SEO
How to Automate Dull SEO Tasks

Some SEO processes involve repetitively clicking things on a screen. Not the best use of your time.
With the right tools, however, you can automate various SEO processes—and free up resources for tasks that need more creative, human input.
In this post, I’ll share two examples of how I automate SEO tasks.
Imagine being able to record and email article assignments to writers in seconds using a simple form like this:

Let’s look at how to set this up.
1. Set up an Airtable database for your writer and article data
Sign up for Airtable and create a new database with a table called “Writers.” The table should have columns for your writers:

In the same Airtable database, create a separate table called “Articles.”
Set up columns in this table for your:
- Article titles.
- Article outline links.
- Article due dates.
- Assigned writer (set this column up as a linked record to your “Writers” table so that Airtable can retrieve data on your writers from it).

You’ll also need to add a lookup field to pull the writer’s email address from the “Writers” table.

2. Create an Airtable article assignment form
Next, create an article assignment form for the “Articles” table. You’ll use this form to add new article assignments to the “Articles” table.

3. Set up a new Zapier automation with a “New Record in Airtable” trigger
When you submit your details on the new article assignment via the Airtable form, Airtable will automatically record the new article assignment in your “Articles” table. So that’s the first step of the article assignment workflow sorted.

Now, we’ll use the Zapier workflow automation tool to automate the next three steps in the workflow—namely:
- Create a shared Google Drive submission folder for the article.
- Create a Google Doc submission document in the shared Google Drive folder.
- Use Gmail to email the writer the article title, outline link, due date, and link to the shared Google Drive submission folder.
Sidenote.
Instead of Zapier, you can also use any other workflow automation tool, such as Make, as long as the tool supports the automation triggers and actions you’ll need.
In Zapier, create a new automated workflow (also known as a “Zap”) with:
- Airtable as the trigger app.
- New Record as the trigger event.
With this trigger, your Zap will start running when you add a new record to Airtable (such as by submitting your Airtable article assignment form).

4. Add a “Create Folder in Google Drive” action step to your Zap
Next, add an action step with:
- Google Drive as the action app.
- Create Folder as the action event.
For the action step’s “Parent Folder” field, select the Google Drive folder in which the new submission folder should be created.
Also, provide a name for the submission folder in the “Folder Name” field. You can map the article title data from Airtable here to name your submission folder after the article’s title.

5. Add an “Add File Sharing Preference in Google Drive” action step to your Zap
The Google Drive folder created by your Zap will have its sharing permissions disabled by default, so let’s add an action step to grant folder access to anyone who has the link to the folder.
This action step should have:
- Google Drive as the action app.
- Add File Sharing Preference as the action event.
Map the file ID of the Google Drive folder created in the previous action step to the “File Id” field of this action step.

In addition, set the “Sharing Preference” field to “Anyone on the internet who has the link can edit.”

6. Add a “Create Document from Text in Google Docs” action step to your Zap
Now, let’s set up the Google Doc that the writer will use to submit their draft.
We’ll have the Zap create this submission Google Doc in the shared Google Drive submission folder. And since the Google Drive folder will have general access enabled, anyone with the link to the Google Drive folder—and this includes you—will also automatically get access to the Google Doc.
No more frustration over writers forgetting to grant access to their Google Docs!
So add a new action step to your Zap with:
- Google Docs as the action app.
- Create Document from Text as the action event.
Map the article title data from Airtable to the action step’s “Document Name” field, and the folder ID of the shared Google Drive folder to the “Folder” field.
You’ll also need to include some default text in the Google Doc, such as “Write your article here!”

7. Add a “Send Email in Gmail” action step to your Zap
Finally, we’ll get the Zap to use your Gmail account to email the writer the article title, outline link, due date, and link to the shared Google Drive submission folder.
Add a last action step to your Zap with:
- Gmail as the action app.
- Send Email as the action event.
Map the writer’s email address from Airtable to the “To” field for this action step. Also, map the article title, outline link, due date, and Google Drive submission folder link in the email body.
I also recommend adding your own email address to either the “Cc” or “Bcc” field so you get a copy of the automated email (and can confirm it’s been sent).

Once you’re happy with your Zap, hit the Publish button to activate your automation!
Finding email addresses for link building outreach can be a massive pain.
After all, most prospects don’t advertise their email addresses publicly. And even if you’ve managed to dig up their email addresses (or guess them using trial and error), there’s no guarantee they work.
But using Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, you can generate a huge Google Sheets list of link building prospects that looks like this:

Then as you fill out the “Approve?” column for each prospect with data—such as “Yes” or “Approved”—a Zapier automation will automatically do all these for you:
- Find the prospect’s email address using the Hunter email lookup tool
- Add the email address to your Google Sheet list of prospects
- Verify the email address using the NeverBounce email verification tool
- Add the verified email address to the Woodpecker.io email outreach tool so you can start sending customized outreach emails
Here’s how to set this up.
1. Get your list of prospects
Launch Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and search for link prospects.
For example, if you recently published a marketing survey with unique insights and statistics, you may want to look for marketing statistics pages to pitch. To do this, simply run an “In title” search for “marketing statistics.”

Next, filter your results to show only webpages that are:
- In English (unless you’re targeting webpages in another language).
- Live, as it’d be weird to reach out and say, “Hey, I found you through [this webpage that no longer exists].”
- On websites with a Domain Rating (DR) of 20 to 80 because you want to prioritize pursuing backlinks from authoritative websites but also that your chances of getting backlinks from super high-authority websites are quite low.

Add a last filter to show only one page per domain (since you want to reach out to only one prospect per website).

Click the Export button to export your list of prospects in a CSV file.
2. Clean up your list of prospects
As mentioned, we’ll be using Hunter to help us find our prospects’ email addresses.
Hunter uses the first names, last names, and domains of prospects to find email addresses, so we’ll clean up our list of prospects to provide Hunter with the exact data it needs.
Import your CSV list of prospects in Google Sheets and delete all columns in it except for:
- Content Title
- Content URL
- Author
Also, some of the prospects in the CSV don’t have author names, so it’s worth removing these rows from the CSV. To do this, just filter for rows with empty author names and delete them.
Next, use the SPLIT formula to split the author names into their first and last names based on the space between their names.

Finally, add two new columns to the sheet:
- Approve?: Adding data to this column will trigger the Zapier automation we’ll be setting up next!
- Email Address: This column will store the prospect’s email address (if found).

3. Set up a new Zapier automation with a “New or Updated Spreadsheet Row in Google Sheets” trigger
In Zapier, create a new Zap with:
- Google Sheets as the trigger app.
- New or Updated Spreadsheet Row as the trigger event.
Map the action step’s “Trigger Column” field to your Google Sheet’s “Approve?” column.

With this setup, you’ll trigger your Zap whenever you add new data—such as “Yes” or “Approved”—to the “Approve?” column for any prospect row.

4. Add a “Find Email in Hunter” action step to your Zap
Next, add a new action step with:
- Hunter as the action app.
- Find Email as the action event.
Map the “Content URL,” “First Name,” and “Last Name” columns in your Google Sheet to the “Domain or Company,” “First Name,” and “Last Name” fields for this action step, respectively.

5. Add an “Update Spreadsheet Row in Google Sheets” action step to your Zap
The next action step will update your Google Sheet with a prospect’s email address if Hunter finds it. Use:
- Google Sheets as the action app.
- Update Spreadsheet Row as the action event.
Map the Row Number of the updated row in the trigger step to this action step’s “Row” field.

Also, map the email address that Hunter found in the previous action step to the “Email Address” field of this action step.

Sidenote.
This email address does not exist. It is for demo purposes only.
6. Add a Filter action that lets the Zap continue only if Hunter has found an email address
Next, set up a Filter action that lets the Zap proceed only if the email address data found by Hunter contains the “@” symbol.
That’s because all email addresses have the “@” symbol. If Hunter happens to find an email address value that doesn’t include this symbol, we won’t want to waste time verifying it.

7. Add a “Verify Email Address in NeverBounce” action step to your Zap
Now, we’ll use NeverBounce to verify the validity of the email addresses that Hunter found. Add a new action step with:
- NeverBounce as the action app.
- Verify Email Address as the action event.
Map the email address that Hunter found to this action step’s “Email Address to Verify” field:

8. Add a Filter action that lets the Zap continue only if NeverBounce returns a “Valid” or “Catchall” status for the email address
When NeverBounce verifies an email address, it will return one of four status text codes: Valid, Catchall, Invalid, and Unknown. Email addresses marked with the “Valid” and “Catchall” NeverBounce status codes have the highest likelihood of being valid.
So we’ll add a Filter action that lets the Zap proceed only if an email address’s NeverBounce status text code matches either “Valid” or “Catchall” exactly.

9. Add a “Create/Update Prospect in Woodpecker.co” action step to your Zap
Finally, we’ll set up the Zap to add the verified email address to Woodpecker.co.
Create a last action step with:
- Woodpecker.co as the action app.
- Create/Update Prospect as the action event.
Map the verified email address to the action step’s “Email” field, and your prospect’s first and last name (as obtained from Google Sheets) to the “First Name” and “Last Name” fields, respectively.

Hit the Publish button to turn your Zap on.
Now, when you fill out the “Approve?” column for prospects in your Google Sheet, your Zap will automatically do the heavy lifting of finding and verifying their email addresses using Hunter and NeverBounce and adding the verified email addresses to Woodpecker.co.
You can then customize your link building outreach emails in Woodpecker.co for each verified email address and, hopefully, snag yourself some backlinks!
Final thoughts
SEO automation takes some initial setup, but it’s amazing to watch your processes run automatically after that. It’s almost like magic.
And apart from the SEO processes we’ve shared here, there are probably plenty others you can automate.
Think of the apps you regularly use for SEO work. If you can connect these apps using Zapier or some other workflow automation tool, automating the workflows they support is likely more than possible.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
The Lean Guide (With Template)

A competitive analysis (or market competitive analysis) is a process where you collect information about competitors to gain an edge over them and get more customers.
However, the problem is that “traditional” competitive analysis is overkill for most businesses — it requires impractical data and takes too long to complete (and it’s very expensive if you choose to outsource).
A solution to that is a lean approach to the process — and that’s what this guide is about.
In other words, we’ll focus on the most important data you need to answer the question: “Why would people choose them over you?”. No boring theory, outtakes from marketing history, or spending hours digging up nice-to-have information.
In this guide, you will find:
- A real-life competitive analysis example.
- Templates: one for input data and one for a slide deck to present your analysis to others.
- Step-by-step instructions.
Our template consists of two documents: a slide deck and a spreadsheet.
The Slide deck is the output document. It will help you present the analysis to your boss or your teammates.
The spreadsheet is the input document. You will find tables that act as the data source for the charts from the slide deck, as well as a prompt to use in ChatGPT to help you with user review research.


We didn’t focus on aesthetics here; every marketer likes to do slide decks their own way, so feel free to edit everything you’ll find there.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the process. The template consists of these six tasks:
- Identify your direct competitors.
- Compare share of voice.
- Compare pricing and features.
- Find strong and weak points based on reviews.
- Compare purchasing convenience.
- Present conclusions.
Going forward, we’ll explain why these steps matter and show how to complete them.
Direct competitors are businesses that offer a similar solution to the same audience.
They matter a lot more than indirect competitors (i.e. businesses with different products but targeting the same audience as you) because you’ll be compared with them often (e.g. in product reviews and rankings). Plus, your audience is more likely to gravitate towards them when considering different options.
You probably have a few direct competitors in mind already, but here are a few ways to find others based on organic search and paid search ads.
Our basis for the analysis was Landingi, a SaaS for building landing pages (we chose that company randomly). So in our case, we found these 3 direct competitors.


Look at keyword overlap
Keyword overlap uncovers sites that target the same organic keywords as you. Some sites will compete with you for traffic but not for customers (e.g. G2 may share some keywords with Landingi but they’re a different business). However, in many cases, you will find direct competitors just by looking at this marketing channel.
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and enter your site’s address.
- Scroll down to Organic competitors.
- Visit the URLs to pick 3 – 5 direct competitors.


To double-check the choice of competitors, we also looked at who was bidding for search ads on Google.
See who’s advertising
If someone is spending money to show ads for keywords related to what you do, that’s a strong indication they are a direct competitor.
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
- Type in a few broad keywords related to your niche, like “landing page builder” or “landing page tool”.
- Go to the Ads history report.
- Visit the sites that have a high presence of ads in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).


Once you’re done checking both reports, write down competitors in the deck.
You can also take screenshots of the reports and add them to your deck to show the supporting data for your argument.


Share of voice is a measure of your reach in any given channel compared to competitors.
A bigger share of voice (SOV) means that your competitors are more likely to reach your audience. In other words, they may be promoting more effectively than you.
In our example, we found that Landingi’s SOV was the lowest in both of these channels.
Organic:


And social media:


Here’s how we got that data using Ahrefs and Brand24.
Organic share of voice
Before we start, make sure you have a project set up in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker.


Now:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis and enter your and your competitors’s sites as shown below.


- On the next screen, set the country with the most important market for your business and set the filters like this:


- Select keywords that sound most relevant to your business (even if you don’t rank for them yet) and Add them to Rank Tracker.


- Go to Rank Tracker, open your project, and look for Competitors/Overview. This report will uncover automatically calculated Share of Voice.


- Add the numbers in corresponding cells inside the sheet and paste the graph inside the slide deck.


It’s normal that the numbers don’t add up to 100%. SOV is calculated by including sites that compete with you in traffic but are not your direct competitors, e.g. blogs.
Social share of voice
We can also measure our share of voice across social media channels using Brand24.
- Go to Brand24.
- Start a New project for your brand and each competitor. Use the competitors’ brand name as the keyword to monitor.
- Go to the Comparison report and compare your project with competitors.


- Take a screenshot of the SOV charts and paste them into the slide deck. Make sure the charts are set to “social media”.


Consumers often choose solutions that offer the best value for money — simple as that. And that typically comes down to two things:
- Whether you have the features they care about. We’ll use all features available across all plans to see how likely the product is to satisfy user needs.
- How much they will need to pay. Thing is, the topic of pricing is tricky: a) when assessing affordability, people often focus on the least expensive option available and use it as a benchmark, b) businesses in the SaaS niche offer custom plans. So to make things more practical, we’ll compare the cheapest plans, but feel free to run this analysis across all pricing tiers.
After comparing our example company to competitors, we found that it goes head-to-head with Unbounce as the most feature-rich solution on the market.


Here’s how we got that data.
- Note down your and your competitors’ product features. One of the best places to get this information is pricing pages. Some brands even publish their own competitor comparisons — you may find them helpful too.
- While making the list, place a “1” in the cell corresponding to the brand that offers the solution.


- Enter the price of the cheapest plan (excluding free plans).


- Once finished, copy the chart and paste it inside the deck.
User reviews can show incredibly valuable insight into your competitors’ strong and weak points. Here’s why this matters:
- Improving on what your competitors’ customers appreciate could help you attract similar customers and possibly win some over.
- Dissatisfaction with competitors is a huge opportunity. Some businesses are built solely to fix what other companies can’t fix.
Here’s a sample from our analysis:


And here’s how we collated the data using ChatGPT. Important: repeat the process for each competitor.
- Open ChatGPT and enter the prompt from the template.


- Go to G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot and find a competitor’s reviews with ratings from 2 – 4 (i.e. one rating above the lowest and one below the highest possible). Reason:
businesses sometimes solicit five-star reviews, whereas dissatisfied customers tend to leave one-star reviews in a moment of frustration. The most actionable feedback usually comes in between.
- Copy and paste the content of the reviews into ChatGPT (don’t hit enter yet).
- Once you’re done pasting all reviews, hit enter in ChatGPT to run the analysis.


- Paste the graphs into the deck. If you want the graphs to look different, don’t hesitate to ask the AI.
There’s a faster alternative, but it’s a bit more advanced.
Instead of copy-pasting, you can use a scraping tool like this one to get all reviews at once. The downside here is that not all review sources will a have scraping tool available.
Lastly, we’ll see how easy it is to actually buy your products, and compare the experience to your competitors.
This is a chance to simplify your checkout process, and even learn from any good habits your competitors have adopted.
For example, we found that our sample company had probably nothing to worry about in this area — they ticked almost all of the boxes.


Here’s how to complete this step:
- Place a “1” if you or any of your competitors offer convenience features listed in the template.
- Once done, copy the chart and paste it into the deck.
This is the part of the presentation where you sum up all of your findings and suggest a course of action.
Here are two examples:
- Landingi had the lowest SOV in the niche, and that is never good. So the conclusion might be to go a level deeper and do an SEO competitive analysis, and to increase social media presence by creating more share-worthy content like industry surveys, design/CRO tips, or in-house data studies.
- Although the brand had a very high purchasing convenience score, during the analysis we found that there was a $850 gap between the monthly full plan and the previous tier. The conclusion here might be to offer a custom plan (like competitors do) to fill that gap.
We encourage you to take your time here and think about what would make the most sense for your business.
Tip
It’s good to be specific in your conclusions, but don’t go too deep. Competitive analysis concerns many aspects of the business, so it’s best to give other departments a chance to chime in. Just because your competitors have a few unique features doesn’t necessarily mean you need to build them too.
Final thoughts
A competitive analysis is one of the most fruitful exercises in marketing. It can show you areas for improvement, give ideas for new features, and help you discover gaps in your strategy. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it’s fundamental to running a successful business.
Just don’t forget to balance “spying” on your competitors with innovation. After all, you probably don’t want to become an exact copy of someone else’s brand.
In other words, use competitive analysis to keep up with your competitors, but don’t let that erase what’s unique about your brand or make you forget your big vision.
Got comments or questions? Ping me on X.
SEO
Critical WordPress Form Plugin Vulnerability Affects Up To +200,000 Installs

Security researchers at Wordfence detailed a critical security flaw in the MW WP Form plugin, affecting versions 5.0.1 and earlier. The vulnerability allows unauthenticated threat actors to exploit the plugin by uploading arbitrary files, including potentially malicious PHP backdoors, with the ability to execute these files on the server.
MW WP Form Plugin
The MW WP Form plugin helps to simplify form creation on WordPress websites using a shortcode builder.
It makes it easy for users to create and customize forms with various fields and options.
The plugin has many features, including one that allows file uploads using the [mwform_file name=”file”] shortcode for the purpose of data collection. It is this specific feature that is exploitable in this vulnerability.
Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability
An Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability is a security issue that allows hackers to upload potentially harmful files to a website. Unauthenticated means that the attacker does not need to be registered with the website or need any kind of permission level that comes with a user permission level.
These kinds of vulnerabilities can lead to remote code execution, where the uploaded files are executed on the server, with the potential to allow the attackers to exploit the website and site visitors.
The Wordfence advisory noted that the plugin has a check for unexpected filetypes but that it doesn’t function as it should.
According to the security researchers:
“Unfortunately, although the file type check function works perfectly and returns false for dangerous file types, it throws a runtime exception in the try block if a disallowed file type is uploaded, which will be caught and handled by the catch block.
…even if the dangerous file type is checked and detected, it is only logged, while the function continues to run and the file is uploaded.
This means that attackers could upload arbitrary PHP files and then access those files to trigger their execution on the server, achieving remote code execution.”
There Are Conditions For A Successful Attack
The severity of this threat depends on the requirement that the “Saving inquiry data in database” option in the form settings is required to be enabled in order for this security gap to be exploited.
The security advisory notes that the vulnerability is rated critical with a score of 9.8 out of 10.
Actions To Take
Wordfence strongly advises users of the MW WP Form plugin to update their versions of the plugin.
The vulnerability is patched in the lutes version of the plugin, version 5.0.2.
The severity of the threat is particularly critical for users who have enabled the “Saving inquiry data in database” option in the form settings and that is compounded by the fact that no permission levels are needed to execute this attack.
Read the Wordfence advisory:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Alexander_P
SEO
How SEOs Make the Web Better

SEOs catch flak for ruining the web, but they play a crucial role in the search ecosystem, and actually make the internet better for everyone.
Let’s get the criticism out of the way. There are bad actors in SEO, people who seek to extract money from the internet regardless of the cost to others. There are still scams and snake oil, posers and plagiarists. Many parts of the web have become extremely commercialized, with paid advertising and big brands displacing organic and user-generated content.
But while there are situations where SEOs have made things worse, to fixate on them is to ignore the colossal elephant in the room: in the ways that really matter, the web is the best it’s ever been:
- It’s the easiest it has ever been to find information on the internet. Searchers have a staggering array of tutorials, teardowns, and tips at their fingertips, containing information that is generally accurate and helpful—and this was not always the case.
- Bad actors have a smaller influence over search. Search is less of a Wild West than it used to be. Once-scam-ridden topics are subject to significant scrutiny, and the problems and loopholes in search that need fixing today—like big brands and generic content receiving undue prominence—are smaller and less painful than the problems of the past.
- More people use search to their benefit. Online content is the most accessible it has ever been, and it’s easier than ever to grow a local business or expand into international markets on the back of search.
SEOs have played a crucial role in these improvements, poking and prodding, building and—sometimes—breaking. They are Google power users: the people who push the system to extremes, but in doing so, catalyze the change needed to make search better for everyone.
Let’s explore how.
SEOs are much-needed intermediaries between Google and the rest of the world, helping non-technical people acquire and benefit from search engine traffic.
There is a huge amount of valuable information locked up in the heads of people who have no idea how to build a website or index a blog post. A carpet fitter with a bricks-and-mortar business might have decades of experience solving costly problems with uneven subfloors or poor moisture management, but no understanding of how to share that information online.
SEOs provide little nudges towards topics that people care about and writing that’s accessible to people and robots. They help solve technical problems that would hinder or completely block a site from appearing in search results. They identify opportunities for companies to be rewarded for creating great content.
It’s a win-win: businesses are rewarded with traffic, searchers have their intent satisfied, and the world is made a little richer for the newfound knowledge it contains.
SEOs do many things to actively make the web a better place, tending to their own plot of the Google garden to make sure it flourishes.
Take, for example, the myriad standards and guidelines designed to make the web a more accessible place for users. The implementation of these standards—turning theoretical guidelines into real, concrete parts of the web—often happens because of the SEO team.
Technical SEOs play a big part in adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a set of principles designed to ensure online content is “perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust” for every user. Every SEO’s fixation with Core Web Vitals fuels a faster, more efficient web. Content teams translate Google’s helpful content guidelines into useful words and images on a page.
(Case in point: check out Aleyda Solis’ Content Helpfulness Analyzer.)


There is a lot of overlap between “things that help users” and “things that improve search performance.” Even if the motive behind these changes is as simple as generating more traffic, a well-optimized website is, generally speaking, one that is also great for real human beings trying to engage with it.
The biggest criticism leveled at SEOs is that they break things. And they do! But that breakage acts as a type of pressure testing that strengthens the system as a whole.
Abuse of spintax and keyword stuffing forced Google to develop a better understanding of on-page content. Today, that loophole is closed, but more importantly, Google is much better at understanding the contents of a page and its relationship to a website as a whole.
Hacks like hiding keywords with white text on a white background (or moving them beyond the visible bounds of the screen) forced Google to expand its understanding of page styling and CSS, and how on-page information interacts with the environment that contains it.
Even today’s deluge of borderline-plagiarised AI content is not without benefit: it creates a very clear incentive for Google to get better at rewarding information gain and prioritizing publishers with solid EEAT credentials. These improvements will make tomorrow’s version of search much better.
This isn’t just Google fixing what SEOs broke: these changes usually leave lasting benefits that extend beyond any single spam tactic and make search better for all of its users.


This is not to argue that blackhat SEO is desirable. It would be better to make these improvements without incurring pain along the way. But Search is huge and complicated, and Google has little incentive to spend money proactively fixing problems and loopholes.
If we can’t solve every issue before it causes pain, we should be grateful for a correction mechanism that prevents it—and more extreme abuse—from happening in the future. SEOs break the system, and in doing so, make future breakages a lot less severe.
Some SEOs take advantage of the loopholes they discover—but many don’t. They choose to raise these issues in public spaces, encourage discussion, and seek out a fix, acting like a proxy quality assurance team.
At the small end of the spectrum, SEOs often flag bugs with Google systems, like a recent error in Search Console reporting flagged independently by three separate people, or Tom Anthony famously catching an oversight in Google’s Manual Actions database. While these types of problems don’t always impact the average user’s experience using Google, they help keep search systems working as intended.
At the other end of the scale, this feedback can extend as far as the overarching quality of the search experience, like AJ Kohn writing about Google’s propensity to reward big brands over small brands, or Lily Ray calling out an uptick in spam content in Google Discover.
SEOs are Google’s most passionate users. They interact with it at a scale far beyond the average user, and they can identify trends and changes at a macroscopic level. As a result, they are usually the first to discover problems—but also the people who hold Google to the highest standard. They are a crucial part of the feedback loop that fuels improvements.
Lastly, SEOs act as a check-and-balance, gathering firsthand evidence of how search systems operate, letting us differentiate between useful advice, snake oil, and Google’s PR bluster.
Google shares lots of useful guidance, but it’s important to recognize the limits of their advice. They are a profit-seeking company, and Search requires opacity to work—if everyone understood how it worked, everyone would game it, and it would stop working. Mixed in with the good advice is a healthy portion of omission and misdirection.
Google Search plays a vital role in controlling the flow of the web’s information—it is simply too important for us to leave its mechanics, biases, and imperfections unexplored. We need people who can interrogate the systems just enough to separate fact from fiction and understand how the pieces fit together.
We need people like Mic King, and his insanely detailed write-up of SGE and RAG; Britney Muller and her demystification of LLMs; the late Bill Slawki’s unfaltering patent analysis; or our own Patrick Stox’s efforts in piecing together how search works.


Final thoughts
The web has problems. We can and should expect more from Google Search. But the problems we need to solve today are far less severe and painful than the problems that needed solving in the past; and the people who have the highest expectations, and will be most vocal in shaping that positive future, are—you guessed it—SEOs.
To SEOs: the cause of (and solution to) all of the web’s problems.
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SOCIAL5 days ago
Is this X’s (formerly Twitter) final goodbye to big advertisers? It looks like it
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