For more intensive crawls than SEMRush, Ahrefs, etc., do you all still recommend ScreamingFrog? Been 3 years since I've used it but rolling out a large project soon and want to lean on it. Any other tools I should take a look at? Thanks!

We all talk about SEO tricks & tips, what Google favours and what it doesnt.

Weve all implemented this and that, sometimes that and this.

But all in all, what is the most killer SEO strategy/campaign to run for a local business in 2025?

What if a client had an unlimited budget for their business and were talking about doing everything we can to get them the sweet #1 spot in their local results?

Are you running digital PR, building backlinks, creating new pages?

I know it may seem like a broad question and hard to answer but Im still curious if there are certain things that can be agreed on for ranking local businesses above others.

I’m just starting to run my own website and I’m still not very familiar with backlinks, keywords, etc. I’ve seen a lot of SEO articles mention tools, and it seems like SEMrush and Ahrefs are the most popular. However, my budget is limited. If I can only choose one tool to help with SEO, which one should I pick? Thanks in advance for your answers!

Ones with 30 or less DA, the lower the better, but still lots of valuable rankings.

So I have a local home service business. Have a website, have used some freelance SEO people to help build basics but am considering making a bigger commitment to focus more on it.

It is a 7x more investment monthly compared to doing it myself and with freelancers.

I'm struggling to make that commitment without knowing the return. I know SEO isn't fast but what is the timeline I can expect to move from page 2-4 to top of page 1 (locally)?

And what have others seen for lead volume in that position. Traffic is great but leads are what drive business. If I can't get organic spend to be at least on par with lead generating spend from a cost per lead perspective, how can I justify that spend?

Open to be educated and thanks for reading!

I haven't had a subscription in a few years.

Back then I did ahrefs and Moz.

Does anyone still use Moz?

It seems like everybody is doing sem rush or ahrefs.

I am just looking to do a month or two while I get a new site or two set up for a Friends business.

Curious what the people paying are paying for

Howdy SEO community,

TLDR; Do you feel that its becoming harder and harder to acquire good SEO leads?

I work with SEO for past 5 years now currently on my 2nd year of freelancing, I managed to push my agency to 10K MMR, but eventually the sales cycle stopped, because once you done the foundations for the company and they see value in SEO they bring inhouse people to fill the holes/push further.

I been doing:
* Manual Outreach
* Reddit (helping folks over in different communities) also DM's.
* Social media (Linkedin, FB, X).
* Upwork/Fiverr

I have really clear message how SEO reduces CAC of whole marketing, which is increased due folks trying to do ads to push the conversions, and I feel I'm not typical "Hello Dear/Sir" outreacher. I usually spend time crafting the emails to actual companies need, identifying the problems and letting them know how to fix em.

I even did some case studies how we managed to make over 400% ROI with certain clients which I felt would help me convert some leads.

Last year It felt crazy easy to get new leads, people were eager to invest in SEO and scale the traffic channels. However something changed in industry @ 2025, do you feel that as well?

Let me know your frame-works how you usually acquire leads, what do you feel is the easiest ICP right now to book? What tools are you using? How do you actually managing to survive?

I'm just double-question everything I do right now.

As you know I learn and share and lot in this sub. I run three full time businesses. My heart will always be doing in home academic tutoring here on Oahu specializing in students with ADHD because I have ADHD.

Due to some of the skills I picked up here, a government home for boys found me online and asked me to tutor them and be their primary source of education. That means I'll have the opportunity to help kids who no one has tried to help or didn't want to help.

You can all be proud of yourselves. If it weren't for all of you honing my SEO skills, that agency would have never found me. That means you all played some part in helping these children.

I thank you

God bless you all

Looking for a good keyword tool for about $20/month, something like KeySearch? Thought about going with them because I like the UI, bu I'm just trying to bootstrap a simple website with a few articles for now so I figured I would get some opinions and maybe cheaper prices?

I optimized my homepage for “cleaning services city” but saw a lot of traffic on another keyword “house cleaning city”. So I decided to create a page optimizing for that keyword. Headings, meta data, etc. but my homepage is beating that page by 2 positions. I’m afraid of cannibalization.

I’m thinking of building links for my “house cleaning city” page, since my home page may be ranking higher due to it having more authority from links, and still being highly relevant to the keyword.

Let me know what you guys think.

How can i rank in SEO with an etf savings plan calculator. This is also my main keyword and there will be just one page with the calculator on it. I think this isn‘t great for SEO to use just one page.

there is a widespread phenomenon that happened between Feb 3rd and Feb 4th where sites around the world lost all impressions. The only common factor seems to be that they are all relatively new sites.

Not sure why this isn't being talked about more. I found a number of threads where people are chiming in from all over with the same exact scenario. February 3rd and prior the site was ranking and getting impressions. come Feb 4th to today zero impressions.

A site i started in November is not longer even ranking for the exact name of the site. before Feb 4th is was number one if you searched the name. now not in top 100. all pages are still indexed

anyone have any insight as to what Google did that effected so many sites overnight?

please chime in if you have a site that this happened to.

Hello, basically as the title says, I'm starting up a web agency, we develop mainly WP websites and we're looking to add SEO in our care plan along with hosting and maintenance.

My question is is there any service offering a fixed monthly cost we could include in client's care plan that would handle 100% of the SEO in those website or any good reputable whitelabel agency.

And also if you know any good courses about SEO and mind sharing them (can be free or paid), looking to expand on this domain aswell.

Thanks!

Tons of broken external links this week. I'm an analyst for a specific vertical within the medical field. They were all gov sites, many of which were the CDC. Gone.

Not a political post, tho I certainly have my opinions. Just an FYI. I'm spending my whole morning swapping them all out.

Also, for some odd reason, all HuffPost links came back as "broken" even though they're fine.

I've got a reputable News site which does very well on Google Search. I've always ignored the incessant requests for links to be placed within articles - especially as many come from dodgy Gmail addresses with broken English. However, it's hard enough to earn money in journalism and if these guys actually pay, then they're better than many legit industry players. So, is adding these links harmful? Do they actually pay? How long do they expect a link to be there for (i know some publishers only let them stay up for 3 to 6 months)? What's the going rate? I see plenty of tales of people making a fortune from these things but the ones I've worked with don't seem to have much to spend.

Does anyone understand this well enough to ELI5? I'm a photographer. The self-build website instructions (Pixieset and Yoast/WP) say "if the image is purely decorative, leave it blank. They also discourage "keyword stuffing". Okay... as a photographer, most of my images are purely decorative. They are art. The art is decorating the page. The blog post showing off the art is a page full of decorative images with some basic storytelling paragraphs. AND - all the images are from the same wedding event, so describing again and again "table decor at _____ wedding venue" is going to be perceived as keyword stuffing, right?

But as of right now, (according to semrush) I rank nowhere and Pixieset has identified 3566 images without alt text and has put that as the reason I'm in the yellow for SEO. I'll be googling YouTube videos to try to understand this better, but if any of you out there truly get it, I'd love a more nuanced explanation.

I have already optimized everything i can think of to the max.

Seems like my hosting plan currently just can't provide what i need and need a cloud option likely, however i cannot afford one right now.

Given I can't upgrade to better hosting for a while, I am wondering how bad is it really for the mobile speed being in the 60s? 60-65. It's 100 on desktop.

Thanks in advance!!

I've just built a new website in November 24 and it has been wiped out on google since the 4th of February. It's happened to a lot of sites.

I'm getting messages from site owners who are seeing the same. This has not yet been covered by the main seo sites or Seo's on twitter.

There's an awful lot of people out there who have recently built a new website and who are not seeing rankings or impressions at all. The sites are barely crawled by Google as well.

I wanted a post to bring this up to see how widespread this is and what the future may hold or if anyone has actually built a site recently and see good rankings.

Let’s say you’re launching a new local service business (e.g., house cleaning, plumbing, landscaping, etc.). What would be your step-by-step SEO strategy to dominate the local search results?

From what I’ve gathered.

• Keyword Research
• On-Page SEO
• Content strategy
• Google Business Profile (reviews, posts, optimized)
• Citations & Local Listings
• Backlink Strategy
• Technical SEO
• Competitor Analysis
• GSC

Looking forward to hearing different approaches from those who have successfully ranked local businesses!

Hey guys, I'm building my career in SEO and I wanna know from some experienced people about what they do in a SEO audit. I'm literally asking what do you guys do? How do you proceed? I've seen many videos and did some courses, but it feels incomplete. I don't have anyone to guide or mentor in this, so any help would be great.

Overall, what aspects or areas do you put in your final excel sheet?

I'm thinking of things like showing keyword improvements month to month, clicks, impressions, position, CTR and conversions. What tools do you use? Do you generate reports manually using Google Search Console? Do you have a client reporting tool that you use?

I have a website where I manually push each new post, confirm that a sitemap is available and content is viewable, confirm my robots.txt is valid and isn't hiding anything and after all that manual work a console that says that :

1. 14 of 25 pages is indexed (Can't seem to get to 100%)
2. That there is 30 pages found in the sitemap and all is good, despite only indexing few
3. It lies saying that 14 pages are available but site:hookd.app search provides only 10 pages
4. Messages saying indexing confirmed page will show shortly and then not showing months later.

Am I really getting something wrong? Or does my website have too few pages or views for their system to even both providing acurate data / indexing?

The site is hookd.app and has no 500 errors, has clear links between pages and on SEMRush looks like everything is perfect. So is there some massive piece of information that I simply don't have or does google just outright lie to smaller pages? Or even if anyone else is having similar issues or changes after recent google updates?

Thanks

I have a great business. I sell a product on ebay. I am looking for SEO help to promote the product on Google. I have used several companies with NO results. I am looking for results. I will pay percentage of my profits for results.

I don't know if such posts are allowed here or not, but if anybody can tell me what we are doing wrong with our site to get little to no organic traffic it would be really appreciated. Do not sugar coat your words for me, let me learn the hard way.

Our website is "Techtroduce"

It has been up since July, Adsense monetization approved at the end of October and we saw a massive drop in organic traffic since the December Google Spam Update.