SEO Agency Selection: RFP Templates and Evaluation Criteria
Excellent and incompetent SEO agencies can look identical in a pitch. Both can bring polished decks, confident accounts of past wins and someone who can read the room. The defense...
SEO field notes · newest first
SDC SEO
The timeline
215 postsSEO Experimentation Frameworks: Hypothesis Testing for Organic Search
Rigorous SEO testing is possible, but only if you drop the single-group before-and-after comparison. "A page changed, traffic moved, so the change worked" is not evidence; it is the absence...
SEO Career Paths: From Analyst to Director and Beyond
SEO has no standardized career ladder, so progression has to be navigated rather than followed. At mid-level the field can fork into two tracks: a senior individual-contributor path that deepens...
SEO Sprint Planning: Agile Workflows for Search Optimization Teams
Sprint methodology can work for SEO with one central adaptation, and getting that adaptation right is much of the job. SEO's feedback loop runs past the sprint boundary: you ship...
International Traffic Is Hurting Your Core Market Performance
For a business that sells in one country, visitors from countries it can't serve do their damage in the reports and the budget. They pull down the blended conversion rate....
How to Optimize for Entity-Based Search
Entity-based search means Google tries to understand the things a query and a page are about (people, organizations, places, products) and how they relate, not only which words match. For...
Why Changing Your CMS Broke Links You Never Touched
A platform migration can change URLs nobody meant to change. Trailing slashes, default permalink patterns and character encoding can differ between content management systems, so a migration that "kept the...
Webflow SEO Limitations You Hit at Scale
Webflow's design-first model lets marketers ship and restyle pages without a developer, and at fifty pages the SEO questions are the ordinary ones. As a content library grows into the...
How to Recover from a Google Penalty Without Knowing the Cause
If you've been down for weeks or months and can't name why, settle one question before anything else: is it a penalty at all? In Google's vocabulary, the ranking penalty...
SEO Team Onboarding: Ramp Plans for New Hires
A new SEO hire takes time to reach real productivity, and much of the delay comes from something other than skill. The job is site-specific: which technical constraints this codebase...
HubSpot CMS SEO for B2B That Actually Works
For a B2B company, the SEO asset to lean on in HubSpot is not a keyword tool. It is the CRM behind the website: the ability to see which organic...
Topic Clusters for B2B vs B2C: Key Differences in Strategy and Execution
A topic cluster is a pillar page that covers a subject broadly and supporting pages that cover its parts in depth. The shape is the same in B2B and B2C....
Your A/B Testing Tool Is Showing Googlebot the Control Variant
The conversion winner you just shipped may be content Google never saw during the test. Two setups can make that happen: a testing tool that keeps bots out of experiments,...
SEO and Engineering Collaboration: Communication Protocols for Technical Requests
SEO requests may stall when they arrive in a form engineering can't consume. An email saying "we need to fix our canonical tags for SEO" has no problem engineering can...
What Is Crawl Budget and Does It Matter for Small Sites?
Google gives small sites a test of its own. Its crawl budget guide says that if your site doesn't have a large number of pages that change rapidly, or if...
Rankings Crash Every Time You Publish New Content
When established pages dip right after you publish something new, look for three effects before assuming a mysterious penalty: overlap between the new page and existing ones on the same...
How to Reverse Engineer Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines for Your Site
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines are a public description of what Google means by a helpful, trustworthy result, which makes them a practical checklist for auditing your own site. Use...
Your Best Content Ranks on Page 2 Forever
A page that has sat in positions 11 to 20 for months isn't waiting for its turn. Something specific can separate it from the results on page one, and making...
Job Board SEO When Indeed Owns Everything
Out-muscling the large aggregators on head terms is a long shot for a niche job board, so it shouldn't lead with it. Its ground is three things that sit on...
Why Google Ignores Your Last-Modified Headers
If your server sends both an ETag and a Last-Modified header, Google's crawlers use the ETag. The documentation states this outright, and the rule follows the HTTP standard. When there...
SEO Reporting Automation That Executives Actually Read
An executive can stop reading an SEO report when it tells them what the team did instead of what the business got. Rankings climbed, impressions rose, the technical-health score improved,...
Your Bot Detection Is Blocking Googlebot and You Don’t Know It
Bot protection can block or challenge legitimate crawlers when its rules are ordered so that a strict challenge fires before the verified-bot allowance does. A sharp organic drop that starts...
Parameter URLs Are Eating Your Crawl Budget
Filter, sort and tracking parameters multiply URLs, and the result is two separate problems: crawling spent on copies, and copies sitting in the index. They need different tools, and the...
Why Your CDN Is Serving Different Content to Googlebot
When Google's copy of a page shows content your visitors no longer see, the first question isn't which cache is at fault. It is whether Google is still receiving the...
How to Optimize for Google SGE / AI Overviews
SGE, the Search Generative Experience, is what Google called its generative search before AI Overviews replaced it. The features you optimize for today are AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google's...