The Edward Show

E1152: Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analytics platforms on the web, but there is a growing category of traffic it was never really designed to help you understand: bots, AI crawlers, and AI agents. I sit down with analytics consultant Jason Packer, author of Google Analytics Alternatives, to talk about what GA4 is measuring, what it can miss, and how the rise of AI is changing b...

E1151: Google has started routing search-result links through new google.com/goto redirects, masking the final destination URL for logged-out users. That sounds like a small technical change. For rank trackers, SERP scrapers, SEO tools, and marketers who depend on Google search data, it creates a much bigger problem. I'm joined by Jonathan Berthold from Moz to break down what Google changed, why r...

E1150: James Dooley and David Quaid return to debate one of the biggest questions in SEO right now: is GEO a separate discipline, or is it just SEO under a new name? James says he used to agree that GEO was simply SEO with a different label. Then his own team changed his mind. He now runs a separate GEO/AEO department because people who can rank websites #1 in Google can still struggle to get bran...

E1149: Jason Barnard breaks down how to get a Google Knowledge Panel for yourself or your business in as little as three months. We cover why clarity and consistency are the foundation of entity SEO and how Google decides whether it understands who you are. Jason explains what an "Entity Home" is, why your About page matters, and how to structure it for both humans and search engines. We go throug...

E1147: Your organic traffic is declining. Your rankings are getting more volatile. Pages that have been stable for months or years are suddenly moving down. Before blaming a Google update, backlinks, AI Overviews, or some mysterious algorithm change, look at the simplest explanation: Your pages might not be satisfying search intent well enough. I break down the most common reasons SEO traffic decl...

E1148: Everyone is talking about GEO, AEO, fan-out queries, schema, Reddit, digital PR, Wikipedia mentions, and dozens of other ways to get recommended by ChatGPT and other AI systems. Devesh Khanal of Grow and Convert thinks most companies are skipping the obvious place to start: bottom-of-funnel SEO. Devesh shares what Grow and Convert is seeing across clients after years of publishing detailed,...

E1146: Get free niche backlinks by interviewing small bloggers, business owners, and other people in your industry. This is a link-building method we're testing. Instead of cold emailing website owners and asking them for backlinks, start by giving them a reason to know you. Interview them on a podcast. Small bloggers and business owners are often much easier to book than established journalists o...

E1145: Google just gave SEOs a new feature that could change how publishers build visibility across Search, Discover, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. I break down Google Preferred Sources, how it works, why it matters, and why publishers should pay attention before everyone starts using it. Google Preferred Sources allows users to choose publishers they want to see more often in Google Search experienc...

E1144: Google's August 2026 spam update has officially finished rolling out, and we're seeing clear patterns in who got hit, who recovered, and who is winning. The update launched August 18 and completed just three days later on August 21. But the volatility started well before Google officially announced it. Throughout August, sites were reporting major ranking swings, sudden traffic losses, and...

E1143: He Did 2,000 Podcasts in a Year Just for SEO Rankings James Dooley has published 2,000 unique podcast episodes this year and is on track to hit 3,000 by the end of the year. But he's not doing it to build a traditional podcast audience. He's doing it for SEO. James breaks down the system he uses to turn short, keyword-focused podcast episodes into Google rankings, video rankings, backlinks,...

E1142: Reddit citations in ChatGPT just totally collapsed. Promptwatch data shows Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations dropping dramatically in August, falling to below 0.5% after previously sitting around 3-4%. This is the third major Reddit citation drop we've seen, and it raises a bigger question for SEOs: what happens when an AI search strategy built around one platform can disappear overnight?...

E1141: Can you launch a brand-new website with 100,000 pages and survive Google? That's the question at the center of today's episode with David G. Quaid. A listener sent me a problem he and his friends keep running into: they launch programmatic SEO sites with 10,000 - 100,000 URLs, organic traffic shoots up, and then the sites collapse back to zero. So David and I dug into whether large-scale pr...

E1140: Claude is now watermarking everything it writes, and the SEO community is worried about what this means for AI content and Google rankings. But there's an important detail: Google likely doesn't have the key needed to verify Claude's watermark. I break down what Anthropic's new watermarking system does, why it's being implemented, what it can and can't prove, and whether any of this should...

E1139: Image backlinks work surprisingly well for SEO, and one old experiment found they could even outperform exact-match anchor text links. I break down an SEO experiment from Dan Petrovic that tested four different types of backlinks to see which had the greatest effect on rankings. The test compared: - An exact-match anchor text backlink - A naked URL placed after the target keyword - An image...

E1138: How does James Dooley start a brand-new SEO site with 650 industries worth of SEO experience? James walks through how he evaluates a new SEO opportunity from the beginning, including when he'll use a fresh exact-match domain, when he'll buy an aged domain, how he evaluates the backlink profile before buying, and how he turns simple lead generation sites into larger brands. We also get into...

E1137: Local SEO is changing as Google Maps becomes more AI-driven. I'm joined by Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark and one of the most respected people in local SEO, to break down Google's Ask Maps AI and what businesses need to do to get recommended. Ask Maps combines Gemini with Google's location data, Google Business Profiles, reviews, Maps activity, and other signals to answer detailed local...

E1136: Charles Floate has been doing SEO for years, across everything from brand-new sites to companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on backlinks. In this episode, Charles lays out how he approaches SEO from A to Z: starting a site, building authority, finding keywords, structuring pages, getting links, becoming a topical authority, scaling what works, and changing the strateg...

E1135: Matt Hammerton joins me to break down the local SEO system he uses across personal injury law and home services. Matt has been doing SEO since 2009, manages more than 100 Google Business Profiles, owns stakes in multiple home service companies, and currently works with OneLaw, a law group that did $100 million in the first six months of this year. We get into the work behind those numbers:...

E1133: Most brands don't want to call themselves "cheap." That's exactly why the word can be such a powerful SEO modifier. I break down an SEO tactic James Dooley shared during our recent three-hour podcast: targeting words like "cheap," "cheapest," "affordable," "low cost," "budget," "inexpensive," and even "free" to stand out in Google and attract searchers who actually care about price. The opp...

E1134: Are traditional CMS platforms like WordPress about to become unnecessary for SEO? TJ Robertson and David Quaid join me to talk about a very different way of building and managing websites: CMS-less sites where bots and AI agents handle publishing, technical fixes, internal links, site updates, analytics, and eventually even parts of optimization themselves. TJ has already been building webs...

E1132: Somebody asked on Reddit: "What are some of the craziest, most interesting SEO stories and tactics you've come across?" The answers were incredible. I go through the best stories from the SEO Growth subreddit, including a Danish telco that outranked Apple for the keyword "iPhone" within an hour of a keynote. We also look at: - How an article about a random PS5 rumor reached #1 in Google and...

E1131: James Dooley and David G Quaid join me for a three-hour discussion about the SEO "best practices" they ignore, the advice they think gets repeated without enough testing, and what they really look at when trying to rank websites. We start with a simple question: which accepted SEO practices do you not follow? That turns into a much broader discussion about how Google works, why SEO checklis...

E1130: Micro-influencer SEO is one of the most overlooked ways to get your brand mentioned across Google, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and AI search tools. I break down a simple strategy: instead of paying for generic press releases or chasing influencers with huge audiences, work with tiny creators whose videos are already being indexed and ranked by search engines. A micro-influencer wi...

E1129: The further a source is from your company's control, the more likely AI systems may be to trust it. Kaleigh Moore explains her "Source Signal Stack," a four-level framework for understanding how brands earn visibility in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and other AI search tools. A company can control its website, blog, and social accounts. It has less control over what employees, independent...

E1128: Local SEO is changing as Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI systems influence how people find and evaluate local businesses. I'm joined by Joy Hawkins and Caleb Ulku for a detailed discussion about what is working in local SEO now, which common tactics are becoming less effective, and how businesses should prepare for AI-powered local search. Joy and Caleb compare what they are s...