SEO Is Not That Hard

Send a text Ever wondered why people in Glasgow ask different questions than people in London about the same service? We pull back the curtain on a major update: city-level People Also Ask targeting that lets you research real local queries and build content that matches each neighbourhood’s language, concerns, and intent. It’s a simple shift with powerful results—clearer clusters, tighter FAQs, a...

Send a text Links still move the needle, but the way we earn them has changed. We pull together the best of our link building series and lay out a clear, low-risk path to stronger rankings and lasting authority. No gimmicks, no cloak-and-dagger—just assets people want to cite. We start by cleaning up the language of links: what “good, bad, and ugly” backlinks look like, why Penguin still shapes ri...

Send a text Want links without cold emails or sketchy deals? We dive into a practical system for earning citations by putting useful work in front of the right people, then letting trust and timing do the heavy lifting. Ed Dawson, founder of Keywords People Use, unpacks why links still drive rankings and why they matter even more as AI search surfaces sources in responses. We start with the realit...

Send a text Want links people actually want to share? We unpack ego bait link building and show how to turn recognition into rankings, authority, and AI-era citations. Instead of waiting for links, we create reasons for people and brands to amplify our work by featuring their expertise fairly and visibly. We start with the foundations: why links still matter for Google and why they matter even mor...

Send a text If your backlink comes with a receipt, it’s probably a liability. We break down the crucial difference between buying placements and earning genuine editorial links, tracing the story from PageRank to Penguin to today’s AI-driven search where citations and trust decide who gets surfaced. Along the way, we show how to avoid risky shortcuts and build a durable system for attracting links...

Send a text What if one small, free tool could earn you more backlinks, leads, and trust than months of blogging? We dive into engineering as marketing, a strategy that turns lightweight, useful tools into link magnets and lead engines, especially powerful as AI search surfaces cited, authoritative resources. I walk through the core idea: build a free tool that solves a real problem right next to...

Send a text Want more high‑quality links without playing whack‑a‑mole with paid placements or low‑value directories? We walk through a strategy that flips the usual script: stop entering awards and start running them. By becoming the awarding body in your niche, you can earn relevant backlinks from major brands, spark press coverage, and build durable authority that search engines and AI assistant...

Send a text Guest posting sounds harmless: write for a reputable site, add a link, meet a new audience. But when that link is part of the deal—and it passes PageRank—you could be stepping straight into “unnatural links” territory. We break down a real manual action that cited a guest article as the example, then map a clear path to promote your work without risking your domain. I walk through Goog...

Send a text Want links that don’t vanish with the next algorithm update? We dive into digital PR and show how to earn authoritative coverage that boosts rankings, brand searches, and even AI search citations. Instead of paying for links, we focus on creative stories and credible data that journalists choose to share. We start with why links still move the needle and how AI-driven results increasin...

Send a text Want links that arrive without endless cold emails or paid placements? We make the case for building interactive tools that solve real problems, create a defensible moat, and keep earning citations for years. From consumer broadband to B2B keyword research, we unpack why tools outperform blog posts when your goal is authority, rankings, and revenue. We start by reframing “content” as a...

Send a text Ever wondered why PBNs still tempt smart SEOs? We pull back the curtain on private blog networks—how they’re built on expired domains, why they deliver short bursts of rankings, and where the true costs and risks hide. From anchor text control and link velocity to detection patterns, manual actions, and painful clean-ups, we map the full lifecycle of a PBN so you can make informed choi...

Send a text Want search visibility that survives the next update and shows up in AI answers? We dive straight into the real calculus of link building: what still works, what crumbles under scrutiny, and how to build a backlink profile that compounds rather than collapses. Drawing on two decades of building, buying, and selling sites, Ed breaks down backlinks into three buckets—good, bad, and ugly—...

Send a text What if your site could be read like a map of meaning instead of a pile of keywords? Edd walks through a complete reframe of SEO around entities — the people, organisations, products, places, and ideas that define your niche — and shows how to turn that model into durable authority across search and AI. We start with how modern search reads the web: extracting entities, resolving ambig...

Send a text Authority doesn’t live on your site alone—it’s earned in public, where other trusted names choose to cite, invite, and stand beside you. We wrap our entities series by moving beyond links-as-votes and into the richer world of entity association: the patterns of mentions, partnerships, and consistent identity signals that teach search engines and LLMs who you are and why you matter. We...

Send a text Search is quietly rewiring how people find answers, and the biggest shift isn’t on the results page—it’s inside the models that compose those answers. We dig into a practical playbook for turning your content into the source that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity cite, so your brand earns authority even when no click happens. First, we map the path from traditional rankings to AI...

Send a text Tool mentioned in the podcast: https://validator.schema.org/ Machines don’t reward guesses; they reward clarity. We walk through a practical, four‑step framework to make search engines and LLMs understand your brand, your people, and your offers without ambiguity. The focus is on schema markup that scales: JSON‑LD for clean implementation, @id for stable references, and a connected ent...

Send a text Ready to stop sprinkling keywords and start building authority that lasts? We take one neglected concept in your niche and turn it into a structured topic cluster that both readers and search engines recognise as a trusted resource. From mapping entities to designing a pillar page and the right cluster coverage, we show how to move beyond thin posts and build a small, focused library t...

Send a text The prompt mentioned in the episode is: You are an expert SEO analyst specializing in Natural Language Processing and entity-based optimization. I will provide you with the text from a competitor's webpage. Your task is to perform a Named Entity Recognition (NER) analysis on this text. Please identify all the significant entities mentioned in the text. For each entity, classify it...

Send a text Search engines understand the world through entities, not just keywords, and that changes how we plan, write, and structure content. We take the entity conversation out of theory and into practice by building a simple, durable audit you can complete today. The result is a living blueprint that gives your brand a clear centre of gravity online and helps algorithms connect your pages to...

Send a text Tired of confident AI answers that crumble under scrutiny? We pull back the curtain on why large language models hallucinate—and how to stop the damage by turning your website into a source AIs can safely cite. Instead of treating models like fact vaults, we treat them like brilliant writers who need trustworthy notes. That shift unlocks a practical playbook: ground responses in real d...

Send a text Forget neat rows of facts—your brand lives inside AI as a point on a vast map of meaning. We unpack how large language models like ChatGPT convert words into vectors, arrange them in a multi‑dimensional latent space, and “reason” by navigating probabilistic paths rather than retrieving certified entries from a knowledge graph. That shift explains both the astonishing creativity of LLMs...

Send a text The search results page is no longer a tidy list of links—it’s a dynamic canvas where knowledge panels, rich snippets, featured snippets, and AI Overviews signal who Google trusts. We dig into how entities underpin every one of these features and why your real goal isn’t just ranking higher, but earning eligibility across the SERP. By treating features as an external readout of the kno...

Send a text Most brands still try to “tell” Google who they are. We show how Google actually decides: by stitching together a ledger of facts from your site, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, news articles, and structured data—then trusting only what aligns. This is the Knowledge Graph at work, and it’s quietly steering whether you earn a knowledge panel, sitelinks, and richer visibility across search. We brea...

Send a text Keywords don’t tell the whole story—entities do. We take you inside the three-step process machines use to read your content like a detective at a crime scene: highlighting potential entities, using context to resolve ambiguity, and linking each mention to a unique identifier in a global knowledge base. By the end, you’ll see why “Jordan” only makes sense when surrounded by the right c...

Send a text Most of us were trained to think in keywords—count them, match them, stuff them. But Google no longer sees the web as a bag of words; it reads the world as a network of entities, relationships, and intent. We unpack the “things, not strings” shift and explore how Hummingbird, BERT, and advances in NLP turned SEO from phrase-matching into meaning-making. Along the way, we show how entit...