Andy Jones

"SEO is dead" We are still doing the same fundamentals we were doing 12 months ago. The only difference is a slightly greater focus on PDP pages and merchant feed optimisations. AI achieves speed to market, but it doesn't magically make you rank higher. cc: Jason Mun Ash Fuller Nicholas Tie Sereena Furse Leslie Tan Judy Kim Darren H. Huang #seo #geo #chatgpt #searchengingoptimisation #results

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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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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.

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