue. • Google Business Profile strategy and communication around engagement signals like reviews, photos, and citations • Local content published monthly • Clean technical SEO that aligns with your development environment • Consistent off-page signals for both the website and GBP We call it the grind. It works. It is what leads our partners to success and even when things don’t work out, we don’t stop. Hopefully we get a chance to work with this partner again. But more importantly, I hope more operators raise the bar for what they expect.

23

15 Comments

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.

31

8 Comments

How are you getting your SEO reporting delivered to you? And what detail does your SEO specialist or agency include? If reports are all about work completed in the month previous and metrics, then a jolly good reporting revamp is needed. I recently wrote an article for Search Engine Land all about SEO reporting, from what it is, what it needs to achieve, core metrics to include and how to structure it. In short, SEO reports should be: 🔹Understood by all recipients 🔹A dialogue between SEO, the rest of marketing and managers/founders/directors 🔹Tied to business and marketing goals, think revenue and engagement over clicks and impressions 🔹Insightful, providing the stories and takeaways from the data, not just the numbers.

34

4 Comments