Hey everyone!

I’m spending more time learning about local SEO and what actually helps businesses get more customers through their Google Business Profile.
I’ve been working on a small business project called Scale Quest, and it’s got me curious to learn more. I’d love to hear from people with real hands-on experience.
There’s so much advice out there about optimizing a profile, getting more reviews, posting updates, adding photos, building citations, and so on. But I’m curious about what makes a real, noticeable difference beyond just ticking boxes.

For those of you who do local SEO or manage Google Business Profiles for clients:
What’s made the biggest difference in improving visibility in the local map pack?
Have you found that getting more genuine reviews helps move the needle, or is it more about relevance, proximity, and overall prominence?

Are there any overlooked optimizations that consistently deliver results for local businesses?
How do you measure whether profile optimization is actually bringing in more calls, enquiries, and customers rather than just more views?

I’m especially interested in hearing what you’ve seen work across actual client accounts, including things that didn’t work as well as expected.
I’m still learning, and I’d genuinely appreciate hearing different experiences or opinions. I’m not looking for a magic trick — just trying to understand what really matters in practice.
Thanks!

Has anyone cancelled an SEO content tool (e.g. AirOps) this year instead of renewing? What made you decide and what are you doing instead? Context: Google's updated search guidance on using generative AI content on your website.

Hey everyone,

So, i have made this website three months back, and was publishing around 4 articles each month. The niche is flooring, when I searched the niche, it had already less competition but search volume was also less. In this month, I have already published more content than previous months.

My website stats are like, 4.64k impressions, 31 clicks, average position 9. Is it okay? And what should I work more to get more clicks and impressions.

This is my first time with the website, so please help me a little and guide me. What should be the more practical approach in this.

I'm torn on whether to create a Google Business Profile. I'm technically allowed to because I'm not strictly online-only. I'm also a local service area business. Some things to note:

--I work out of my house, so I would be hiding the address.

--I will meet clients locally in public, but anyone outside of a certain radius will be strictly a remote client.

--I am a new business, not an established one.

Part of me thinks it's a good idea because it would allow for Google reviews and really help me gain organic traffic locally. But I'm not sure if that will tank my SEO outside of my immediate location.

Thoughts? Should I make a GBP or not?

I’m working on an SEO strategy for a website with both Danish and English versions. Most of its traffic appears to come from users whose browser language is set to Danish.

I’d planned to research search volumes for both Danish and English keywords in Denmark. However, I’m finding that most keyword research tools report zero or no search volume for many relevant keywords in either language. I suspect this is partly due to the small market size.

How would you approach keyword research and prioritization in this situation? What other data or methods would you use when search volume estimates are limited?

Thank you

Pretty much everyone is saying you need to be "everywhere", I even read a comment saying be in 60 places (the guy wasn't joking)... You also hear: have 3rd party reviews/endorsements, great "PR", etc etc. Honestly, my site doesn't have anything. Just a site, GBP, a LinkedIn page which is barely posted to, ZERO backlinks, and within 4 months it is totally dominating AI overviews and rankings in a very, very competitive industry in a big city. I am beginning to lean more towards the side of "good seo" is good aeo.

My company is dreammsp and MOZ has me as tagged as "spam" for some reason I have no idea. Also my domain authority is terrible (7, down from 10). I've been working so hard on my website. I feel like I've done everything correctly. But I just can't get good results. My family depends on this working out. I'd write out my entire sob story, but I've just talked about it so much that I'm exhausted. my post in smallmsp last month "feeling dejected" is where I laid it out though.

I'm coming to you guys, what should I do to get my site ranking better? I don't have money for advertisement so I absolutely have to make this work organically.

So I have a webshop based in the Netherlands with an .nl url. my customers are 50% Dutch 50% eu. Does
It make a difference if I put my eu market on an .com
Domain… or just keep everything on the .nl domain.

I already have English pages but I’m now finished translating to German, Spanish, Italian, French.

What would you do? I always think about it like this. European customers see a .nl domain so they can see right away that it’s based in the Netherlands. .com is like could be everywhere. So that could
Lower the conversion and then my rankings…

Can’t make up
My mind. Hope some good answer can pull the trigger.

The website I'm handling had 350 referring spam domains 3 months ago. I submitted the disavow file but still the reffering domains have increased up to 1.3k. The number of backlinks doesn't seem to drop. Is there any alternative to fix them?

Has anyone cancelled an AI content tool (e.g. AirOps) this year instead of renewing? What made you decide and what are you doing instead? Context: Google's updated search guidance on using generative AI content on your website.

Which tool is not too expensive for checking organic traffic numbers. Ahref is way too expensive.

I made a website for a friend (barber) with a booking system. My website has a button book now which redirects you to the third party’s booking page.([companyname].setmore.com).

Reviews also get placed there on the booking page.

Is this terrible for SEO? Does this decrease the chance of him popping up when people look for barber on Google maps/google?

Or isn’t it too bad?

My website is noted on the booking page.

Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I'm a beginner building a B2B export/industrial site (targeting overseas buyers, English content). The site is brand new — no traffic, nothing indexed yet. I keep reading scattered advice and I want a process, not more random tips. Three specific questions I can't find a clear answer to:

1. Internal linking
   How do you plan internal links on a site that's still empty? I've read "hub and spoke," "breadcrumbs," and "contextual links," but I'm not sure what a realistic blueprint looks like when I only have a handful of pages at first. Should I design the link map before writing content, or let it grow organically? Do you build a visual map/sheet first?

2. Keyword mapping
   When I have a small catalog (say 10–20 product pages) plus blog, how do you actually map keywords to pages without cannibalization? Do you make one keyword per page strictly, or target clusters? What does a simple, actionable keyword-mapping template look like for a beginner?

3. Content production workflow
   I want a repeatable pipeline: research → outline → write → optimize → publish → interlink. Are there proven templates or checklists people actually use day to day? Also, for a brand-new site, should I focus on a handful of high-quality pages first, or publish consistently and fix later?

Context: I'm comfortable with basic technical SEO (sitemap, robots, meta). I'm building with WordPress + Breakdance. Any books, templates, or example sites that show a real internal-link architecture would be especially helpful.

Thanks in advance — really appreciate this community.

Going to do this one more time for the ten people at the back who dont want to hear.

The default position for crawling errors seems to be thinking that its a "technical error" and no suprise -this is exactly where people with a TechSEO background like to start.

So lets undo the circular thinking part.

95% of posts pertain to "crawled, not discovered" and 10% to "Discovered, not crawled"

The first default reply is always: Check GSC for errors

If there's a technical error in fetching the file IT CANNOT BE CRAWLED :)

1) Its that simple!

2) If its a 4xx, 3XX, 5XX error, blocked by robots or noindex - there is literally a status report FOR EACH one

Crawled, Not Indexed is NOT a technical error.

If you dont like Authority in SEO - then start a debate about it like an adult please, instead of sniping around the corners and downvoting people :D

Is it a quality error?

Anyone with access to authority or an indexing service never has this problem. Whether its a long page, or a short page, a page with embedded video, a cartoon, 10 words.

Anyone with content that can' tbe indexed can try it on another domain. In my 26 years I have never found content that cannot be indexed and this question comes up here 5-7 times PER day.

The only measure of content quality is authority - there is no content quality guide.

Is EEAT a content Quality guide?

No EEAT misses -A for Art, C for Creativity, E for Entertainment, L for Learning and F for Fun

The proper updated version of EEAT - EAT 3.0 or More EEAT is actually FEEECAAL

Fun

Entertaining

Experience

Expertise

Creative

Authority

Art

Learning

FEEECAAL is the best EEAT.

So my client site was sitting at basically zero in Search Console for like 4 months and most pages weren't even indexed. Around Sept 24 they finally got picked up and impressions started going up.

Last 3 months it's 835 impressions, 20 clicks, avg position 23.2. Clicks are still tiny, 0 to 3 a day, but the line is going the right way at least.

Got me wondering, has anyone here actually brought a site back after a penalty? Did it ever get back to where it was before, or does it just never feel the same? And what finally got your pages from position 20+ onto page 1?

Even slow or half recovered stories are welcome.

My organization terminated third-party content writers because they used an AI tool to generate content and lacked sufficient knowledge about our product. As a result, we had to invest extra effort into ensuring that the content was technically accurate on our end. Now, my company is considering replacing freelance writers with AI tools to create content. So, I have a question for the SEO experts: Is my management making the right decision, or should we continue to seek out skilled writers?

With zero-click searches and AI Overviews taking over the top of the SERPs, it feels like traditional SEO is just the baseline entry ticket now. Lately, almost every strategy conversation has shifted toward AIO (AI Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

People throw both terms around interchangeably, but we've been treating them as two completely separate problems in our workflow, and I'm curious if everyone else here is approaching it the same way:

1. AIO (AI Optimization) = Machine Readability & Inclusion To me, AIO is about making sure LLMs and AI crawlers can extract and understand the page without guessing.

• Structure over fluff: Answering the core query immediately under clean H2/H3 hierarchies and bulleted takeaways.
• Heavy Schema: Doubling down on JSON-LD (FAQ, Article, Organization, Product) to feed explicit entity relationships directly to the crawlers.
• Entity coverage: Focusing on complete topical context rather than isolated keyword variations.

2. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) = Citation & Narrative Control If AIO gets the content read by the model, GEO is what actually gets a site cited or recommended inside AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

• Information Gain: AI engines seem to ignore rehashed top-10 articles and prioritize pages that have unique stats, original frameworks, or first-hand data.
• Off-page entity mentions: Unlinked brand mentions across forums, niche directories, and industry discussions seem to carry way more weight for LLM trust than traditional low-tier backlinks.
• Tracking Reference Rate: Shifting focus from pure CTR to how often a brand/site is actually named in the generated summary.

Right now, I'm trying to figure out where to allocate the most effort for the rest of the year.

For those of you actively testing AIO and GEO on your sites:

1. Are you seeing a noticeable difference in AI citations from heavy Schema/JSON-LD alone, or is off-site brand authority doing the heavy lifting?
2. How are you measuring ROI when impressions go up via AI summaries, but traditional organic clicks stay flat?

Hi, I need help regarding guest posting. I plan to contact many websites and publishers to secure guest posts and list myself on guest posting platforms like iCopify and Link Publishers. How can I do that? I also need help regarding a free posting website list

please help reagrding this I will be very thankfull if Someone share a list of those websites

I work in the insurance industry. For some of our most important keywords, we used to be mentioned and cited in Google's AI Overviews (AIOs), given that we're a significant player in the market. However, after a month or so, the AIOs stopped mentioning any entities altogether. When entities started appearing again, some of our competitors, including smaller players, were mentioned, but we weren't.

My questions are:

1. Is there any way to influence Google to change the broader pattern of its AIO responses, where there's a legitimate basis for doing so?
2. Is it possible that our competitors engaged in some form of "downvote-bombing" to influence the AIOs and get themselves mentioned?
3. If you were in my position, what steps would you take to improve our chances of being mentioned again?

Thanks for reading all the way!

Cloudflare and OpenAI put out a post this week about a pilot where Cloudflare's network helps OpenAI's search crawler decide what to crawl: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-openai-discovery-agentic-web/

It doesn't say how ChatGPT's search algorithm actually works, but I think it drops a few real hints.

Most of it is about Cloudflare sharing data that helps OpenAI figure out which pages are worth indexing or updating, so the crawler spends less time on pages that aren't worth it or haven't changed and has more resources left to index more pages. That's aimed right at what's possibly Google's number one pain point right now. Billions of new pages keep getting added, Google is indexing a smaller and smaller share of them, and a lot of site owners are having a harder time getting pages into the index.

The part I keep coming back to is that the article specifically points out that a lot of the most helpful pages on the internet don't have many links pointing to them. My read is that whatever they're building won't depend on links as much as Google does. In Google's defense, they've said many times they don't want to rely on links as much as they do, and the algorithm does seem to lean on them less as it gets more sophisticated. I still think it depends on links more than they'd like to admit.

Whether that's enough to compete with Google, I honestly don't know. Google has a huge head start and a ton of data. On the other hand, Cloudflare is the biggest CDN and DNS provider, so it sees server-level data Google doesn't. And a search engine that only has to work for AI is a lot easier to build: people look at the top one to three results, while an AI will happily read through a hundred or more, so you mostly need to find the best one or two hundred pages rather than put them in perfect order.

I don't think ChatGPT is going to replace Google as the default search engine, but the competition does seem to be heating up.

Hi everyone,

I recently did a complete rewrite of about 10 blog posts out of ~650 on my site. The overall topic remains the same, but the content changed significantly.

In the process, I updated the URL slugs (though the WordPress Post IDs stayed the same) and set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.

My question: If an old URL was originally published on May 12, 2018, and the rewritten post went live on the new URL on August 28, 2026, should I backdate the new URL's publication date to May 12, 2018, or keep it as August 28, 2026? I'm a bit worried about any adverse SEO owing to false representation of dates.

Thanks!

Long story short we offer a global service for people visiting a particular country we rank top 5 in the US but totally invisible in the SERPS in Asian countries. Our top competitor ranks well in Asia but on page 2 or 3 in US and EU. We are totally invisible in the serps for Asia

Hi all,

I'm looking to get some opinions on what would be a fair salary for an SEO Executive with around 2 years of experience.

The role would be within an e-commerce team at a business based in the East Midlands. The person would be responsible for managing SEO independently, with support and reporting to an E-commerce Manager.

The role is fully office-based.

Given the level of responsibility and experience required, what salary range do you think would be reasonable for this position?

I'd appreciate any insights from people working in SEO, recruitment or e-commerce, particularly those based in the UK.