Seb Atkinson

With the near endless amount of changes being forced upon us at the minute, it's a good time to reassess how you are adding value. SEO may be losing a little of its lustre at a senior level. But businesses run on revenue. Not clicks. Whilst one may drive the other, being more commercially savvy and a little entrepreneurial never hurt anyone. Here's a few thoughts on how you can become more commercial as an SEO: https://lnkd.in/eQtN24TJ 💰 Fiscal ways you can become 'more than an SEO' (examples included) 👯 Turning your audience into a sellable commodity (even more examples) ⏳ Why this matters now more than ever Nothing happens in a vacuum. It's an opportunity to steer your stakeholders and the business through choppy waters.

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I'll let you decide if this post is showboating or useful advice 👇 Lumen SEO just had it's most successful 6 months in it's 5 year history with revenues doubling in 6 months and 2x senior hires made last week 📈 But this isn't about me (because I'm responsible for about 30% of that, the rest is my team and my support group 🙏) - this is about you. I'd like to share the key 6 decisions we made that led to this growth - they aren't traditional, they aren't safe and some seem obvious now in hindsight: 1. We have failed more than ever 🚧 Not only that, but we have engineered a system for failure discovery and sharing. Holly's switch to Head of Operations and Experimentation saw the introduction of 'Lumen Labs', a digital space to log, measure and learn from SEO experiments. Monthly 'Discovery Sessions' then followed - a 30 minute space for each team member to share a discovery from any part of their work, even if - and especially if - that discovery is an experiment that failed. 2. We launched a digital product 📱 The SEO Essentials course has only just launched but having a revenue stream that still embodies our values and character, but doesn't require consistent human hourly input has opened the businesses profitability. It also means new entrepreneurs and students can benefit from our discoveries, not just paying clients. 3. Counter benchmarking 🤟 We stopped trying to improve on what our competitors were already doing, and started doing things that they weren't doing at all. This started with making everything video - with a 0% reading rule. Every report, audit and proposal is watchable, with no reading required at any point. Our conversion rate from inquiries doubled as a result. 4. We leaned into AI search 🤖 We started reporting to clients on traffic growth from AI search engines and LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity in December, even before some clients were aware of their importance. We're about to introduce position tracking for AI search, making clients aware of what keywords they are ranking for in AI results separately to Google. It's important not to over-decorate your role as an agency - your job half of the time is to help clients sleep well at night safe in the knowledge that technology isn't out to kill their business. 5. The 32 hour week 📅 You know all about this one 😉 - Talent pool improved, error count reduced and staff well-being improved. 6. We stopped posting about our services 🔎 SEO is boring - it's why people pay us to do it for them. Values, ethics, unconventional HR policies? Now that's emotional stuff. We've experienced more follows, engagement and enquiries after prioritising 'culture' posts over posts about our services. Was this useful? Did it make sense? All questions and challenges welcome as always 💙💬

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Unsolicited #SEO tip: "in 95% of cases you need to pay for link placement" ❌❌❌ In my opinion, 𝐩𝐚𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐛𝐚𝐝 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠-𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲. Candour pays for 0% of the links we acquire for clients, we've been building links from: 📰 Papers such as The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, Metro, The Express, Huffington Post 💻 News sites such as Yahoo News, MSN News, Business Insider, IBTimes, Forbes, 📚 Sites like TakeABreak, Hello Magazine, Toda, Indsider, TheKnot, Hitched, Dicebreaker, as well as .gov and charity websites. If you've got good ideation, and your acquisition team is being both proactive with opportunities as well as reactive, there is almost unlimited scope to earn links from these kinds of websites. Why is paying for placement a bad idea? You're building a house of sand. At some point, even if those links are working now, at some point, Google is going to be able to work out they are likely paid placement and devalue them - this is why you see so many sites, especially during Google updates have the rug pulled from under them. If your strategy is aligned with search engine's goals, it doesn't matter what algorithm changes happen, your links are deserved and you have a solid foundation to build on year after year. "It works until it doesn't." Links in these sources are only going to become more important as we move deeper in AI search territory.

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Genuine request. If you're a company who likes to think 'long term', particularly around something as nebulous and fast-moving as LLMs/AI, please please please understand that KPIs or targets for the work proposed may not exist yet, or may not yet be more than 0.01%...because we're preparing for a different market environment.... ...and that doesn't mean the work is any less valuable.

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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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🚨 Why companies waste money on paid ads & they don’t even realise it! That’s not scare tactics – it’s a consent tracking issue. We’ve audited dozens of sites over the past year. You’d be amazed how many haven’t properly implemented Consent Mode for Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or Meta. No Consent Mode = ❌ No tracking for users who click ‘Reject all’ ❌ No enhanced conversions ❌ Incomplete or missing data in GA4 ❌ Wasted ad spend you can’t justify And here’s a common misconception: Blocking GTM until consent is granted isn’t enough. Unless your individual tags are configured to respect consent signals, they may still fire — and you’re not compliant. Even worse – many brands think they’re compliant because they’ve got a cookie banner. But: ⚠️ Consent Mode isn’t automatically wired in. Especially when tags are manually added or use old GTM setups. ⚠️ According to the ICO, your banner must give equal prominence to ‘Accept’ and ‘Reject’. You can’t bury the reject option on a second layer. And if you haven’t implemented Consent Mode v2 by now, your data could already be non-compliant — and broken. ✅ Paid traffic showing as ‘Direct’ ✅ Retargeting audiences shrinking ✅ ROAS metrics unreliable ✅ Data loss due to cookieless users (e.g. Safari Incognito) This isn’t just a privacy issue — it’s a data and performance issue. You can’t optimise what you can’t track. 👉 Connect with me and comment “Checklist” below I’ll send you our free GA4/GTM audit checklist to help you fix this. #GoogleAnalytics #ConversionUplift #GA4 #GTM #ServerSide #Stape #BigQuery

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Fab to join the State of Play panel last night on the future of SEO Worried about how AI might affect SEO? Key things we're thinking about right now at eight&four: 1) AI hasn't and will not 'kill' Google The actual big story going on in Search isn't LLM stealing market share, it's expansion & fragmentation of search surfaces... Datos’ Q2 report showed YouTube has tripled YoY, Pinterest search doubled, Reddit search +30%. Meanwhile, LLM prompt growth is modest (and early evidence seems to indicate the more people use the LLM's, the MORE they then use Google...!) So - don't get too focused on AI panic, instead stand back and think about how to build distributed influence across as many search surfaces as possible.. this means SEO teams need to be partnering with social teams, PR teams, paid teams - breaking down these baked in digital siloes internally (it's why we integrated a PR & comms agency into eight&four this year - to drive that integrated thinking for our clients) 2) If an agency is trying to panic you, walk away ESPECIALLY if they're trying to sell you a "GEO Ranking dashboard" 🙄. As always with any AI hype, step back, think critically, trust your professional judgement. Replace GEO theatre with clear roadmaps to assist with LLM inclusion, adapt owned content entities to support answer generation (in LLM's, or new AI features being implemented in Google - AI mode, Overview etc.). And yes, take those traditional SEO techniques (technical, schema, IA) into Reddit, YouTube, TikTok! 3) This is a huge opportunity for "SEO" Any hype cycle brings one clear benefit to marketeers - ATTENTION. Use this window of attention SEO is currently getting to make powerful changes to the way your organisation values and prioritises world class content strategy. Reclaim that consultancy seat. Authoritatively push for more effective content investment. 2026? Let's break down silo'ed digital channels, and work effectively together to drive DISCOVERABILITY for our brands. One integrated team, different specialists, working together to show up for our customers, with the right information, in the right places. Fortune favours the brave - go get it!! 🔥🔥🔥 Big thanks to Jessica R. for the invite, and fellow panellists Andrew Fox Helen Pollitt Jessica Atkinson João Filipe Pereira Mark Evans for a great chat 🙏

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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

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