The Edward Show

E1175: Most SEOs know how to rank websites. Far fewer know how to sell that skill. Blair Witkowski joins to break down how he sells SEO services without leading with the word "SEO." Instead, he talks about phone calls, missed leads, competitors showing up in ChatGPT, and money the business owner leaves on the table. Blair walks through his sales process from the first cold call to the signed clien...

E1174: Google has told employees not to discuss how clicks are used in Search outside of a need-to-know basis. That comes directly from an internal Google presentation from around the end of 2018 that surfaced during discovery in Google's antitrust trial. The presentation gives a rare look at how Google talks internally about Search, SEOs, leaks, ranking information, clicks, and the risks of expla...

E1173: Internal linking is one of the fastest SEO improvements you can make, and this episode breaks down a simple method for using topical authority you already have to rank new pages and push existing pages higher. The method starts with a Google search: [your website] "keyword you want to rank for" Google will show you which pages on your site it already sees as relevant to that keyword. From t...

E1172: Mike Martin ranks #1 in Google Maps for "business coaching" from 53 miles away from his Google Business Profile. In this episode, Mike breaks down the Google Business Profile strategy he uses across his own businesses, clients, and agencies. The core is what he calls the GBP Loop: profile completeness, pictures, posts, and praise, multiplied by consistency. Mike started in SEO after teachin...

E1171: Query augmentation: how Google connects searches with related queries and why one page can end up ranking for hundreds or thousands of keywords that never even appear on the page. James Dooley returns to the show, bringing the goods. We get into the difference between lexical matching and query semantics, how Google interprets search intent, and why trusted sites with strong user and brand...

E1169: How are SEOs doing keyword research in 2026? I break down a viral thread from the SEO subreddit where SEOs shared their real processes, tools, shortcuts, and ways of deciding which keywords deserve attention. Some of the advice is strong. Some of it misses the point. The biggest mistake is treating keyword research like a spreadsheet exercise instead of looking at search intent, business va...

E1170: Nike has one of the strongest brands and domains on the internet, yet its blog gets an estimated 1,400 organic clicks per month. That is an absurd amount of wasted SEO authority. I sit down with David Quaid to break down why enormous companies like Nike, GoPro, and Chewy leave so much organic traffic on the table, despite having domains that smaller companies would kill to own. Nike has dec...

E1167: Claude-generated websites have a serious SEO problem: they use a lot of unnecessary words. Search intent is not only about covering the right topic. It is also about presenting the answer in a way that is fast and easy to consume. I break down three real AI-heavy websites and show how unnecessary copy, repeated headings, pointless "eyebrows," bloated introductions, and buried answers create...

E1168: SaaS link building gets expensive fast. In this episode, Kristiyan Yankov breaks down why a single placement in the right listicle can be worth $1,000+, how he decides which backlinks are worth paying for, and the link-building methods his team uses across more than 60 SaaS companies. We go deep into the actual process behind SaaS link building, from finding competitor backlink gaps to pitc...

E1166: Google can lose faith in your website. That is the language Google's John Mueller used when discussing sites filled with large amounts of programmatic SEO content, low-quality pages, and generated content that fails to give users enough value. I break down what that means, why bad old pages continue to hurt a site, and what actual SEO recoveries look like. I cover: - John Mueller's warning...

E1165: Position #1 on Google is dead, at least as a single, static ranking you can check once and trust. Joy Hawkins returns to break down a study of 8.1 million Google search results that found organic rankings became 48.7% more volatile after the May 2026 Core Update. 97% of the tracking reports analyzed started shuffling, and two people searching the same phrase at the same time now regularly s...

E1164: It cost just $72 in press releases to get Google's AI Overview to call James Dooley the "King of AEO." I break down how two cheap press releases created enough relevance and third-party confirmation for Google to repeat the claim directly inside an AI Overview. The first press release cost $66 through an EIN Newswire package. The second cost $6 through AB Newswire. Both placed "King of AEO"...

E1163: Does Google care whether people actually click the links on your page? I break down a $50,000 internal linking experiment across 15 websites, plus a Google patent that describes assigning different weights to links based on the probability that users will click them. The findings challenge a lot of standard SEO thinking around internal links, PageRank dilution, link placement, and how autho...

E1162: In 2016, Google gave an internal presentation called Q4 Search All Hands. Years later, slides from that presentation surfaced during discovery in Google's antitrust trial, and one of them contains an unusually direct admission: "We do not understand documents. We fake it." Google explained that its ability to understand documents directly was minimal. Instead, it watched how people reacted...

E1161: I break down why I still consider LinkedIn a blue ocean for organic reach, Google rankings, AI visibility, and content distribution. A listener named Marc recently started posting again after years of inactivity. Within one week, one of his posts reached 45,000+ views. That came from an account that had been dead for years. And the opportunity goes far beyond LinkedIn's feed. LinkedIn pages...

E1160: You do not need to pay for backlinks to build authority in 2026. I break down a viral SEO Reddit thread about how people are getting legitimate, high-quality backlinks without buying links, spamming irrelevant directories, or wasting time on tactics Google is increasingly good at ignoring. The best part: several of the people in the thread shared specific examples, including the exact asset...

E1159: Google's August 2026 Spam Update hit some sites extremely hard. I break down four case studies from Glenn Gabe showing exactly what Google's August spam update targeted, including scaled AI content, programmatic SEO with little added value, thin affiliate pages, poor user experience, and sites operating in risky niches. One of the sites lost rankings for more than 200,000 queries. Another h...

E1158: Google published an article called "Good SEO Is Good GEO," arguing that the best strategy for showing up in Google's AI search experiences is still foundational SEO. I agree with a lot of it. But some of Google's advice leaves out important parts of how SEO and GEO work today. I go through Google's article point by point and react to it in real time. Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews are...

E1157: Google is expanding some AI Overviews automatically, removing the need to click "Show More" and pushing traditional organic results much farther down the page. Predictably, a lot of SEOs are freaking out. I break down what Google actually changed and why I don't think businesses and publishers should panic about SEO. Google confirmed that AI Overviews can now dynamically expand when its sys...

E1156: Google Preferred Sources was originally introduced around news publishers, and that is still causing a lot of SEOs to dismiss it. That is a mistake. I go directly through Google's own documentation and explain why Preferred Sources now appears relevant far beyond traditional news sites. Google says any website that publishes fresh content is eligible. The feature is available globally in To...

E1155: A roofer in South Florida donated a free roof through Habitat for Humanity. The charity wrote about it and linked to his business. Then a local news station picked up the story, his Facebook post was shared more than 200 times, and one act of goodwill produced the kind of links and attention that are extremely difficult to buy. That is goodwill link building. I break down how businesses can...

E1153: Breaking down the debate around AI-written SEO content, Google's ability to identify machine-generated text, and whether AI detection could eventually become a meaningful part of Google's search and training systems. Google's John Mueller recently liked a LinkedIn post arguing that Google may be moving toward an algorithm designed to target all AI content. That comes after the August spam u...

E1154: Google's new goto redirects have a lot of SEOs worried that rank tracking is about to become less accurate, more expensive, or much harder to do. David Quaid joins me to break down what is actually happening, what it means for tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, and why the answer may be for SEOs to start building more of their own tools. Google's goto redirects add another step between the sear...

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...