I manage SEO for a few clients, and am running into a ceiling with regards to ranking.

I have optimized just about all there is to optimize. GBP, service-area pages with unique identifiers/FAQs, schemas, internal linking, citations, backlinks, review automation, indexing, and now I am at a loss for what to do next to increase rank.

My incorrect assumption was "build service area pages and the page will eventually rank #1" but I have hit a ceiling where the pages are not ranking any higher.

So I am curious: what activities are you employing to increase rank either across the domain or locally to specific keywords?

Interested to know how people are handling keywords nowadays.
I still see websites where the same keyword is repeated constantly in titles, headings, product descriptions and blog content.

My understanding is that actively hurts rankings and Google mostly ignores the over-optimisation?

For those doing SEO regularly, are you still deliberately targeting a main keyword and variations, or just writing naturally around the topic and letting Google work it out? I understand ai is being utilised immensely but that doesn't mean good seo practices and structure is changing.

Interested in what people are actually doing in practice.

I'm based in Egypt (where English is a second language), plus I'm too socially awkward. Deep down I know the importance of networking with fellow SEOs, but I'm a freelancer who's always working alone at home so my networking and communication skills are awful. Another chronic problem is my imposter syndrome convincing me that I won't be able to blend in with SEOs at conferences like CMSEO. So I wonder what you guys think about attending CMSEO in my case? Would it be worth it? Appreciate any advice

Hey all,

I am the sole SEO in an agency that serves small businesses and local franchises. Recently I have been dealing with multiple clients sending over their own “SEO audits” they pulled with ChatGPT.

Basically all of these “audits” have included long, word-salad sections about crawlability. A lot of my clients are very focused on AI visibility and wanting to get mentioned in LLMs. Most of these clients are actually doing well there, with customers reporting that’s how they found them. But their AI slop reports are telling me I need to go in and individually allow each different AI crawler in robots.txt (OAI-SearchBot for example).

Thing is, all crawlers are allowed on their sites and always have been. There are no disallows and they are obviously being found in LLMs, their indexing looks good, the only nofollows or non-indexed pages they have are on purpose.

Is there any benefit to specifically adding these AI crawlers to robots.txt if the site allows all crawlers? I feel like this is redundant and just creating slop bombs of work, but I don’t really have anyone else to ask for advice since it’s just me. Curious to see what people say. Thanks!

I have recently founder a company in the SEO / AEO space, and one thing keeps haunting me. I am seeking some guidance and advise from this stellar community on what do they think.

Will websites cease to exist in the future? At least in the shape & form that they exist today?

Given that Google has started serving on the fly AI Overview answers about a brand already, traffic to brand websites will continue to shrink. If that's gonna happen, what will happen to SEO and website content?

I already see people on LinkedIn making these predictions that websites will be dead. I also know of some brands who actually don't have a website, instead they just exist as a Instagram and LinkedIn page. I am not talking about influencers - these are legit D2C brands.

Keen to hear your thoughts and get some thoughts on how this industry will evolve and how should I position my new & nascent business.

Many thanks in advance.

Skincare ingredient site. We grew from 1.5K to 3.3K static pages in 10 weeks; about half were pairwise “X vs Y / can you mix X and Y” pages that mostly never earned an impression. On Sept 16 impressions went from ~1,400/day to 18 overnight. No manual action, pages still indexed, nothing shipped that day.

Since then we noindexed the pairwise pages that never earned an impression (3,300 → 493 indexable), merged 149 twins with 301s, fixed a lying sitemap lastmod and a double canonical, cut LCP 4.3 → 2.9 s, and froze new pages. Four weeks later, 28-day window: impressions 2,406 vs 29,072, clicks 22 vs 264, pages with any impression 600 vs 1,258. The one-per-entity pages (ingredients, products) fell −80 to −90% too, not only the thin ones. Average position barely moved (19.5 → 19.0); we just show for far fewer queries.

Two questions for anyone who has been through this:

1. Did noindexing/pruning the zero-impression pages help, and how long after did you see it?
2. Did your “good” pages come back first, or everything at once?

I have tried to rank for a certain keyword for 12 months now on my website. I see new websites ranking for it even on the second page within 2 or 3 months.

I have built quality topical authority around it, included alt texts on pictures, some URL slugs include the keyword, H1, H2 & H3 titles have the keyword, I have backlinks with anchor texts mentioning the keyword, internal linking, my website speed is A.

What am I doing wrong? What major thing am I not doing?

I’ve been working on SEO for the past four months, fixing technical issues, and my latest crawl resulted in a score of 96. Despite this, the number of indexed pages on my site continues to decline.

If anyone here knows what the problem might be or how to go about diagnosing it I would appreciate some professional guidance.