First off, I'm not an SEO expert by any means. I’m a fractional CMO for B2B SaaS startups, so my focus is on strategy, ops, and overall Pipeline impact.

I recently brought on a SaaS SEO agency to support my portfolio clients, and we kicked things off in the first week of February. I know SEO takes time, but I’m starting to feel like they’re running an outdated playbook, especially with how fast AI is changing the game for everything marketing.

Here’s what we’re doing so far:

1. Content & Webpage Audit – Reviewed existing pages to identify areas for improvement (e.g., keyword optimization, content gaps, etc.).
2. Keyword Research & Content Planning – Identified relevant keywords and created 200+ blog content ideas across BOFU, MOFU, and TOFU. We’re publishing about 4/month, mostly starting with BOFU.
3. Technical SEO – Fixing site errors, broken links, and other issues.
4. Software Directory Listings – Created profiles on 50+ software directories.
5. Product Landing Pages – Building keyword-optimized “solutions for X” pages.
6. Product Inclusion – Researching blog posts like “Top 10 sales enablement tools” and paying to get included in the top 1–2 listings.

So...SEO experts out there, is this what SEO should look like in 2025? What’s missing or outdated?

Just trying to figure out if I’m on the right track with this agency, or if I need to find a better partner/hire someone.

Appreciate any insights! 🙏

I think you know the answer. No.

Google released AI overviews for more countries and search queries with the March Core update.

More and more popular "white-hat" SEO experts change their minds. They don't believe Google speakers and guides anymore. They see Google working hard to eat their traffic.

Many discussions around that, but they have led to almost nothing:

1/ Yes, we've already realized that the world of zero-click marketing is inevitable.
2/ Yes, we've already realized that there is no sense in creating content for most banal information search terms.

But what if:

1/ Google goes even further and starts showing AI overviews for more niches and searches?
2/ Google starts creating even more of its sites and online stores?

Site owners cannot resist this, because game theory will not allow it.

To force Google to change, a huge share of content creators must close their content for scanning and indexing by Google.

But as soon as some part of the creators block websites from Google, the creators who do NOT do it will greatly benefit from it.

So, it will never happen on the level we need to change Google's behaviour.

That's why I don't see a mechanism to make Google pay for the content we create.

Do you see?

Any one seen ranking changes or drop in position?

I just got a new job modernizing 5 websites for a company from WordPress to a JavaScript framework.
They had terrible performance and were hoping to boost SEO.

They are paying an SEO company $1000's per site, per month to 'help with their rankings'.

But I am smelling BS when I read the emails that say they have 'optimized on-page content' and have 'continued to drive their rankings'

I am the only one with access to the GitHub Repo, so they have not touched the actual code, nor have they found any authoritative backlinks in the past year.
As I learn about SEO I see beginner mistakes across the board. (bad keyword targeting, no or invalid schema markup, no effort to gain rich snippets etc)

My boss is an absolute legend, and I do not want him to be getting stuffed over by this company. He wants to hire me instead but is worried we will loose rankings if he ditches the other company.

Is there some secret sauce they are using? some software that acts as a middleware?
How is this SEO company providing any benefit without accessing the codebase, finding backlinks, writing blogs, redirecting 404s etc (all the things I am doing now...)

Thanks for your help

SEO though originally short for search-engine-optimization, was supposed and always thought of as writing and doing stuff to provide a good experience to the humans who are reading or consuming what we put out there

read the blogs with as less clutter as possible

provide the answer in the most direct manner possible

don't fluff in jargon, just use keywords necessary to reach the reader

life was good before AI, it was us humans doing the good work so other humans get to enjoy the same

now it's all dead, its' what's called dead internet theory.

i gotta write stuff faster and output even faster with AI tools, publish it automatically with an AI agent, use keywords to rank in chatGPT, only for the reader to notice 2 words out of 1000 because they wanted their answer to be brief in the AI

not to complain or anything but what happened to the humane touch, what happened to taking hours to draft a blog with good readability, who knows what metrics these AI use to rank whatever they give the user on their UI

let me guess, does it need 10 rounds of adding 'seamless' to the blog because i am not doing that

i am quitting this career after half a decade and have decided to go live in a farm or something atleast my hands and legs have a purpose there

Recently I've launched a new site with zero domain authority and backlinks. Today I checked with GSC and saw that 24 out of 530 pages are indexed. When I look into which URLs got indexed, I saw that half of them from the blog template that I forgot to delete, pure lorem ipsum nonsense. Moreover, blog has no links from the main page and there is no main blog page. A user can't reach to them in anyway unless they type the exact URL.

Why Google decided to index those pages instead of main content? How Google decided that these pages are valuable and useful?

hey y'all! curious to know if any of you have built anything, have any awesome AI prompts, or have seen any existing tools that help with SEO strategy?

e.g., I give something my URL, maybe some Semrush or Ahrefs data, and my goal, and it tells me semantically what my top priority should be?

OR if I want to start a site from scratch: I give it the URL, it tells me what keywords to go after, what strategies would work best, etc.?

Curious what's out there!

Nine months ago, I bought a domain and a hosting plan just to see how easy it was to build a website.

At that time, I had zero knowledge about SEO, anchors, or anything related. It took me three months of learning through YouTube and various websites. Eventually, I got approved by AdSense—but honestly, I had no idea how I managed it, even after watching a thousand videos.

I’m still learning, but growth has been slow—practically zero. I can’t afford premium SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs, but I do get some traffic from Reddit by posting my content in different subreddits but they are too cruel rules they directly banned me . What To Do 😓😩😫😫😫😰 My website is focused on science, and I’ve already published over 300+ blogs with proper formatting.

The only major problem? I struggle with managing SEO effectively. I feel stuck and frustrated.

How can I improve my keyword strategy without paid tools? Any tips would be really helpful!

Zapier does Programmatic SEO perfectly and gets away with it.

I feel like people can't differentiate between thoughtful Programmatic SEO and spammy AI generated slop Programmatic SEO

Are people really selling this as a strategy? I started getting notifications on a site I built awhile back. Called the client. Apparently they paid for an online course from a “SEO” guy who had them make a page describing the services, then duplicated that page 213 times while ONLY changing the town name and the zip code. Desperately tried to explain why this is bad, and the client said this guy knows what he’s talking about. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Hello, and sorry in advance if this question has been asked before. I want to ask if SEO is a good career for me, especially in this new AI age.

I'm a writer who has been writing articles for websites for over 8 years, but my niche is currently not paying very well, so I've been looking to expand my territory. I know about SEO, and has been writing articles that are SEO oriented alongside the editors of the websites I worked for, but I didn't formally study it. I also know Html, CSS, Javascript, and I know what some decisions to make to make the website more SEO viable. I tried getting into copywriting, and I get the idea and the voice behind it, but I wouldn't say it's my calling (I just loved the parts where the person I used to study copywriting from would audit the website for mistakes or things that do not convert, maybe because its the parts I feel familiar with the most).

So my question is, with this background, do I have a headstart in SEO, and should I pursue it? appreciate any guidence.

I know the recent algorithm updates, plus (and primarily!) AI Overviews have affected lots of websites. It’s frustrating to look at the Google Search Console graphs these days. I’ve been updating articles religiously, including high-performers, but the updates barely move the needle, it seems. The Impressions graph and the Clicks graph have been going in the opposite directions for weeks.

Anyone else experiencing this? Any thoughts or tips? Am i missing something crucial here?

Blog niche: SaaS

I've been out of the game for a bit so am trying to figure out where my knowledge is outdated etc.

As far as approaching link building goes, have there been any notable changes etc over the past couple of years?

When looking at linkbuildig for clients (predominantly local and local ecomm sites) what is the best sorts of sites to be trying to get links on/ what's a good methodology to approach?

For example, years ago, commenting on blog posts was a good, cheap and easy way to get backlinks, but as far as I know, that's not necessarily a smart thing to do anymore as it's spammy.

My brand name is a made up name with basically no competition or search volume. I instantly ranked number 1 because of this. I dropped my product and instantly got organic traffic to that domain by people searching my brandname on google (around 100 clicks a day at at 80%CTR). How come after two days im suddenly at the number 40 spot and people are messaging me on other platforms and telling my that they could find my page on google?

My on page seo isnt currently the best since I have other things to take care of, but why was I ranking so well and completely dropped?

Is there anything I can do like a tool, which would show me the CTR a keyword ranking organically could get? Because much traffic may go to YT videos, or maybe snippets etc.

Is there any tool that would show me the CTR of like the ORGANIC #1 spot for that keyword?

Yesterday I did a search with an LLM and I doubted the search it had done, so I asked to tell me which search string it had used and on which engine.

Well, I had asked to search for job postings with some characteristics such as being in Europe and with salary greater than 100k, and he searched for something like "job offers ai research Europe 100k", a search I would never have done. The presence of "Europe" and "100k" could leave out many valid results where those terms are not mentioned (eg "AI Specialist Milan/remote 127k" - to make a stupid example)

This is something that too many are underestimating, but the game has just begun and it is not yet known which search tools (Google API, duckduck go, own crawlers) they will use.

The people I see using the LLM search do not ask how the search was done and seeing the results they think that the chatbot has scanned the web when in fact it has done one or two searches and accepted what came out.

The positioning of some sites on some engines like duckduck go is very different from that on Google and even this alone could lead to remaining out of the users' sight.

Have you tried to reverse engineer the LLM searches? How are you moving on this front?

I've made SEO mistakes before so I am here to ask the experts. My Wordpress site is doing quite well and we are running a successful business and rank well. However, when we began I didn't know much about SEO and never set up parent and child pages on my website - there is no page hierarchy at all and we don't have a typical menu-submenu style (custom web design team created the site).

If I begin organizing the pages into child/parent hierarchies can I screw anything up rankings-wise? I want to be careful here. Thank you for your help.

Do any of you have any suggestions or methods to finding a ton of relevant and possibly converting depending on your niche, long tail keywords in the shortest amount of time?

Hi all, I'm restarting my SEO journey with my web design agency website since COVID and I'm trying to understand why my ranked keywords are being so crazy with rankings changing every 2-3 days. I'm talking like keyword difficulty of 0 to 5, super easy keywords. A day goes by and I'm ranked #1 and then drops to like #97 it's crazy.

I know there was a major update in March but I'm just trying to understand why is this so sporadic and is it anything on my end that i'm doing wrong?

I'm not a expert/pro in SEO but I'd consider myself pretty intermediate.

I'm targettiing a few small cities in a state that isn't that populated like the search volume is no more than 10-20 volume per keywords.

Title, meta, headings, and even alt text are optimized and my page speed is 100 so I'm just confused what I should be evaluating with something like this going on? Thank you.

I started a small local online business directory in Jan 2000 for myself out of necessity since nothing really existed at the time. I used it to help myself keep track of all the things to do in my area with children since I was a first time at-home mom with a newborn. It really took off and for well over a decade, I think…got loads of traffic (in my opinion…it still wasn’t huge compared to commercial sites with money to advertise) and tended to come up on the first page of local related searches.

I had some paid listings and ran into people all the time that were familiar with it and used it regularly. I was proud of my project.

Then life got busy and my family grew and I didn’t work on it so much…now it’s likely been close to a decade since I had any regular traffic and I just haven’t had time to work much on it.

But my kids are grown now and I am interested in working on the project again and now I can enlist family to help. I started another complete overhaul of the Wordpress site and I think I am nearly ready to import all the business info I have been collecting in a spreadsheet for awhile and I pay my son to check the info to make sure it’s still accurate.

I like my site to be different. Not full of the clunky and annoying ads it seems every site has…but I need to make money. So I plan to again offer paid listing options. I don’t expect to make any major money but I am hoping eventually, once I get traffic up again to be able to get paid listings again.

Today I am wondering…do people still visit online directories in 2025??

Why do you guys think SEO performance improvements happen gradually instead of in sudden jumps, even when everything seems optimised?

If Googlebot has already discovered, crawled and indexed your pages, shouldn't it immediately know exactly how they stack-up vs. competitors?

Or could it be that Google continuously reassesses and revalidates pages over time, making incremental adjustments rather than big leaps?

I'd love to hear your thoughts/theories on why SEO growth tends to be slow and steady rather than sudden.