I run a 7-figure marketing agency that’s super niched in a specific industry, and while business is great, I’m seriously blown away by how hard it is to find solid SEO help.

I’ve hired in-house for $70K–$90K/year with full benefits, PTO, 401k, the whole package, and they still can’t figure out how to do basic stuff like redirecting links or fixing 404 errors. Not talking strategy or high-level audits… I mean the bare minimum technical work you'd expect from someone in this role.

So I go the freelancer route, thinking maybe I’ll get better results. Instead, the simplest audit takes months to implement. Everything is "in progress" or "SEO takes time." Like yeah, I get SEO isn't overnight, but fixing broken links isn’t rocket science.

At this point, I’m seriously wondering: is the SEO industry just this bad? Or am I hiring wrong? Do real SEO operators still exist? This digital marketing industy kills my soul.

Just needed to vent and see if others are dealing with the same crap?

Hi. I’ve previously worked in corporate research domain and now I’m planning to switch to a new one. I came across SEO and I really liked it. I just got to know a few topics and the onpage SEO in particular has interested me more. Please guide me on how can I pursue a course and which are the ones that are reputable and can help me get a job. I’m also willing to learn HTML (SEO-related), if you can let me know that as well, it would be very helpful. I just need some of the best courses to upskill myself in this field.

Any additional inputs are also welcomed! Thanks in advance :)

AI Snippet gives alot of the relevant info to the user. I dont think people are gonna scroll down as much anymore and look at other info. This is a drastic change in the business of SEO I think. Are top 10 positions going to get less clicks now? I think so....

How do you perform your keyword research? Are you using any free or paid tools?

I generally follow my gut feeling with keywords. I just brainstorm a list together with related words on a specific keyword. Then I also transform them in long tail keywords. I use / [keyword] in google search to see what is often searched for.

So, no real tools, but I wonder if I miss out. What do you use?

I heard some people say that "google loves recommending google" so I was wondering if that would work in the same way with having a YouTube video in an article.

My website (realtormate com) is 6 months old, and after running it, my team posted articles with high-volume keywords with low difficulty to gain traffic. Most of the articles were poorly written but they received tons of traffic, and suddenly the traffic dropped two months ago.

We didn't receive any penalties or notices from Google, and our traffic isn't zero, but it has suddenly decreased from 1K clicks a day to 30 clicks. I would provide a screenshot of our GSC, but the subreddit doesn't allow photos.

So, I was wondering is there any way to recover from this? I tried to update the articles, publish new ones, and remove the old ones but nothing has happened. It's like Google has shadowbanned my domain.

Apologies if this is obvious, I am a bit of a noob to SEO. As far as I am aware my site is relatively optimised, but I’m looking to investigate reasons why my competitors continue to beat me on my targeted keywords.

Any tool recommendations for this? Thanks :)

I have a few articles that are ranking around 50-70, with around 3000 impressions, and 0-20 clicks per month.

These stats are from GSC.

What can I do to improve the ranking of these articles?

TIA!

Building up backlinks, writing articles & social media. But I had a thought of doing a press release to see if it would make any sizable impact. Has anyone done it before & had positive results?

I'm working on a brand new domain for the past 5 months. Happy with the content. Not building any backlink and we've started seeing good growth in impressions.

I believe Google is evaluating our site; and figuring out our niche. How long do you think we'll see improvement in clicks?

Hey there! I have been writing 1-2 blogs per week for just a little over a year now and it pulls traffic to our website. I run a video production company in Boston and I have written blogs on topics ranging from "Best Places to Shoot Video Content In Boston" to more gear based blogs like "Why I love XYZ camera". I've discovered that my gear blogs get a lot of traffic compared to the others. A blog I wrote comparing two cameras is on page 1 of google search and it gets a good amount of clicks!

I've noticed that this kind of traffic impacts my bounce rate because people who come to read about why X camera is better than Y camera on my site are not going to click on our "Out Work" page or our "Contact" page. These visitors will not convert is what I'm saying I guess!

With that being said... we do have a lot more traffic to the site in general... not just more impressions and clicks but like a 500% increase of form submissions for jobs from last year at this same time. I've put a photo of our impressions and clicks for the last 16 months below. I'm not an SEO expert (obviously) but this traffic can't possibly be just to our blog...

So in reading all of this, now I guess my question for you is should I keep writing those gear head blogs to get any and everyone to my website? Or should I just be grateful for the traffic that has gotten me and move over to doing more schema code / other SEO tactics. Is writing those blogs and getting those people to my site helpful overall? Like is google feeding my site to more clients because I have valuable content on my site to a handful of people?

I expect that many of you don't believe that this is a thing. I didn't either.

I run an agency and we were in the first page of Google for over 10 years for our local terms. Over the years we've gotten stronger, more links, more prominent PR, bigger clients.

In May 2024 we got hit hard and lost our rankings. We did a lot of work and started recovering. We were back in the top 10 by November 2024... only to get crushed by December... and then even worse around February 2025.

I noticed that starting around February 2024 we started getting an insane amount of spam traffic from outside the US. To the tune of roughly 15% of our total traffic is from Algeria! All with 0s time on site.

This is still going on until today.

We are based in the US, and only market to the US. Occasionally we get some clients from all over the world, but obviously we're not a top hit in other countries.

About 40%+ of our total traffic is from Algeria, Poland, France, Brazil, and a few other European countries. I'm not including Pakistan, India or Philippines here, because while we get a ton of traffic from them too, I can understand why that is (people looking for work or scoping us out). The rest make no sense - not at these volumes.

So the first question is - do you think that having a bunch of bots or humans visit your site and then bounce right away could actually affect your rankings?

The second question is - whether you think that's possible or not - can you think of any downside in actually blocking foreign traffic, particularly from these countries that send the highest volume?

SEO is pretty nuanced and falls into a gray area at times regarding best strategy or approach. Sometimes during interviews it feels like talking about SEO here on reddit, where some people agree with what you say, while others debate against it. I often find myself questioning the level of experience the interviewer has, and if they would approach the same issue differently, even though my way and their way are both good approaches. Or sometimes they might be outright wrong, but they don't know that, so then I don't get the job because of their ignorance on the subject that doesn't align with my answer. Okay rant over.

Greetings Everyone,

I am based in UAE Dubai and have been planning to have my own business starting from scratch although I don't have resources to establish a business here but in my filed (Automotive repairs/Car garage) I have few friends who have generated tons of leads and have made them self very well over the time.

When I have asked them for help - of course they don't want to and so I want to learn SEO by my self step by step and make my living without depending on anyone.

I would really appreciate you guys if you can help in a way from where I can start learning and implementing.

Thanks in Advance.

So recently, I got an Indian niche blog and was surprised to see their growth within 5-10 days. They bought the low DA expired college-related domain having 20-25 root domain backlinks, started posting from 10^th April, and now ranking on Google for more than 22.6k high to low competitive keywords and also driving traffic from Google Discover.

These are a few more findings related to the blog:

1. This is the Ahrefs domain stats:

2. They already gaining more than 500k monthly organic traffic as per SEMrush:

Look at their vertical traffic graph:

3. As I already said, they started posting from 10^th April, and they have somehow 130 to 140 real post pages till now, and more than 200 garbage Tag pages with duplicate content. Each of their post is indexed by Google almost instantly, despite having a new blog. You will be shocked seeing their keyword ranking growth with 10 days:

4. I also noticed that this website is showing up many times on Google discover from which they are driving good amount of traffic too.

It’s fact that this type of quick achievement is not possible through the White Hat method. Interested in getting some insight on their BH method, if anyone has any idea about it.

Seems like I'm permanently removed from Google ads now over "verification" which I cannot comply with as a service provider and sole proprietor. So I'm looking into getting a url , Instagram and paying FB. Any other alternatives appreciated.

For my local website, I had around 18 pages that ranked top 3 for [service] + [location] | [business_name].

Suddenly, I woke up and noticed that 15 of the pages fell off Google’s search results (tracking through SEMrush). They are no longer showing in Google search results. I checked GSC and everything looks alright.

This is a relatively new domain, with a low DR but these pages were on top until I noticed new banklinks from unknown, toxic domains started popping up (all weird junk)…I immediately went ahead and disavowed these domains with the tool but I read that the results might be minimal from that.

Not sure what to do…is my answer just to get more backlinks and build DR to get these pages to start populating in results again?

In Google Search Console, what's considered a good click-through rate (CTR)?

Lately, I've been getting around 10 clicks from roughly 100 to 200 impressions. A few months ago, I’d get the same number of clicks (around 10) but from 400–900 impressions per day. I’ve made significant improvements to my site and added a lot of new content about 100 times, so I’m surprised by this change i was expecting more impressions and more clicks.
i used to have only 5k indexed links. Now i have over 40k indexed links

It almost feels like Google is imposing a daily limit—once I hit about 10 clicks, my site stops appearing in searches. My domain authority is only 19, and I have no backlinks. I’ve struggled to get others to mention my site, and I refuse to pay for backlinks. The system seems rigged—unless you pay or have connections to news sites for backlinks, growth feels impossible

I’m up for an SEO job (got my start in an SEO agency, been working as a marketing officer for 2 years) and they’ve asked me to analyse a landing page (technical, on-page/off-page.)

Should I ask them for access to the Google Analytics and Search Console?

Thanks in advance!

Work in property management, top 10 for our location based transactional keywords, a good chunk of them 1-5. But lots of PPC links at the top, local pack, PAA, occasional AIO, so even for my rank 2 keyword I’m all the way at the bottom. Generally I’m at a decent topical authority that I can rank first page for most new keywords (which are scarce lol)

I’m starting to work on link building now since our main competitor has gotten pretty aggressive with it, but some questions: 1. Do directories still work? Our competitors are listed on yellow pages etc and we aren’t, I’ve been reading conflicting information. 2. Should I prioritise the GMB listing over the website link when link building? Genuinely a lot of them have terrible reviews (3.5-4.5, I don’t really have a say on the reviews process at the moment) so I’m not sure if this would be a good practice 3. Other local seo tips would be much appreciated.

I get this question all the time, so I thought I'd share my answer here:

Yes, co-working spaces can be used on Google IF:

1. You have a dedicated office with permanent signage at the location
2. You have a unique phone number directly answered by your staff and not by the co-working building’s answering service
3. You have staff in place at the location during stated business hours

I still don’t love it, though, because co-working spaces put your Profile under extra scrutiny and could be more prone to triggering suspensions and verifications.

If you’re going to get a dedicated space with signage at a co-working space, you might as well get a real office somewhere else and not put that target on your back.

Did I miss anything?