Sara Smith

Digital Marketing | #SEO | #CRO | #SEM | #LocalSEO | Probably somewhere drinking ☕️ ,🍷 and playing 🎾 🎸

[Cyrus SEO @CyrusShepard]

SEO Testing: When you encourage users to select your website as a "Preferred Source" in Google, the difference they see in search results can be significant - especially for searches you already rank for

[Cyrus SEO @CyrusShepard]

Since Google officially updated its docs on creating Helpful Content, lots of folks are talking about "Effort" (along with scaled content + fake author profiles - good!)

Google’s definition of Effort isn’t what most people think

Effort ≠ work

In the age of low-effort, scaled AI content getting algorithmically decimated, understanding “high-effort” is increasingly relevant to brands.

Most interestingly, the Google API leak exposed two data points that specifically reference Effort scoring:

1) contentEffort - LLM-based effort estimation for article pages
2) ugcDiscussionEffortScore - UGC page quality signals

Effort is not how much work you actually put into a page. It’s more about the evidence of useful work that ends up on the final page.

High-effort pages typically contain at least some elements that AI or automation can’t easily replicate, such as original facts (gained through your own experience) and unique perspectives/opinions.

I put all of this in a Substack recently, along with a template for auditing Content Effort

[Semrush @semrush]

AI didn’t kill SEO. It exposed every page that copied the SERP and added nothing new for readers.

[Cyrus SEO @CyrusShepard]

Pretty blown away by these two findings from Andy @crestodina's new study

1. Attribution is a BIG problem. The number of folks saying "I don't know if the blog delivers results" jumped to an all-time high

We hear this from marketing teams all the time - what's the ROI of our content in an AI world? How do we measure it? (and there's typically never an easy answer)

Which leads to takeaway #2...

2. Everybody is doing LESS of the *things that actually work*!!!

Marketers who practice proven SEO/content strategies like Guest Blogging, Influencer Collaboration, Original Research, and even basic KEYWORD RESEARCH are all more likely to report "Strong Results" than people who don't

But more people are abandoning these practices. D'oh!

A few other takeaways:

• 92%+ of marketers now use AI, but AI usage has basically zero correlation with better results

• Influencer/expert collaboration was the strongest predictor of success

• Original research increased the likelihood of strong results by ~50%. Yet fewer marketers are doing it

• Combining strategies compounds. Marketers using 6+ of the successful strategies were nearly 3x more likely to report "strong results"

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

📊 A reminder especially with the latest Google Core Update rolling out: One of the biggest mistakes I still see in SEO analysis is assessing performance shifts in isolation 👇

To understand what’s really happening, you need to assess all relevant organic search metrics and configurations together together and in context:

➡️ Organic traffic trends
➡️ Ranking keyword growth or decline
➡️ Keyword overlap vs competitors
➡️ Backlink profile
➡️ Engagement signals
➡️ Content depth and coverage
➡️ Category / section-level performance
➡️ Competitors gaining or losing across the same market

This is why I find competitor comparison dashboards genuinely useful when doing SEO analysis: it helps you analyze the different metrics next to each other faster, to identify the patterns that matter faster.

I’ve been using the @semrush “Competitor Comparison” report in their Enterprise suite for this, since it lets you compare your site vs competitors across organic traffic, ranking keywords, backlinks, engagement, and content related signals in one place.

That broader context is especially useful when you need to answer where you're specifically falling behind, against whom and what's driving the gap.

If you're already using Semrush: Check out it. If not, this is another useful dashboard to try out.

Disclaimer: This is a cross-promotional post with Semrush Enterprise, an #SEOFOMO sponsor. That said, I’m happy to share it because this is a functionality I genuinely find useful in my own SEO analysis work.

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

🤖 It Works Until It Doesn't: AI Content Strategies That Backfire - A must read guide by @lilyraynyc 👇

There are very specific scenarios for which content at scale is needed due to nature/reach of the site (eg. marketplaces), but it needs to be generated by going through a careful integration and validation to ensure quality via an editorial workflow and review, while adding useful and relevant, meaningful, unique insights, proprietary data, expert / user advice that really fulfill a need of users... however, most of sites out there, don't really fall into this scenario.

In this guide, Lily shows what happens when AI is leveraged in ways that don’t fulfill the criteria above, and it works… until it doesn’t.

She analyzed +220 sites publicly associated with AI content creation, automation, and scaling platforms, and the findings are a reminder of what happens when scale is prioritized over substance:

* 54% lost +30% of their peak organic traffic
* 39% lost +50%
* 22% lost +75%

The pattern is certainly familiar for anybody that has been in SEO for a while: rapid content growth, traffic increase, then significant visibility drops a few months later, caused by:

* Programmatic “what is” glossaries.
* Comparison pages at scale.
* “Best X for Y” listicles.
* Competitor alternative pages.
* Thin location or language pages.
* Self-serving listicles.
* Off-topic content scaled mainly for visibility.

AI didn’t created these tactics but made them much easier, faster, and cheaper to scale. The issue isn't using AI for content but using AI to publish large volumes of formulaic, undifferentiated content created mainly to rank, get cited, or influence AI search systems, without enough originality, expertise, topical focus, or human validation.

This matters for both traditional SEO as well as AI search. If your AI search strategy damages your organic search visibility, credibility, and topical authority, it can also end up hurting your AI search visibility via grounding.

Remember: Don’t use AI to scale like this, because as we’ve seen in SEO many times before, scale without substance might work temporarily, but it doesn't usually end well.

Read it here: https://t.co/jhGBQZCa4i

[Semrush @semrush]

After analyzing 42,000 blog posts with an AI detector, content classified as fully human-written outperformed AI-generated or mixed content across the top 10 positions.

The gap is most striking at position 1:
80.5% probability of being human-written vs just 10% AI-generated.

This may appear to conflict with survey data showing that 72% of SEOs believe AI content ranks as well as human-written content. However, the data points to a more nuanced reality.

The key difference emerges at the very top of the rankings.

From position 5 onward, the performance gap between human-written and AI-generated content narrows significantly.

In other words, AI content performs competitively when the benchmark is ranking on page one.

However, in the highest-ranking positions, human-written content clearly leads.

Full study: https://t.co/LkdoFP58CT.

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

17 Content Types to Survive Google’s Zero-Click Future - Excellent research by @CyrusShepard

We know that Google favors different types of sites now. Winning content tends to be proprietary, unique, and solves problems beyond providing information.

Here are 17 content types that currently perform decently-to-excellent in the AI era when properly executed:

https://t.co/jyC8YyFcDf

[Joe Youngblood - SEO, Futurology, AI, Marketing @YoungbloodJoe]

If you want to test if a page will be fully crawled by Google try this free tool: https://t.co/5sOk7VSttp

[Cyrus SEO @CyrusShepard]

Known user "click" signals tracked by Google, and how they can drive SEO rankings + AI references

1) Impressions
2) Clicks
3) badClicks
4) goodClicks
5) lastLongestClicks

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

🚨 How Google Click Signals Drive SEO Rankings and AI Answers - A must read piece by @CyrusShepard going through how Google is trying to answer three broad questions from user click data:

* Is this result relevant?
* Is the content useful to answer the question?
* Does this completely satisfy the user search?

... and what can we do about these! Check it out: https://t.co/kaGV2U2S1Y

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

🚨 Must read: A Fantastic Guide to Generative AI by @gfiorelli1 at the Advanced Web Ranking blog, going through:

* The Model: Architecture and Mechanics of LLMs
* The Agent: Reasoning, Planning, and Action
* The Library: Neural Search and Retrieval Architectures
* The Strategy: SEO for AI Search
* The Technical Foundation
* Content and AI Search
* Amplification

-- Check it out: https://t.co/XJSYgdnhuB

[Connor Gillivan @ConnorGillivan]

Top 21 "New" SEOs to Follow Before 2025 Ends (that you may not know yet):

You may not know these SEOs, but you'll undoubtedly learn from them.

1. Lily Ray (SEO strategy) New York
2. Julian Goldie (SEO + AI) England
3. Ume Laila (SEO content) Pakistan
4. Sarvesh Shrivastava (Ecom SEO) India
5. Samy Thuillier (SEO strategy) Portugal
6. Peter Rota (Technical SEO) Boston
7. Davor Bomestar (SEO strategy) Croatia
8. Amanpreet Singh (SEO content) India
9. Steven Schneider (SEO content) Seattle
10. Aleyda Solís (Int'l SEO) Spain
11. Britney Muller (SEO + AI) US
12. Anatolii Ulitovskyi (SEO tools) Florida
13. Pierre Herubel (Marketing strategy) Thailand
14. Matt Diggity (SEO strategy) Thailand
15. Louis Smith (Ecom SEO) England
16. Jules Ignacio Canlas (ROI SEO) England
17. Tom Winter (SEO + AI) England
18. James Oliver (SEO + CRO) England
19. Sam Sami (On + Off Page SEO) New York
20. Jairo Guerrero (SEO strategy) Netherlands
21. Asim Asmat (Ecom SEO) New York

---

Who would you add?

♻️ REPOST & Follow these SEOs for killer learning.

P.S. I'm honored to reach 1,000,000s w/ my SEO & marketing content every month. Thanks for all your support 🙏

[SearchEngineJournal® @sejournal]

Google AI Mode & AI Overviews Cite Different URLs, Per Ahrefs Report. via @MattGSouthern: https://t.co/LwVJllTyHs

#Google #SEO

[SearchEngineJournal® @sejournal]

How To Track User Journey In GA4 To Make SEO Wins More Visible. via @bngsrc: https://t.co/TNPcq9itG2

#SEO

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

🚀 A must-read: How Growth Works When AI Systems Interpret, Compare, and Choose Brands 👇 by @gfiorelli1 explaining how:

* Growth Now Depends on Becoming Legible, Verifiable, and Recommendable to AI Systems
* The Strategic Levers for Becoming a Brand AI Systems Can Trust and Recommend
* The Program for Becoming AI-Recommendable (with different approach, from minimum viable ones to comprehensive)
* Measure Success When Attribution is Fragmented or Invisible
* Much more!

Check it out: https://t.co/aDQl4aVnfp

[Gisele Navarro @ichbinGisele]

AI-generated Reddit Answers are giving bad advice in medical subreddits and moderators can’t opt out.

🔗 https://t.co/0mxhsBbrpi

[Barry Schwartz @rustybrick]

Google Goldmine content rank scoring system via the old search data leak... https://t.co/HAUalOag0C via @hobo_web