Paul Howells

"SEO is dead" We are still doing the same fundamentals we were doing 12 months ago. The only difference is a slightly greater focus on PDP pages and merchant feed optimisations. AI achieves speed to market, but it doesn't magically make you rank higher. cc: Jason Mun Ash Fuller Nicholas Tie Sereena Furse Leslie Tan Judy Kim Darren H. Huang #seo #geo #chatgpt #searchengingoptimisation #results

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The JBH Link Mapper. What it is, what it does, and how it works for SEO and Digital PR (and GEO). Of all the tools I've been involved in building at JBH, the LinkMapper is one of my favourites. The reason it's my favourite is that it displays inbound links exactly as they should be displayed. This builds on the work by Albert-László Barabási in his famous book, Linked. The link mapper shows you the pages that act as hubs. These are popular pages of a website that gain links, and hubs show popularity. Ideally, your business's core assets should be the most popular. The problem is we live in an era of attention starvation. As a result, many of a brand’s core services, products, or category pages are starved of the necessary links and brand mentions they need for success. Which is where digital PR comes in. Digital PR is the manual process of generating links and brand mentions. And highly skilled digital PR builds these links and brand mentions to the core pages of a business, which are starved of link equity. In some highly competitive environments, adding new links and brand mentions gives almost instantaneous ranking increases leading to revenue. But that's not all. We've seen that the impact of brand mentions and links also leads to near-immediate revenue increases. The reason for this is that in the market, prospects are exposed repeatedly (through high-quality journalism) to a brand's positioning and expertise. Essentially, you're using digital PR to remind people you exist. This is like advertising, content marketing and link building rolled into one. As we move into an AI-powered search era, we already know that digital PR drives almost 75% of success in GEO (generative engine optimisation). The link mapper enables our team to quickly identify and visualise low-quality hubs by categorising links based on domain authority. Using a colour-coded system that works on domain authority, we can see pages that have lots of high-quality links and pages that have weak ones. Because the internet is a free-scaling network, links dissolve over time. Websites get deleted, links get deleted, web pages get deleted. This means you need to regularly update the brand mentions and links related to your brand's most valuable or key assets. Additionally, creating separate assets that become hubs of popularity in their own right can help drive internal links to your core page. An old-fashioned but still hugely successful SEO technique. The map serves as a quick signpost, allowing you to understand the ecology of your website. And it allows you to understand the extent of publicity your brand has gained. In other words, it allows you to quickly gauge your business's 'popularity', as more popular businesses tend to attract more links. I'm going to be writing a more detailed post on this for my newsletter this week. I think you'll love the deep dive. Stay tuned.

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This is how we got 3,848 additional enquiries for a medical practice website that was dead in the water. This client had been through multiple SEO consultants since 2016 and watched their website stagnate for 3 straight years. When they came to us, their site was a wasteland of cowboy SEO tactics. Content hadn't been updated since 2011. Service pages were living in complete isolation from each other. Plus they had all the usual technical problems. Yeeeeee haaaawwww 🤠. But when we were doing out initial audit and strategy session we discovered the business owner had a really strong personal profile in his field. Published works, industry recognition, the lot. And the website wasn't leveraging any of it. So we went to work on the fundamentals: ✅ Made it easy for Google Fixed broken links, redirect chains, page speed issues - all the technical stuff that stops Google from properly crawling the site. ✅ Connected the content Service pages were ranking poorly because they weren't linked to anything else on the site. We organized everything into proper content groups and connected them with internal links. ✅ Leveraged his expertise Added him as the author of his own content and chased down links from his previously published works that weren't connected to the site. ✅ Updated content Some content was over a decade old. We pulled every page into a database, did proper keyword research using Search Console data, and rewrote it all with Surfer optimization. ✅ Won big links Used digital PR to land links from Telegraph and Independent so we had massive trust signals that helped break through Google's higher trust requirements for health sites. The result after 12 months? 414% growth in organic visitors and 3,848 additional enquiries. But the thing that stands out for me in this case study is how the business owners expertise and authority was being completely ignored. This guy had genuine expertise and industry recognition that his website was completely failing to showcase. It’s MENTAL that this wasn’t front and centre on the site. That’s got nothing to do with SEO strategies. It’s basic human nature that we respond to authority and expertise. And in the medical field that’s top of the list when it comes to what customers need to trust you enough to enquire about your services.

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SEO is dead? Not quite. But it’s no longer the only game in town. Welcome to the rise of AEO and GEO. And this sheet by Chris Donnelly captures the differences brilliantly. For years, SEO ruled the internet. Optimise keywords. Earn backlinks. Rank higher. Simple. Until it wasn’t. Now, the way people find answers is changing. Fast. Enter AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation. It’s all about zero-click results snippets, “People Also Ask,” and voice searches. Short, direct, high-trust answers. Then there’s GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation. AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t just link to your site, they summarise it. If you want visibility you need content AI can understand and cite. Here’s how they stack up: SEO ✅ Proven, long-term results ✅ Drives consistent traffic ❌ Takes time and upkeep AEO ✅ Instant visibility ✅ Great for mobile and voice ❌ No clicks if users get the answer directly GEO ✅ First-mover advantage ✅ Strong AI trust signals ❌ Tough to track and optimise If you're still only playing the SEO game, you're missing half the field. Start blending: → SEO for authority → AEO for snippets → GEO for AI reach Have you started optimising for AI search? Repost ♻ to educate your network. And follow Tom Pestridge for more posts like this.

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