The Edward Show

E1033: Breaking down a dense set of notes from the BrightonSEO conference and turning them into a practical playbook for modern SEO. These are real observations about what you have to do to win search and conversions - especially with AI, generative engine optimization (GEO), and the growing importance of conversion-focused content. I recorded this episode from a rooftop in Manhattan, and we cover...

E1032: Breaking down new research analyzing 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts to understand a simple but important question: why does ChatGPT cite some pages and ignore others? This study, conducted by Ahrefs, gives one of the clearest looks yet into how ChatGPT selects sources, what influences citation likelihood, and how you can position your content to be included. We walk through the key findings, w...

E1031: Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, joins the show to break down what's actually working in SEO right now - and what most people are getting completely wrong. This conversation goes beyond tactics. Wil explains why chasing shortcuts, automations, and "quick wins" is a losing strategy, and why the future belongs to people who understand how humans think, search, and make decisions. We...

E1030: Keyword cannibalization - what it is, how to identify it, and how to fix it without wasting time on things that don't move your business forward. This topic came from a detailed post in the SEO subreddit, along with real-world examples and insights from people actively working on sites. We also connect it back to how Google actually handles duplicate and competing content, and where people...

E1029: How e-commerce brands should build backlinks, especially Shopify brands. Kai Cromwell, an e-commerce SEO legend, joins the show for his second time. We cover what links are worth paying for, what links to avoid, how to evaluate link marketplaces, when to use cold email, and why most e-commerce brands should be careful about building too many links directly to product pages. Topics covered:...

E1028: Breaking down what Google is rewarding right now when it comes to SEO - and how so much "standard" content isn't working. Last week at the Google Search Central Live Toronto event, a series of slides started circulating in the SEO community. One in particular stood out: the difference between commodity content and non-commodity content. This is a practical breakdown of that idea, what it me...

E1027: Tryggvi Rafn rejoins the show to screenshare (on YouTube) the AI-powered SEO system he built from scratch over four months. This is not another "AI writes blog posts" workflow. The system is designed to discover, prioritize, and build revenue-driving pages automatically, using a combination of data pipelines, keyword clustering, and agent-based workflows. We walk through how it works end-to...

E1026: Breaking down common SEO crawling myths and explaining why "crawl budget" is usually not the real problem. We talk about crawling, indexing, authority, sitemaps, content pruning, duplicate content, and cannibalization. The legendary David Quaid, our guest, explains why more crawling does not mean better rankings, why XML sitemaps do not magically fix indexing issues, and why authority is of...

E1025: Matt Diamante breaks down how he built a simple one-page tool that ranked #1 on Google with almost no content and no traditional SEO work. The site is LinkGap.io, a backlink gap analysis tool he built in a single afternoon using AI. It has roughly 35 words on the page, no meta description, no analytics, and almost no backlinks - yet it ranks and generates thousands of leads. This conversati...

1024: An experienced SEO practitioner and an AI search founder debate what gets a brand surfaced inside large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. The conversation starts with a core disagreement: is generative engine optimization just an extension of SEO, or is it a fundamentally different discipline? From there, it expands into how AI systems actually produce answers, what "query fa...

E1023: How Google Discover works and why it can outperform traditional SEO by a massive margin. Google Discover isn't driven by search queries. It's driven by attention. If you understand how to stop the scroll, you can unlock traffic levels that most publishers never reach. This episode is based on insights from Guilhem Chauvin, along with real-world experience publishing daily content and testin...

E1022: Patrick Stox of Ahrefs breaks down what actually matters in SEO right now and what doesn't. We cover a wide range of topics, from technical SEO and internal linking to AI content, programmatic SEO, and the growing conversation around GEO and large language models. Patrick shares practical insights from working on some of the largest websites in the world and building SEO tools used by thous...

E1021: A simple SEO strategy built around Google's "People Also Ask" questions - and how to turn them into a system for building topical authority, generating consistent traffic, and driving real conversions. Most marketers either ignore these questions or treat them as an afterthought. This episode shows how to structure them into a scalable content framework that not only ranks, but also feeds a...

E1020: If you're early in your SEO career and feel like you're constantly bouncing between conflicting advice, this episode is for you. A 22-year-old working at an agency asked a simple but important question:
 "What would you do if you had to start over today?" This episode breaks down a practical, no-theory answer. Not a perfect plan. Not a motivational speech. 
A real approach for someone worki...

E1019: One of the most uncomfortable truths in SEO: yes, duplicate content can still rank - and in some cases, it can even OUTRANK the original. I walk through real experiments, what Google actually does when it finds duplicate pages, and why higher authority sites can take your content and win in the search results. We also cover the common misconception around a "duplicate content penalty," what...

E1018: An SEO test removed FAQ schema from product listing pages - here's what happened next. For years, FAQ schema has been treated as a best practice in SEO. It helped pages stand out in search results, increased click-through rates, and was widely adopted across marketing pages. But after Google reduced the visibility of FAQ rich results in 2023, the question became: Does FAQ schema still matte...

1017: Breaking down the latest changes in Google Search and what they mean for publishers, SEO teams, and content-driven businesses. We cover the first-ever Google Discover-specific update, the March 2026 core and spam updates, and what's really happening with AI-generated content in search. This is a practical discussion based on real observations. Edward is joined by Gagan Ghotra, Harpreet Singh...

E1016: A real-world SEO case study where a website was completely removed from Google's index overnight. No rankings. No pages. Gone. At first glance, it looked like a classic case of AI content abuse or a penalty tied to scaled content. The site operated in a YMYL niche, had tens of thousands of URLs, and included some AI-assisted content - so the initial assumption seemed obvious. But that wasn'...

E1015: Why niching down is one of the most effective ways to make SEO easier and more profitable. Most people approach SEO by trying to target everything at once. They go after broad categories, spread their content too thin, and end up competing with bigger players without any real advantage. Instead, the better strategy is to focus on a narrow niche, dominate it completely, and then expand outwa...

E1014: The single biggest productivity mistake that quietly destroys SEO results: not taking structured breaks. This is not about working less. It's about working in a way that actually produces better pages, better strategy, and better outcomes. If you are writing SEO landing pages, doing keyword research, auditing sites, or building out a content strategy, this directly impacts your results. Whe...

E1012: How IBM managed to rank at the top of Google for some of the most competitive keywords in the world, including "AI," "AI agent," and "what is AI." We go through a real case study of IBM's content strategy, based on analysis from Lars Lofgren, and look at what they're doing right, what they're getting away with, and what you can apply to your own SEO strategy. This is one of the clearest exa...

E1013: Breaking down a simple but widely misunderstood idea in SEO: internal links are not "set and forget." Most people treat internal linking as something you do once when you publish a page. David argues the opposite. If you are not revisiting and adjusting your internal links regularly, you are likely wasting authority and slowing down your ability to rank new pages. The core idea is straightf...

E1011: Why the rise of AI-built ("vibe coded") websites is going to make SEO easier, despite the slight increase in websites properly targeting keywords. Most people think AI will increase competition because it makes it faster to create pages targeting keywords. That part is true. But they're missing the more important point: most AI-generated pages are not built to convert, and that creates an o...

E1010: Jabez Reuben joins the show to talk about what is working in SEO, especially as search changes with LLMs, AI overviews, and shifting Google results. We get into why Chiang Mai has become such a strong place for SEO, how Jabez got started in the industry after moving there, and why the local community helped shape the way he works. From there, we go deep into his approach to SEO: keep it sim...

E1009: Sarvesh Shrivastava joins the show once again to break down how a garage door company went from struggling for leads to generating $1.7M in revenue - using Sarvesh's focused local SEO strategy. This is a real case study with exact steps, decisions, and systems that were implemented over 11 months. We cover what moved the needle, what most business owners get wrong, and how to approach local...