Field notes from the editor team.
Essays, post-mortems, and pattern catalogues on technical SEO, content strategy, link building, search analytics, and AI search. Written by the editors who teach inside the library.
The Core Web Vitals myth: when LCP fixes actually move rankings
Most performance work doesn't move traffic. The work that does has a very specific shape — and it's almost never the work the dashboards push you toward.
Stop chasing keyword difficulty: a query-cluster framework for 2026
KD scores were already noisy; AI search has made them noisier. Here's how we plan content portfolios when single-keyword competitiveness is unreliable.
Reading the SERP for what it actually tells you
Most teams pull the top ten URLs and stop there. The SERP is a brief: it tells you what to write, who to mention, and what to never bother shipping.
The four backlink patterns that actually move pages
We audited every backlink campaign across our portfolio that produced a measurable ranking lift. Four patterns. Everything else was noise.
Search Console isn't analytics. Here's how to read it like one.
GSC is the most under-read tool in the SEO stack. Most reports stop at the Performance tab. The real value is in the joins and the caveats nobody writes down.
A competitor audit you can run in an afternoon
Most competitor audits get scoped to a month and shipped in a quarter. Here's the four-hour version we actually use in client work.
Share of voice in AI search: measuring what Gemini and ChatGPT cite
Brand-radar metrics aren't new — the inputs are. Here's how we adapted share-of-voice tracking when the answer engine started writing the snippet itself.
The AI Overviews playbook: what we changed in Q1 2026
Five concrete changes we shipped across client sites this quarter, and the citation-rate movement we measured. Two worked, one was neutral, two were duds.
Traffic source attribution after the cookieless transition
GA4's attribution model held together for longer than I expected. Here's what's actually trustworthy in 2026 and where the model still hides large amounts of organic traffic.
"Social signals don't affect SEO" was always the wrong question
We've been arguing about the wrong mechanism for fifteen years. Social doesn't pass link equity; it does something else, and that something else is measurable.