Pam Ann Marketing

Why All AI-SEO Studies are Flawed (and What to Trust Instead)

Pam Aungst Cronin — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:59:36 +0000

Introduction

All studies are easy to manipulate, but SEO studies in particular are especially susceptible to flawed logic. Anyone can look at Google search results and find some patterns and correlations, but a purely observational study can draw dangerously inaccurate conclusions. Most studies in the SEO industry are of this nature, and many are poorly disguised advertisements for AI-SEO tools.

In this article, I will critique four AI-SEO studies related to the ranking potential of AI-generated content. I’ll combine my 20+ years of SEO experience with a potent amount of critical thinking to pick apart what’s worth relying on and what not to place any weight on.

Conclusion (TL;DR)

The “Too-Long, Didn’t Read” version of my findings is:

All published AI-SEO studies that I could find are flawed.
Google tells us what’s okay and what’s not okay with regard to publishing AI-generated content.
Forget what the studies say, just follow Google’s guidelines (and my “Level 3” framework), and you’ll be fine!

Those are the key takeaways, but read on if you want to be able to pick apart a study like a fiery cross-examiner!

High-Level Summary of the Four AI-SEO Studies I Reviewed

Here’s a quick overview of the studies that I reviewed, which will be followed by more in-depth analysis.

Study #1: SEMRush: “Can AI Content Rank on Google?” (2024)¹

Their Claim: “Is it safe to use AI for SEO and content creation? The answer is yes. But it’s not that simple.”
What They Did: Analyzed 20,000 articles and surveyed 700+ marketers.
Major Flaws:

Only analyzed top 20 ranking URLs (survivorship bias – ignored all the AI content that failed)
Used GPTZero AI detector with no error adjustment
Didn’t control for domain authority, backlinks, or other variables
Survey had no credential verification or proof of results
Published by SEMRush, a company that sells AI-SEO tools (conflict of interest)

Verdict: Deeply flawed, essentially a marketing piece disguised as research.

Study #2: Ahrefs: “AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings” (2024)²

Their Claim: “Google neither punishes nor rewards AI content”
What They Did: Analyzed 600,000 pages from top 20 ranking URLs, surveyed 879 marketers.
Major Flaws:

Only analyzed top 20 ranking URLs (same survivorship bias)
Used their own AI detector tool and admitted it’s not perfect
Misapplied linear correlation (0.011) to claim proof of no relationship
Contradicted themselves by noting position #1 has less AI than positions 2-20 while also saying that Google doesn’t punish nor reward it
Published by Ahrefs to promote their own AI detection tool

Verdict: Deeply flawed, another poorly disguised advertisement.

Study #3: Graphite.io: “AI Content in Search & LLMs” (2024-2025)³

Their Claim: Despite making up over 50% of published articles, AI content represents only 14% of Google rankings.
What They Did: Analyzed 31,493 keywords across 10 categories using matched-pair comparison and Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test.
What They Did Right:

Avoided survivorship bias by randomly selecting 65,000 URLs from CommonCrawl (both ranking and non-ranking)
Quantified and adjusted for AI detector error rates (4.2% false positives, 0.6% false negatives)
Used proper statistical testing (p-value < 0.000001)
Keyword-by-keyword comparison (apples-to-apples)

What They Still Got Wrong:

Still used an AI detection tool (but adjusted for error rate)
Included “moderate confidence” results, not just “high confidence”
Didn’t control for domain authority and other variables
Doesn’t address human-edited AI content (hybrid approach)

Verdict: Best of the four, but still imperfect. Has some scientifically solid nuggets.

Study #4: NP Digital: “Performance Engagement Analysis” (2024)⁴

Their Claim: Human-written content received 5.44x more traffic than AI-generated content over a 5-month period.
What They Did: Tracked 744 articles across 68 websites for 5 months using Google Analytics traffic.
What They Did Right:

Knew with certainty which content was AI vs. human (they created it themselves – no AI detector needed)
Measured over time (5 months) with all articles having same publication date
Used actual traffic data, not just rankings

What They Still Got Wrong:

Small sample size (744 articles, 68 websites)
Unclear if they used matched-pair comparison
Didn’t specify verticals or domain authority comparability
Limited methodological transparency
Doesn’t address human-edited AI content (hybrid approach)

Verdict: Better than SEMRush/Ahrefs due to certainty about content source and time-based tracking, but lacks transparency and controls.

The 8 Deadly Flaws of AI-SEO Studies

Flaw #1: Survivorship Bias (Only Analyzing Winners)

What is Survivorship Bias?

Survivorship bias can occur when researchers focus only on successful outcomes, ignoring failures. Research studies about this type of bias have found that “when you look only at survived funds or markets, it can appear that winners repeat, even when they do not” (Brown et al., 1992)⁵ and that this can result in “overly optimistic interpretations” (Czeisler et al., 2021).⁶

How Do AI-SEO Studies Fall Victim to Survivorship Bias?

That’s what several of these studies fell victim to. Some of the studies only looked at top-ranked pages, which cannot answer critical questions such as:

What percentage of AI-generated articles fail to rank at all, or rank very low?
What if only a tiny fraction of AI-generated articles actually rise to the top?

When AI-SEO studies exclusively hand-pick success stories, they fail to show the whole picture and end up concluding that AI-generated content is “safe” simply because in some cases (unknown how frequently or infrequently), it succeeded.

That’s like studying a financial investment strategy by analyzing only the portfolios of investors who succeeded with that strategy, while completely ignoring the investors who went bankrupt using the same strategy.

Survivorship Bias in These AI-SEO Studies

SEMRush Study: Strong Survivorship Bias

This one fails the Survivorship Bias test. They only analyzed URLs that rank in the top 20 results (first two pages of Google search results). It’s also notable that their article type filtering methodology was not disclosed, but what is clear is that they completely ignored the AI-generated content failures, focusing only on what could be edge cases of what is working.

Ahrefs Study: Strong Survivorship Bias

The Ahrefs study also failed this test. They state that they “took 100,000 random keywords from Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and extracted the top 20 ranking URLs.” Again, how can we know what doesn’t work when you’re only analyzing what did work? This leaves out a critical control group of AI-generated content that didn’t rank well.

Graphite.io Study: Solidly Attempted to Avoid Survivorship Bias

This study aimed to avoid the pitfall of Survivorship Bias by randomly selecting 65,000 URLs from the CommonCrawl archive. This theoretically includes both winners and losers (URLs that rank well and those that don’t); however, it’s worth noting that this archive is not a perfectly randomized sample of all web content. There may be a skew one way or another (likely towards ranking content), but at least this isn’t as blatantly flawed as the other two.

NP Digital Study: Unclear, But Unlikely to Include Strong Survivorship Bias

This study was very different in nature than the others in that it didn’t focus on selecting preexisting URLs. They created content from scratch for this experiment, so it’s unlikely that Survivorship Bias was a factor. However, it is possible that the domains they published the content on, which were not disclosed, had some previous positive ranking history that could have helped the content out.

Flaw #2: Use of Unreliable AI Content Detection Tools

What is an AI Content Detection Tool?

AI content detection tools exist to attempt to identify AI-generated text patterns in written content. They essentially reverse-engineer what an LLM (Large Language Model) might say if it had been the one to generate the text.

LLMs are actually text prediction tools – when you are talking to an AI chatbot, it’s actually predicting the most likely patterns in which the words about the topic should fall. AI content detectors aim to recognize these patterns to help determine if a human wrote the content or an LLM did.

Unreliability of AI Detection Tools

Peer-reviewed research, as well as my own personal firsthand experience, have shown significant reliability problems with AI content detection tools.

Accountability in Research found “problematic false positive and false negative rates from both free and paid AI detection tools” after testing 100 research articles from 2016-2018 plus 200 AI-generated texts (Popkov et al., 2025).⁷
Stanford University research found that AI detectors misclassified over 61% of essays written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated (Liang et al., 2023).⁸
A University of Pennsylvania RAID Benchmark study of 10 million AI-generated texts found that many open-source models for detecting AI content use “dangerously high default false positive rates.” Adjusting models’ false-positive rates to “reasonable” levels greatly reduced ability to detect AI content (Callison-Burch, 2024).⁹
Turnitin (plagiarism detection platform used by universities) claims they have less than 1% false positive rate¹⁰, but admits missing 15% of actual AI content (false negatives).¹¹ Washington Post independent testing of this tool found a 50% false positive rate.¹²
WalterWrites AI Detector Analysis found that AI detectors perform at 55% and 97% accuracy. Accuracy drops by 20%+ on paraphrased text. GPTZero was noted as having the “most true false positives.” (WalterWrites AI Detector Analysis, 2025)¹³

My Experience

Personally, I have experienced fully inverted results using Originality.ai. This screenshot of a “97%” original result was actually almost entirely AI-written. And get this… the one human-written sentence was the one part that got flagged as AI!

Any study that relies on an AI content detection tool should be considered severely flawed.

Use of AI Content Detection in These AI-SEO Studies

SEMRush Study: Includes AI-Content Detection

The SEMRush study fails here by using GPTZero, an AI content detection tool which the WalterWrites AI Detector Analysis (2025) found to have the “most true false positives,” to categorize content as either “AI-generated” or “Human” with no error rate adjustment.

Ahrefs Study: Includes AI-Content Detection

This “study” is actually a poorly disguised advertisement for their own AI content detection tool. The authors even admit to these tools being imperfect, yet proceeded to base all of their “research” conclusions on it.

Graphite.io Study: Included AI-Content Detection, But Did Adjust for Error Rate

This study is innately flawed due to the use of an AI content detection tool, but they did at least attempt to measure and adjust for the inevitable error rate that such tools introduce.

This study established a baseline for human-written content by using articles published between January 2020 and November 2022 (before the launch of ChatGPT). They ran those articles through the SurferSEO AI detector and encountered a false positive rate of 4.2%. They also created a controlled dataset of 6,009 AI-generated articles using GPT-4o and found the detector correctly identified 99.4% as AI (false negative rate of 0.6%). They used a weighted chunk methodology to adjust their results based on these error margins, something that the SEMRush and Ahrefs studies most certainly didn’t do.

However, this isn’t a perfect solution in this case, since the AI-generated content on the web was produced by a wide variety of models, not just GPT-4o. I also take issue with the fact that they chose to include content that the detector rated with “moderate” confidence, instead of just “high” confidence, and it’s notable that Jasper was an AI content production tool active on the market before ChatGPT was launched. So it’s not scientifically solid to conclude that the web was AI-free prior to ChatGPT’s launch.

But again – honorable mention here for attempting to mitigate the inaccuracies of the AI detection tool and being super transparent about how they did so.

NP Digital Study: Avoided AI-Content Detection

Since the NP Digital team generated the content themselves, they had full control and knowledge of which content was AI-generated and which was not. This completely avoids the issues that AI content detection tools bring to AI-SEO study results. They had full control and knowledge of which content was AI-generated and which was not. AI content detection tools and their many flaws were not a factor in this study at all.

Flaw #3: Correlation Does Not Equal Causation

What’s the Difference Between Correlation and Causation?

The human brain is naturally wired toward finding patterns and assuming that one thing caused the other. Sometimes these observed patterns are just coincidences, and sometimes they are driven by an entirely different third factor. Sometimes there is causation involved, but it’s dangerous to assume that A caused B when it could have been B that caused A.

Correlation vs. Causation in SEO

In SEO, there are thousands and thousands of different ranking factors, so looking at two data points and concluding that one caused the other is dangerous. The reality is probably that A wasn’t just caused by B, but also by some unique combination of C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z!

If anyone ever doubts you on the power of this logical fallacy, point them to this website: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations. In addition to being thoroughly amusing, this site highlights unexpected correlations that have absolutely no causal relationship among them, such as:

Associate’s degrees awarded in Dental assisting correlate with Wins for the Baltimore Orioles:

The distance between Saturn and the Sun correlates with Baidu’s stock price (BIDU):

And my personal favorite: Per capita cheese consumption correlates with the Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets:

Correlation vs. Causation Example

Those are quite funny, but here’s a serious one to exemplify why we should not draw conclusions based upon two factors alone:

Ice cream sales and drowning deaths are strongly correlated. When ice cream sales go up, drowning deaths increase.
Does ice cream cause drowning? No. Both are caused by a third factor: warm weather.
People buy more ice cream when it’s hot, and more people swim (and some of them drown) when it’s hot.

When these studies conclude that AI-generated content will cause a rankings increase, or that it won’t cause a rankings decrease, it is the same as concluding that ice cream causes drowning!

Correlation vs. Causation in These AI-SEO Studies

SEMRush Study: Has Correlation / Causation Issues

The SEMRush study fails here. There were no constant variables at all other than the fact that all of the websites were already performing well in search.

Concluding that AI is safe because these sites use it is like watching Olympic swimmers eat ice cream and concluding that ice cream makes you a fast swimmer. It ignores the real cause of the success: the years of authority-building and trust these sites already established. They didn’t win because of the AI; they won because they were already winners, and the AI was just along for the ride.

Without controlling variables such as domain authority, site age, brand reputation, site technical health, site size, etc., there’s no way to scientifically prove that A caused B. Any comparison is “apples to oranges” unless you normalize for those other factors.

Just because SOME websites with AI-generated content rank well in Google does not mean that YOUR website will. Does your website have the same domain age, popularity, topic/vertical, inbound links, etc. as the websites in these studies? If not, then ignore them!

Ahrefs Study: Has Correlation / Causation Issues

The study focuses on content type but does not assess the impact of the domain’s power. A high-authority site ranking with an AI article might be doing so because of its existing backlink profile and/or brand reputation, not the quality of the AI text itself. If a lesser-known brand created the same exact article, it may not rank as well.

Since a more popular site is likely to be able to “get away with” more transgressions than a less popular site, and since they only analyzed top-ranking URLs, this study is irresponsible to conclude that AI-generated content would be a “safe” move for any site that isn’t amongst the most popular sites on the web.

Graphite.io Study: Has Correlation / Causation Issues

This study noted, but didn’t adjust for, the fact that other factors like domain authority are at play. The element of comparing ranking URLs on a keyword-by-keyword basis is more logically sound than randomly evaluating the amount of AI usage in top-ranking URLs, but they still didn’t control for confounding variables.

NP Digital Study: (Presumably) Has Correlation / Causation Issues

The study did not clarify what verticals or other constants were or were not in the mix. Were the sites and articles all within one industry? Were they all similar in domain authority and age? Many questions are left unanswered in this regard.

Flaw #4: Flawed Survey Data

Relying on poorly conducted surveys to draw scientific conclusions is an irresponsible method of “research” (air quotes intentional).

Without controls for constants such as credential verification, years of experience, etc. all you’re getting is someone’s word. And why should you take their word for it? Surveys where statements are not quantified, and participants may be financially or otherwise motivated to exaggerate their answers, have no place in a research study.

SEMRush Study: Has Flawed Survey Data

SEMRush’s survey of 700+ marketers is indeed problematic.

What are the credentials of these “marketers”?
Have they been in the industry for more than a day?
Have they worked with more than a single website?
Do they work for AI-content-generation software companies?
Are they compelled to defend what they’re doing with AI-generated content is working because they really want (or need) that to become true?
When they report that they are seeing “positive results,” what defines a “positive result”? Is a single additional organic session month-over-month considered a “positive result”?

Ahrefs Study: Has Flawed Survey Data

This study refers to a separate survey of 879 marketers regarding their use of AI in content generation. They point to the fact that survey results stated that 87% of marketers “use” AI. This is stated to seemingly imply that the high rate of usage makes it okay and safe. But it doesn’t clarify what “using” AI means. It’s one thing to “use” AI to check spelling and grammar of human-generated content; it’s another thing entirely to write a whole article using AI.

Graphite.io & NP Digital Studies: Avoided Survey Data

These two studies did not include survey data, which, in my opinion, adds to their credibility. Surveys are fine if they are labeled as such, but to spin a “survey” as a “study” doesn’t sit right with me.

Flaw #5: Conflicts of Interest

Wouldn’t you be skeptical of a study published by a protein powder company saying that protein powder is the best nutritional product in the world? Of course you would.

Yet, somehow, the opposite happens in our industry. SEO software providers are immediately trusted as industry experts. Yes, of course, they do know a lot about the industry; however, when they publish a “study,” their motives should be taken into consideration.

SEMRush Study: Strong Conflict of Interest

SEMRush’s inclusion of a survey of 700+ of their users could be considered a subtle marketing brag, but more problematic are the blatant advertisements for their product that are embedded inside the article. On top of that, they are also running their “study” as an ad on Google, which should set off conflict-of-interest alarm bells.

If an SEO company published a study, always ask yourself – “Is this a research study or an advertisement?”

In this case, it’s quite literally an advertisement on Google Ads.

Ahrefs Study: Strong Conflict of Interest

This one is a very poorly disguised attempt at an advertisement for their AI content detection tool. They don’t even attempt to hide it.

Graphite.io Study: Light Conflict of Interest

The fact that they are an SEO agency introduces the conflict of interest angle by default, but they did not attempt to be salesy at all in their study. They didn’t even include a call to action at the end of it. This demonstrates much more professionalism and neutrality than the SEMRush and Ahrefs studies did.

NP Digital Study: Moderate Conflict of Interest

As an SEO agency and software provider, the authorship of this study also includes a conflict of interest by default, but the alarm bells are louder on this one than the Graphite one. They use this “study” to promote work that they did and even reference how they won an award for it. Can’t blame them, but it does notch down the professionalism of this one when looking at it purely through a research lens and comparing it to how Graphite did theirs.

Flaw #6: Statistical Methodologies

SEMRush Study: No Use of Statistical Tests At All

This study is purely observational. They quantified their observations, but made zero attempt to apply any tests for statistical significance.

Ahrefs Study: Misuse of Linear Correlation

This study aimed to apply a scientific measurement (linear correlation) to “prove” that results are statistically significant. The problem here is that linear correlation is not a good measurement for penalty detection, because Google’s penalties are typically threshold-based, and so many other factors are in the mix.

A small amount of a transgression does not immediately trigger a penalty, and a large amount of domain or brand authority can actually change the threshold. A more popular site can “get away with” more transgressions than a less popular site. The fact that they only analyzed top-ranking URLs essentially means that they only analyzed the domains that can “get away with” just about anything.

This in no way proves that AI-generated content wouldn’t be a negative factor for a site that isn’t already performing strongly. The box plot shown in this study is a view into what happens when your site is already doing great and you sprinkle some AI-generated content into the mix. It does not assess the risk of penalty or demotion for sites that aren’t already fully trusted by Google’s algorithm.

It’s troubling that they try to spin this inaccurate analysis as evidence that “Google neither significantly rewards nor penalizes pages just because they use AI.” In the SEO industry, we know that a small amount of a transgression does not immediately trigger a penalty. We also know that a large amount of domain or brand authority can actually move the threshold of what’s considered a “small” or “large” transgression. If Google’s treatment of AI content involves threshold effects (e.g., penalties are triggered at certain AI potency levels) and especially if other factors can shift those threshold tiers up or down, linear correlation would fail to detect this.

This study also contradicts itself. While at the sme time claiming that Google is completely indifferent to AI-generated content, it also notes that position one tends to have less AI than two through twenty.

Graphite.io Study: Solid Application of Statistical Testing

A matched-pairs statistical analysis, the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test, was used to measure the difference in performance between human-written content and AI-generated content for the same keyword. They analyzed 31,493 keywords across 10 categories, and the element of comparing ranking URLs on a keyword-by-keyword basis is more logically sound than randomly evaluating the amount of AI usage in top-ranking URLs.

This is the clearest apples-to-apples methodology I’ve seen to date in an AI-SEO study. The extremely low p-value (< 0.000001) indicates that the ranking difference is not due to chance.

NP Digital Study: Unclear, and Therefore Unlikely That Statistical Testing Was Used

This study quantified their observations but didn’t reference any statistical tests.

Flaw #7: Lack of Time-Based Analysis

One thing we know for sure about SEO is that sometimes things work right away and for some time, and then fall off – either dramatically after an algorithm update or they erode slowly over time.

Any study that only looks at one snapshot in time is limited in its application to reality, and any ranking study that doesn’t take the age of the content into account should be scrutinized heavily as well.

It’s dangerous to rely on snapshot-in-time studies that claim that it is “safe” to use AI to generate website content. All but one (NP Digital) of these four studies failed to look beyond a single moment in time.

Potency of AI-Generated Content by URL vs Domain

Another big miss that all of the studies made is regarding the proportion of AI-generated content on the domain. They all did URL-specific tests, but many of Google’s ranking factors are domain-wide.

Many of the sites that got hit by the March 2024 “unoriginal content” update had a high potency of AI-generated content across their domains. Multiple case studies have documented this, including:

AI-Generated Content Traffic Loss Over Time – Case Studies

Bonsai Mary Experiment: 95% Traffic Loss After Algorithm Update

In this experiment, SEO expert Jesse Cunningham created a website filled entirely with AI-generated content about houseplants with no human oversight. The website experienced rapid growth starting in December 2023, but saw a 95% decrease in organic traffic after Google’s March 2024 core update (WebFX, 2025).¹⁴

Casual.app Experiment: 99.3% Traffic Loss After Algorithm Update

This experiment used an AI-powered tool (Byword) to mass-produce thousands of AI-generated pages in just six months. Initially, the site saw traffic surges, but lost 99.3% of its traffic after Google’s November 2023 core update focused on E-E-A-T signals (TripleDart, 2025).¹⁵

SE Ranking Experiment: Near-100% Loss Over Three Months

This experiment published 2,000 AI-generated articles across 20 brand-new domains in November 2024. Initial results showed 70.95% indexation rate and 122,000 impressions by December 2024. However, by February 2025, all articles had completely disappeared from search results. (SE Ranking, 2025).¹⁶

Lawn Care Website Case Study: 100% Traffic Decrease After Algorithm Update

In this case, nearly all articles were created with AI tools with no human oversight. After Google’s September 2023 core update addressing content helpfulness, the website saw a continual drop in performance, ultimately experiencing a 100% decrease in organic traffic (WebFX, 2025).¹⁷

Not Worth the Risk

With Google consistently tweaking its algorithms to continue to emphasize the importance of originality in content. They’ve demonstrated this already, and it’s entirely possible that they will continue this pattern, becoming more and more strict about AI-generated content over time.

Case-in-Point: The March 2024 Core Update

The March 2024 core update, which aimed to reduce “unoriginal content” by 40% actually ended up doing so by 45% and absolutely decimated some sites that heavily relied upon AI to generate a majority of their sites’ content.

The update introduced new spam policies specifically addressing “scaled content abuse,” defined as creating content “with little effort or originality with no editing or manual curation,” with generative AI mentioned as one example of automated tools used for this purpose (Google Search Central, 2024).¹⁸

Independent analysis by Ian Nuttall found that 1.7% of tracked websites (837 sites) were completely deindexed from Google’s search results after this update, representing over 20 million monthly organic visits (Search Engine Journal, 2024).¹⁹ Many of these sites heavily relied upon AI to generate a majority of their sites’ content.

For all of my 20+ years in SEO, I’ve been preaching that some risks just aren’t worth taking. What works now may not work tomorrow, so it’s safer to place your investment in “by the books” white hat SEO tactics that will stand the test of time.

Flaw #8: Lack of Clarity On Hybrid Content

The Graphite and NP Digital Studies effectively prove that “raw AI slop” loses to human-generated content, but what about hybrid content?

What Amount of Human Editing Makes AI-Generated Content Acceptable?

Unfortunately, the very nature of hybrid content makes it difficult to study. What amount of human editing tips the scales from “raw AI slop” to “human-edited”? Does inserting one sentence do the trick? Or do you have to edit 80 to 90% of it? I’ve been unable to find any studies to date that effectively provide insight into this.

Some studies choose arbitrary ranges of the AI-generated portion (such as 0-30%, 30-70%, 70-100%), but those studies were on a URL-by-URL basis and involved error-prone AI content detectors. We as marketers need to know a “safe” percentage of AI-generated versus human copy for both a single URL and a whole site, but that information simply isn’t available to us at this time.

I doubt we ever will get clarity on this, either. The very nature of Google’s algorithms is that there are thousands of factors that all impact each other. Some sites are likely to be granted a different tolerance level for the use of AI because of their strength of domain metrics, or their age, or their reputation, or their vertical/topic. Others will be treated with much more scrutiny.

However, we do already have clarity on how Google DOESN’T want you to use AI and how they want you to self-assess your content.

What Google Actually Says About AI-Generated Content

Google tells us quite clearly what’s NOT okay to do with AI-generated content in their Quality Rater Guidelines.

What Are Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG)?

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines²⁰ are what human testers of its algorithm use to assess the effectiveness of it. Google constantly tweaks its algorithm to try to satisfy these guidelines. Therefore, common sense says that even if the algorithm doesn’t work precisely in line with these guidelines as of today, this is what they are aiming for and this is what we should do.

In January of 2025, Google updated the Quality Rater Guidelines to address AI-generated content.

Relevant Excerpts from Google’s Updated-for-AI Quality Rater Guidelines

Section: 3.2 Quality of the Main Content

“The quality of the Main Content (MC) is one of the most important considerations for PQ rating. The MC plays a major role in determining how well a page achieves its purpose.

The unifying theme for evaluating the quality of the MC is the extent to which the MC allows the page to achieve its purpose and offers a satisfying user experience. For most pages, the quality of the MC can be determined by the amount of effort, originality, and talent or skill that went into the creation of the content.

Originality: Consider the extent to which the content offers unique, original content that is not available on other websites. If other websites have similar content, consider whether the page is the original source.

Talent or Skill: Consider the extent to which the content is created with enough talent and skill to provide a satisfying experience for people who visit the page.
Accuracy: For informational pages, consider the extent to which the content is factually accurate. For pages on YMYL topics, consider the extent to which the content is accurate and consistent with well-established expert consensus.”

Section 4.6.5: Scaled Content Abuse

“Creating an abundance of content with little effort or originality with no editing or manual curation is often the defining attribute of spammy websites. Scaled content abuse is a spam practice described in the Google Search Web Spam Policies. Scaled content abuse occurs when many pages are generated for the purpose of primarily benefiting the website owner and not helping users. This practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value for website visitors compared to other similar pages on the web, no matter how it’s created.

Examples of scaled content abuse include:

Using automated tools (generative AI or otherwise) as a low-effort way to produce many pages that add little-to-no value for website visitors as compared to other pages on the web on the same topic.

Pages and websites made up of content created at scale with no original content or added value for users, should be rated Lowest, no matter how they are created.”

Section 4.6.6: MC Created with Little to No Effort, Little to No Originality, and Little to No Added Value for Website Visitors

“The Lowest rating applies if all or almost all of the MC on the page (including text, images, audio, videos, etc) is copied, paraphrased, embedded, auto or AI generated, or reposted from other sources with little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value for visitors to the website. Such pages should be rated Lowest, even if the page assigns credit for the content to another source.”

Google’s Self-Assessment Questions

The following questions are provided by Google²¹ to help you assess if what you’re doing with AI is “okay” or not. Well, technically, they are for evaluating whether your content is “helpful” or not, but same difference.

Always evaluate your content drafts according to these questions:

Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?
Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
Is the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?
Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it?
Is this content written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?

A Simple and Scientific Method for Measuring Content Originality

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, I get it – Google wants me to demonstrate originality in my content. But how exactly do I do that? How do I know when I’ve added enough of it?”

Introducing “The Level 3 Content Originality Framework”

As a complete and total nerd, my brain was craving a scientific way to measure content originality in a very similar way to search algorithms. I spent some time studying cognitive linguistics and found the answer. With that, I developed a framework to help our SEO clients clearly understand what is and isn’t appropriate for their use of AI in copywriting.

This greatly simplifies the practice of self-assessing whether or not your content contains enough human input to succeed in SEO, and you can read more about it in this article.

Conclusion: Rely On Common Sense, Not Flawed Studies

AI-SEO studies are innately flawed, to varying degrees. The good ones that use solid scientific methods and avoid bias are worth a read. Apply a healthy dose of skepticism and only hang onto the truly scientifically solid nuggets.

But above all else, just use common sense. Google says not to use AI to write “all or almost all” of your content, to avoid “little to no” originality, and to make an effort to demonstrate your real-world human experience.

It’s really quite simple. So stop reading AI-SEO studies and just do what Google says!

And if you want a scientific way to measure the originality of your content, simply refer to our science-based Level 3 Content Originality Framework.

Bonus Tip! Always Disclose AI Usage

If you use AI to help write portions of your content, you should disclose how and why and for what parts. This is an emphasis in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

The idea here is to make it clear what AI did (estimate, summarize, format, suggest), clarify what the human did (authoring, reviewing, analyzing, providing opinions), and add disclaimers about accuracy or intent where needed (e.g., medical, legal, nutritional).

For example, here is my own actual AI Usage Disclamer for this very article!

AI Usage Disclaimer for this Article

The majority of this article was typed with Pam Aungst Cronin’s own human fingers; however, she did lightly incorporate AI to enhance the article in the following ways:

To perform spelling and grammar checks
To establish a logical heading/subheading structure
To find reputable sources to cite in footnotes
To generate the included analogies and examples

Reference Material for This Article

The post Why All AI-SEO Studies are Flawed (and What to Trust Instead) appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

How Much AI-Generated Content is Acceptable for SEO Writing?

Pam Aungst Cronin — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:50:55 +0000

This article has an associated webinar! Register here to watch it on demand.

These days, most people are asking, “How much AI can I use in my content before Google punishes me?”

This is the WRONG question, and it completely misses the point.

Google doesn’t explicitly punish AI-generated content; it punishes “hollow” content.

AI tends to produce “hollow” content, so it can seem logical that too much AI = Google won’t rank it, but the reality is the inverse: Too little human experience = Google won’t rank it.

In order to succeed in this new era of AI-powered search, you need to flip the “how much AI” question on its head.

The TL;DR (“Too Long, Didn’t Read”)

“How much AI can I use in my content before Google punishes me?” is the WRONG question.

Instead, ask yourself, “What depth of human experience have I added to this?”

The ELI5 (“Explain It Like I’m Five”)

What is E-E-A-T?

In direct response to the firehose of bland, generic, repetitive content that started flooding the web after the launch of ChatGPT, Google expanded its E-A-T guidelines (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) to include a new “E”: Experience.

Search engines and AI chatbots are engineered to trace information back to original, firsthand human sources. They want to avoid machine-generated summaries of other machine-generated content. That’s why Google added this new “E” to encourage you to include your personal, real-world, firsthand HUMAN life experience in your content. The one thing AI can’t replicate is personal insights gained from real-world human experience.

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness still very much matter, but injecting your content with a healthy dose of the new Experience “E” is really the only way to outshine the endless amount of generic, repetitive advice on the web, which has grown exponentially since the launch of ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools.

Forget the Amount of AI, Focus on the Amount of “E”

Everyone thinks that Google cares about how many of your words are AI-generated versus human-generated, but that entirely misses the point!

The point is: Search engines and AI chatbots are engineered to trace information back to original, firsthand human sources.

It’s literally impossible to be considered an original source if you’re churning out bland, AI-written content. In fact, even if you write all your words by human hand, you can still fall into the trap of writing content that’s too lacking of the new “E” to rank well!

And most importantly, content with a good amount of “E” not only ranks well, but also resonates with humans better. It’s a win-win: including your personal real-world experiences in your content not only makes it more visible in search and AI, but also resonates better with your target audience, leading to higher levels of trust and conversion.

This new “E” is the key to unlocking levels of visibility for your brand that simply won’t be reachable if you are using AI to fully generate your content.

And it aligns perfectly with the evolution of search.

How Search Evolved

I’ve been doing SEO for over 20 years now. Back in “the day,” I sat there and stuffed as many different synonyms into a meta keywords tag as I could think of. Today, I’m sitting here preaching to you the importance of putting your real-world, lived situations into your content.

I’ve seen search go through countless changes, but I can easily distill them down into three distinct levels of evolution.

“Level 1” Primitive Search Engines

20 years ago, search engines struggled to identify “things.” They only knew words. It was nearly impossible for them to tell the difference between the word “apple” when referring to a fruit versus “Apple” when referring to a phone. The fact that the word “apple” was present was all that mattered when Google was a simple word-matching engine.

“Level 2” Entity-Based Search

Over the years, search algorithms have evolved to incorporate machine learning. This helped search engines understand entities. An entity is a thing, and that thing can be a person, a place, a type of food, etc.

Search engines were now able to “know” what things are.

For example:

An apple is a thing. It can be one thing (a fruit) if in the context of food, versus another (a brand) in the context of technology.
An orange is a thing. It can be either a color or a fruit, based on the context of the surrounding words.
Fruit is a thing. It is a category of food items that includes apples, oranges, and other seed-producing produce.
A brand is a thing. It is the name of a company or product.

This new “knowledge” took SEO to another level. We no longer had to type in every synonym under the sun. We could rely on the fact that the search engine “knows” that fruit is food without us having to stuff in both keywords.

“Level 3” AI-Powered Search

Over the past several years, search got even more intelligent. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are now fully embedded into search, on top of the entity-based machine learning.

Now search engines can understand meaning, sentiment, intent, and more. And they most certainly can understand the difference between words that refer to real-world experiences and those that don’t.

Google, the unquestioned leader in the search industry, has decided that this factor – this new “E” – is what content MUST contain in order to be considered high quality. They have straight-up told us so by not only modifying their E-A-T acronym to E-E-A-T, but also talking about this factor repeatedly in their revised Quality Rater Guidelines:

A screenshot of a wide variety of references to personal experience in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.

And it makes perfect sense, given that search engines and AI chatbots are engineered to trace information back to original, firsthand human sources.

(Yep, I’m going to keep repeating that so it sinks in!)

My Level 3 Content Quality Framework

To align perfectly with the evolution of search engine intelligence, I’ve developed what I call the “Level 3 Content Framework.” Here’s what that looks like, and how it aligns with the evolution of search.

“Level 1” Content

Search Engine Level of Understanding

At level 1, there was no “understanding” – search engines simply did word-matching.

“Brand” is a word.

“Level 1” Content Example

At this level, we were able to write what was essentially gibberish and just keyword-stuff all word variations into it.

“When researching top brands, it is essential to analyze the branding techniques used to create heavily branded products. A professional brander understands that avoiding brandless or entirely unbranded merchandise is crucial for achieving maximum brandedness within a market. Furthermore, establishing a recognizable brand name and a strong brand identity often requires a comprehensive brand strategy. Sometimes, an organization must execute a complete rebrand to launch a brand-new product line, such as a retail house brand. Ultimately, the goal is to secure long-term brand loyalty, leaving a permanent mark on the consumer’s mind much like a traditional branding iron.”

AI’s Role

AI can definitely do this, but no one should be publishing this crap anymore!

“Level 2” Content

Search Engine Level of Understanding

At level 2, search engines became able to “know” what things are and the relationships between them.

A brand is a thing. It is the name of a company or product.
A brand is related to other things, including logos, slogans, products, core values, etc.
A brand can be assigned to products, companies, or individuals.
Branding is the act of creating a brand strategy and its associated assets.
Examples of brands include: Apple, Google Microsoft.

“Level 2” Content Example

At this level, it became necessary to write comprehensive and intelligent educational content, ensuring that we naturally touched upon all related concepts. For example:

“Beyond the Logo: What Exactly is a Brand?

At its core, a brand is a perception. It is the collective emotional and psychological response that people have when they interact with a company, product, or individual.

The Anatomy of a Brand:

Brand Identity

Brand Voice

Core Values

The Brand Promise

Why Does Branding Actually Matter?

It Builds Trust

It Creates Customer Loyalty

It Commands a Premium Price

The Bottom Line

A brand is a living, breathing entity. It is shaped by every single interaction. Master those touchpoints, and you’ve built a brand.”

AI’s Role:

AI is very good at generating Level 2 content. It does so all day, every day. The web is absolutely saturated with Level 2 content at this point.

“Level 3” Content

Search Engine Level of Understanding

At this point, search engines have now reached “Level 3” understanding of written content. They understand the full meaning of all sentences, contexts, sentiments, intents, etc., to the same degree a human does, and the algorithms look for evidence of original human insight that was gained through real-world experience.

“Level 3” Content Example

In addition to reaching “Level 2” comprehensiveness, we now need to take content to “Level 3” by including the new “E” – real-world “Experience.” For example:

When we were developing a brand for a premium coffee line, we had a choice: focus heavily on the client’s sourcing of the absolute rarest beans, or focus on creating an immersive in-store experience with highly trained baristas.

Our custom survey data suggested rare beans would give our client a slight edge in brand perception, but our market research indicated customers were willing to pay significantly more for the ‘experience’ and perceived status of a high-end coffee shop.

We chose to prioritize the experiential branding, knowing it meant foregoing the differentiator of bean exclusivity, because we projected it would yield greater pricing power and loyalty.

That’s the type of “Vitamin E” you need to inject into your content in order for it to outshine the bland, generic content that’s flooding the web and win rankings in both Google and AI chatbots.

AI’s Role:

AI fails at this. Here is where YOU can rise above the noise!

How to Demonstrate Experiential “E”

Ever since Google introduced the new “E”, I’ve been preaching the importance of it, but I struggled to find a way to measure just how much of this “E” factor a piece of content contains.

Writing in first person is a good start, but it’s not enough on its own; It won’t reach the level that we’re aiming for, which is to become the original source of 100% unique, experience-driven insights that search engines and AI chatbots will want to bring to people’s attention.

I needed to establish a process for my team to review client content and make a clear determination as to whether the piece sufficiently demonstrated real-world experiences.

Knowing that Natural Language Processing is used by search engines and AI chatbots to understand content, I did some deep research into how NLP can recognize when a human is sharing memories of lived experiences and the knowledge acquired from them.

My research led me to a field of study called “cognitive linguistics,” which focuses on the science of using language to match the way the human brain naturally processes information. I uncovered a variety of linguistic signals that can identify when humans are sharing their cognition (their knowledge) that they gained from their experience. There’s a long list of them, and they all have very “sciency” names, so I decided to break them into three very simple categories.

1. “Over The Years” Stories

Storytelling is an incredibly effective way to resonate with human readers, and it can also serve to check the “Level 3” box, particularly when you pick stories that demonstrate just how long you’ve been doing what you do and how your approach has changed over time.

Focus on telling stories about real-world lessons learned and the specific time and place they came from when you personally experienced them.

Times and Places: Stories that explicitly reference specific times, locations, or histories can help “ground” your expertise to your experiences.

Beyond mentioning historical times and places, these specific types of stories offer particularly clear signals of lived experience that spanned significant lengths of time:

Rules of Thumb: Stories about your (or your company’s) unique rules-of-thumb for your profession that were acquired through long-term immersion in the field and the specific situations that led you to adopt them.
The Methods to My Madness: Stories that explain the evolution of your (or your company’s) methodology over time, identifying which “standard” industry practices you retained, which you modified, and which you discarded as your personal expertise matured.
Long-Term Effects: Stories that describe subtle, secondary, or long-term effects of an approach that one can only have experienced after doing a profession for a long time.

Talking about things that happened to you and how your advice is deeply tied to your own lived experience is a solid way to elevate your content to Level 3.

My personal example (Times and Places, Long-Term Effects):

“When I spoke at WordCamp US in 2019, a woman came up to me after my talk and asked me a very interesting question about a rebranding challenge. Her company had been acquired and was tasked with ‘rolling up’ several other brands and websites into their own. Management was leaning toward a quick transition, but was also open to approaching the unification gradually if it meant a better end result for SEO. I told her about the biotech client I worked with back in 2013 who faced the same dilemma and went with the quick-transition approach. I explained that it ended up taking them six whole years to get the new parent brand to the level of SEO visibility that could have been achieved much sooner with a more gradual approach to merging the sites.”

2. Pivot Points

This group of techniques includes various ways of describing changes in beliefs or processes as a result of lived experiences.

Belief Pivots: Explaining a fundamental shift in a professional belief resulting from real-world situations.
Procedural Pivots: Describing how your approach to your profession has evolved and how your standard operating procedures have changed accordingly.
Paths Not Taken: Describing what you chose NOT to do in a given situation (trade-offs you made) and your reasoning behind your decision.

These “Pivot Point” techniques take content to Level 3 by tying advice to identifiable professionals who went through real-life trial-and-error and learned from it.

My personal example (Belief Pivot):

I used to be an AI-generated content “purist.” I felt that no amount of AI-generated content was safe for SEO purposes. I maintained this belief for the past three years, but after intensive research and experimentation, my belief pivoted. I now believe, as detailed in this article, that it can be “safe” to use AI to help generate content, so long as it contains enough of the experiential “E” to ensure that it will absolutely shine in comparison to the typical bland, generic, repetitive purely AI-generated content.

3. The “Only The Pros Would Know” Stuff

This involves demonstrating your deep understanding of complexities and dependencies learned through extensive first-hand experience. These are the things that “only the pros would know.” They are not taught in the classroom or included in the “handbook” of standard industry best practices.

Discussing Complexities: Talking in-depth about dependencies (how one concept impacts another), complex decision-making challenges, and ripple effects that can be caused down the line by earlier decisions.
Theory vs. Reality: Talking about the friction between what you’re supposed to do in theory and the real-world constraints that get in the way.
Exceptions and Edge Cases: There’s an exception to every rule, and the more you talk about them and the unique edge cases you’ve encountered, the greater you’re demonstrating your experience.
The Point of No Return: Talking about situations where a decision was made or a thing happened (e.g., a global pandemic), and the effects were so intense that there was no turning back. Explaining how you navigated such situations and new realities demonstrates your “battle scars” from the real world and how you survived challenges that other, less seasoned professionals would not have.

My personal example (Exceptions and Edge Cases):

“I typically advise clients to try to avoid using subdomains versus subdirectories; however, in cases where a different content management system is being used to power a portion of the site, this is not feasible and a subdirectory approach in that case can lead to more technical problems than the subdomain approach.”

The Level 3 Content Quality Checker

You can use the above framework as a simple guide to injecting your content with “Vitamin E.” But if you’re like me, you’re probably craving a way to actually measure the potency of the real-world experience that your content demonstrates. So I’ve developed a content analysis tool that scans for the linguistic techniques mentioned above.

The Level 3 Content Quality Checker greatly simplifies the task of assessing whether your content has sufficient evidence of human experience (“Vitamin E”) to succeed in SEO.

How the Level 3 Tool Works

To achieve Level 3, the tool must see linguistic evidence that you included at least one of the techniques from the above groups:

“Over the Years” Stories
Pivot Points
“Only the Pros Would Know”

The tool will classify content as Level 3 if it sees any of those linguistic signals.

It also contains a suggestion generator to help you come up with ideas for how to incorporate Level 3 elements if they aren’t there, or how to add more of them even if you did already reach Level 3. The more “Vitamin E,” the better!

And best of all, the Level 3 Content Quality Checker tool is completely free for a limited time while in beta!

How to Use the Level 3 Content Quality Checker for FREE

To receive free early access to this tool, visit https://contelevate.ai.

Key Takeaway: It’s All About That “E”

Regardless of whether your article was written 100% by human hand, or in part by AI with human-added elements, the end result should always land in Level 3. By nature, Level 3 cannot be achieved by AI alone, but the exact percentage of human editing should be considered irrelevant to whether or not the content piece as a whole satisfies the Level 3 requirements.

If you’re not including enough Level 3 “E,” then your content is not closing enough of the information gap between an average AI-generated article and a piece that is going to have long-lasting high performance in search.

Bonus Tip: Always Disclaim Usage of AI

If you use AI to help write portions of your content, you should disclose how, why, and for what parts. This is an emphasis in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

For example, here is my actual AI Disclaimer for this article.

AI Usage Disclaimer for this Article: The vast majority of this article was typed with Pam Aungst Cronin’s own human fingers; however, she did enhance the final version with AI for these purposes:

To perform spelling and grammar checks
To establish a logical heading/subheading structure
To generate the included analogies and examples

Need Help With AI?

From optimizing your website for AI-SEO to AI-powered automation and software development, we can do it all. Reach out today to discuss how we can help your brand ascend with AI.

Webinar: The End of the AI vs. Human Content Debate

This article has an associated webinar! Register here to watch it on demand.

Slides: The End of the AI vs. Human Content Debate

The-End-of-the-AI-vs.-Human-Content-Debate_compressed Download

The post How Much AI-Generated Content is Acceptable for SEO Writing? appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

How to Spot a “Black Hat” SEO/GEO Scam in 2026

Pam Aungst Cronin — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 08:30:00 +0000

For many years, business owners and marketing managers have had to try to steer clear of the many “snake oil” salespeople in the SEO industry, but this past year has spawned a new type of SEO scam artist to avoid: the “GEO Expert.”

What is GEO?

“GEO” is one of the many new terms being used to describe the act of optimizing website content to get found in AI. “GEO” stands for Generative Engine Optimization, an absolutely terrible term that aims to describe this type of effort.

“Generative Engines” refers to AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, etc. These are also known as “LLMs” or Large Language Models, so another new term floating around is “LLMO” for Large Language Model Optimization. Others refer to AI visibility optimization as “AEO” for Answer Engine Optimization, “AIO” for “AI Optimization”, or simply AI-SEO, which I personally feel is the most accurate description given the evolution of the technology that occurred during the course of 2025.

What Changed in 2025?

Search Engines and AI Chatbots Merged in 2025

Over the past year, traditional web search engines like Google and Bing have added AI chatbot features, and AI chatbots have added web search functionality. The two basically morphed into one thing which I refer to as “AI-Powered Search.” Whether you’re trying to get your website found in a traditional search engine that now has AI Overviews at the top, or in an AI chatbot like ChatGPT that now has web search embedded in it, let’s make one thing VERY clear – those are NOT two separate goals!

How to Get Found in AI Chatbots

If you want to get found in AI Overviews at the top of search engines and/or in AI chatbot-generated web search results, you need to get found in search engines. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, etc. – they ALL simply search the web for you using traditional search engines!

Which AI Chatbots Use Which Search Engines?

Here’s a chart that shows which LLMs use which search engines:

LLM	Primary Search Engine
ChatGPT	Bing
Copilot	Bing
Gemini	Google
Claude	Brave
Perplexity	Blended Results from Bing, Google, You, Wikipedia, etc.

Getting Found in AI = Getting Found in Search Engines

The bottom line is: GEO/AEO/AIO/LLMO/AI-SEO/whatevertheheckyouwanttocallit is SEO. Period. Full stop. It’s ALL powered by search engines, therefore it’s all SEO.

How Not to Get Scammed in 2026

If you’re looking to work with an agency or consultant in 2026 to increase your online visibility, regardless of what acronym is used to describe it, there are more red flags to watch out for than ever before. The SEO industry has been riddled with scam artists since its inception, and they now have several new angles to try to trick you with.

Many “GEO Experts” are simply black hat SEOs that have rebranded themselves in order to capitalize on the AI hype. Others are new and completely inexperienced, believing in a “bill of goods” that was sold to them but doesn’t actually work.

I originally wrote this article 15 years ago in 2011, and am updating it now to help protect innocent marketing budgets from being decimated by the sad, desperate SEO scammers who have no actual talent and therefore no choice but to try to swindle you into hiring them with the following tricks.

“White Hat” SEO vs. “Black Hat” SEO – Updated for 2026

Optimizing your website incorrectly can cause you to become banned from Google. As of December 2025, Google’s global search market share was approximately 90.82%, so getting banned from Google can effectively destroy your business. And no one is safe; even J.C. Penney and Overstock.com have received the boot from Google for doing it wrong.

There are two ways of doing search engine optimization: the correct way, referred to as “white hat”, and “black hat”, the incorrect way. Technically, there’s also a third: the middle ground, which we call “grey hat SEO,” but for the purposes of fully protecting your investment in SEO, I’m going to keep this delineation as literally black (bad) versus white (good).

What Does Modern-Day Black Hat SEO Look Like?

Black hat techniques which break the rules of search engines still involve some of the old-school tactics.

The “Old-School” Black-Hat SEO Approach

Keyword Stuffing: Extremely high keyword usage, unnaturally “stuffed” into webpage content and meta tags, including the meta keywords tag, which hasn’t been used by Google since 2008
Invisible or Hidden Text: Blending the colors of the text with the color of the background, e.g., white text on a white background, to sneak keywords into the page
Doorway (Hidden) Pages: Making hidden “landing pages” that aren’t linked to anywhere on the site, for the purposes of drawing in search engine traffic
Cloaking: Generating different content that gets served to search engine bots versus what human users see
Scaled Content Abuse: Making high quantities of low-quality or duplicative pages, such as:
- Pages that have the same copy but different regions inserted (e.g. “SEO Agency NJ,” “SEO Agency NYC,” “SEO Agency Chicago”, etc.)
- Pages with very similar copy but different synonyms (e.g., “SEO Expert”, “SEO Consultant”, “SEO Specialist”, etc.)
Link and Comment Spam: Creating or purchasing high quantities of links pointing to the site from irrelevant, low-quality websites (directories, link farms, private blog networks, forums, etc.)
Parasite SEO: Posting high volumes of content on popular sites like Reddit to take advantage of their ranking position
Negative SEO: Attacking competitors’ websites with high volumes of toxic backlinks

The Modern-Day Black-Hat SEO Approach

AI Content Scaling: Mass-producing AI-generated content with little-to-no human effort (which meets Google’s definition of “scaled content abuse”), whether for your own website or for other websites (link-building), including competitor content scraping/rewriting
AI Persona Fraud: Creating fake, AI-generated “experts”, sometimes referred to as “synthetic authors,” with author bios on your website and social media profiles, to try to capitalize on Google’s E-E-A-T emphasis (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
AI Training Scam: Telling you that they’re going to “teach” AI chatbots about your brand by chatting with them (which is impossible)
AI Poisoning: Creating content around fake or non-existent studies or facts to get them picked up by AI chatbots (and get your brand mentioned as the source of the information), also known as “data poisoning” or “model poisoning”
AI-Generated Reviews/Testimonials: Using AI to generate fake reviews or testimonials, sometimes marking them up with Schema markup as well
AI Q&A Spam: Using AI to mass-produce answers on forums like Reddit, Quora, etc., including mentions of your brand or website

Avoid ALL Black Hat Tactics!

Black hat techniques, whether new or old, may indeed work quite well for a time, until the search engines pick up on it. Then you’re finished. It takes a lot of time, money, and effort to undo the black hat SEO that you already paid to have done, in order to be considered for re-entry into search engines indexes. My best advice is to just avoid it all from the get-go. Take the “slow and steady wins the race” approach and keep ALL of your SEO efforts purely white hat.

How to Spot a “Black Hat” SEO or GEO Scammer

People practicing “black hat” SEO will often downplay the importance of, or dodge questions relating to the following.

Trick Questions That Will Weed Out the SEO Scammers

1. “Describe to me the difference between what you do and black hat SEO” or “How does your approach ensure full compliance with Google’s guidelines?”

They’ll either struggle to answer or downplay the importance of Google’s guidelines.

2. “Can you guarantee first page rankings and/or placement in AI Overviews?”

They should be honest and say that there is no way of guaranteeing it, but explain to you how exactly they are going to try to make it happen.

3. “How exactly will you build E-E-A-T signals for my brand?”

Watch out for any mention of AI-generated personas. They should focus instead on helping you demonstrate your real-world, firsthand credentials and experience.

4. “Tell me about your approach to link building.”

Best answer: They consider it link “earning” and don’t do anything to manually “build” links. Next best answer: They help you find high-quality places to get your content featured in order to gain reputable inbound links. Worst answer: They “build” links for you at scale.

5. “Do you use AI in any capacity to generate website content? If so, to what extent?”

Consider it a red flag if they try to justify creating full pages or articles with AI without any human-written elements. Section 4.6.6 of Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines states that “The Lowest rating applies if all or almost all of the MC (main content) on the page… is auto or AI-generated.”

6. Can you “train” ChatGPT about my brand by chatting with it?

Correct answer: No, that’s impossible. You can “train” AI chatbots by publishing content on the web, but NOT by chatting with them.

You Don’t Need to Be An SEO Expert to Spot a Fake One

If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO consultant or firm, simply use the above list to guide your initial discussion. Regardless of how much you do or don’t know about SEO, using the above as talking points will allow you to “quiz” your candidates before hiring them, helping you discern the true professionals from the smooth-talking crooks.

(PS – we’re the real deal, so be sure to contact us as part of your journey to find the right SEO agency for you!)

Bonus Tip: Avoid the “No Hat” SEO Scammer!

Unfortunately, sometimes SEO snake oil salespeople know all the right things to say to convince you that they’re as white hat as possible, but then take your money and literally do nothing! Here’s a bonus question to help you avoid this form of SEO fraud.

Avoid “No Hat” SEO Fraud: The Key Trick Question

“What tasks and deliverables will you complete as part of our SEO engagement, and how will you report to me on their progress?”

Deliverables should include, at the very least, initial up-front audits and strategy plans, followed by recurring tasks for monthly content ideation and/or generation and monthly reporting. Most importantly, there should be a recurring call, at least once per month, where they keep you informed on the status of each task and explain your reporting in plain and actionable terms: what’s working well, what’s not working so well, and what should be done about it.

A sampling of the AI-SEO service deliverables offered by Pam Ann Marketing.

How to Choose the Right SEO Partner

An image of Pam Aungst Cronin, AI-SEO expert, speaking at a podium in January of 2026.

A reputable SEO agency or expert will:

Be extremely transparent. Use the “no hat” question above to really dig into exactly what they do and how they do it. They should not breeze over any details or refer to any magical behind-the-scenes tactics.
Be willing to educate. Express that you want to learn more about how SEO works and that you expect to gain an education along the way. If they make excuses for why that’s not possible or how that is unnecessary because they’ve “got you covered,” then run!
Be respectful. Don’t ever let an SEO expert talk down to you or make you feel stupid for asking certain questions.
Be communicative. Once monthly calls should be the minimum expectation for live communication between your SEO agency and yourself. That should be even more frequent in the beginning. Email-only communication should be considered unacceptable. There’s no replacement for dynamic strategy discussions between the SEO experts and the client.
Be willing to share references and case studies. Request them both, and be very wary of any hesitation or delays. Be sure to actually contact the references as well – do not let them gamble on the fact that you won’t follow through on that part.
Have good reviews and testimonials. Don’t ask for these – look for them yourself. Any agency worth their weigth in salt will have positive online reviews and testimonials.
Demonstrate thought leadership. Be very cautious of an agency or “expert” that doesn’t have a long roster of publishing their own thought leadership in the industry. You should easily be able to assess their reputation in the SEO industry by looking through their own website articles, articles they’ve written for industry journals, mentions they’ve earned in the press, measuring their social following, and seeing them as guests on podcasts and webinars, or as book authors or adjunct professors.
Have experience in your industry. While the search engines work the same for nearly all industries, an SEO partnership should be a true marketing partnership. The SEO team should understand how your business works, the DNA of your target market, the length of your sales cycle, etc.
Not treat “GEO” separately from SEO. A true expert in the art and science of building online visibility does not delineate between efforts to get found in search engines and efforts to build visibility in AI. They are one in the same. Yes, there are some new layers of techinques specific to the AI visibility part of things, but it all starts with traditional SEO. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise clearly doesn’t understand the fact that AI chatbots use SEARCH ENGINES to search the web, duh!

Are We The Right SEO Partner for Your Brand?

At Pam Ann Marketing, we have been providing white hat SEO services for over 15 years. We’ve worked with over 500 brands across a wide variety of industries. We’re transparent, communicative, and well-respected in the industry. Contact us today to book a call with Pam and see if we might be the right partner for your SEO journey!

The post How to Spot a “Black Hat” SEO/GEO Scam in 2026 appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

Google is Helping U.S. Government Sites Advertise the Sale of Illegal Drugs

Pam Aungst Cronin — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 22:45:27 +0000

Bad Actors Capitalize on Simple Website Flaws

Believe it or not, U.S. government and university websites are being used to promote the sale of illegal drugs, and Google is letting it happen!

Bad actors have figured out a clever way to capitalize upon the strong reputation of US government (.gov) and school (.edu) websites. On sites with certain vulnerabilities, this simple trick, which I will demonstrate for you below, allows a user to inject any text they want into a website’s Google search results.

Government and University Websites Targeted for Exploitation

This issue is actively present, as of today, October 16, 2024, on various government and university sites, including:

FEMA Disaster Assistance – Apply for Federal Aid After a Disaster – DisasterAssistance.gov
West Virginia Checkbook – Financial Transparency for WV Government – WVCheckBook.gov
California Open Data Portal – Public Data from the State of California – Data.ca.gov
Official State Website of Colorado – State Services and Resources – Colorado.gov
City of Birmingham Open Data Portal – Access to Birmingham’s Public Data – data.birminghamal.gov
City of Milwaukee Open Data Portal – Public Data and Transparency – data.milwaukee.gov
Marquette University – Private Catholic University in Milwaukee, WI – Marquette.edu
East Tennessee State University – Public University in Johnson City, TN – Etsu.edu
Columbia University Economics Department – Academic Programs and Research – Econ.columbia.edu
Texas Tech University – Public Research University in Lubbock, TX – TTU.edu
Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico – Private Engineering and Technical University – pupr.edu
Carnegie Mellon University – Private Research University in Pittsburgh, PA – cmu.edu

Those are just a few examples of this wildly rampant issue. I could have sat here all day collecting more, but I think I made my point.

How the Exploitation Works

This exploitation does not involve traditional hacking. Instead, it manipulates the search box on websites to achieve harmful outcomes.

This is a form of SEO poisoning, a term used to describe a variety of tactics that manipulate search engine results to promote or execute malicious activities.

There are various forms of SEO poisoning, but the two most pertinent to this particular issue are Reflected Search Poisoning (RSP) and Internal Site Search Abuse Promotion (ISAP).

What is Reflected Search Poisoning (RSP)?

Reflected Search Poisoning (RSP) manipulates URLs, specifically search query parameters, to include illicit content, which is then indexed by search engines.

These specific cases seem to utilize a specific sub-type of this tactic, Internal Site Search Abuse Promotion (ISAP).

What is Internal Site Search Abuse Promotion (ISAP)?

Internal Site Search Abuse Promotion (ISAP) can occur when the internal “site search” feature of a website generates URLs that are indexable by search engines. This means that anything that a user types into a search box on the website can possibly end up getting indexed in Google and similar search engines.

For example, when I type “this is how this works” into DisasterAssistance.gov:

It generates a URL related to my query:

This generation of URLs, in and of itself, is not uncommon. What makes these particular sites vulnerable is the lack of basic SEO best practices such as canonicalizing, disallowing, or noindexing these types of URLs (in English: blocking them from search engines).

Bad actors take advantage of this by submitting large volumes of searches to a website’s internal search engine. These searches contain malicious advertisements or instructions, such as “buy cocaine.”

What Vulnerabilities Are Exploited in ISAP Poisoning?

As crazy as these words may sound to someone who doesn’t work in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry, these are actually some of the most basic 101-level best practices:

Canonicalization: If your site can’t help but generate duplicate or unintended URLs, the best practice is to use a canonical tag in the website code to tell search engines only to index the root of the page.
- For example, site.com/search?search_term=A and site.com/search?search_term=B should both have a canonical tag pointing back to site.com/search
Robots.txt File: A properly configured robots.txt file can also help avoid this issue.
- Continuing with the example above, site.com/robots.txt should have a “disallow” directive for the /search directory to exclude search results pages.
“Noindex” Tags: Lastly, a webmaster can outright block a URL (and its parametered versions) from being indexed by search engines with a “noindex” tag.

It’s kind of crazy to me to even call these vulnerabilities, but without them properly set, malicious actors can create URLs with nefarious search terms, making them appear as legitimate content hosted on trusted government or school domains.

How New is ISAP Poisoning?

The exploitation of search functions for illicit promotion has been ongoing for several years, with different studies highlighting the persistence and scale of this issue:

In 2019, a report titled “Into the Dark: Unveiling Internal Site Search Abused for Black Hat SEO“ seems to have coined the term. The report revealed that public websites, including educational and government domains, were being exploited using ISAP.
In 2023, an article on Synthical titled “Reflected Search Poisoning for Illicit Promotion“ described how RSP allowed attackers to exploit the reputation of high-ranking websites.
The most recent study, titled “Reflected Search Poisoning for Illicit Promotion“ (2024), found that over 11 million distinct Illicit Promotion Texts (IPTs) were generated, affecting tens of thousands of websites and major search engines like Google and Bing.

How To Prevent Internal Site Search Abuse

To prevent the misuse of official websites’ internal site search functions, a combination of technical and security measures should be implemented:

Technical Measures

Canonical Tags: Use canonical tags to ensure that only the main pages are indexed, preventing unnecessary duplication.
Robots.txt File: Properly configure the robots.txt file to block search engines from indexing pages not intended for public consumption.
Noindex Meta Tags: Add “noindex” meta tags to search result pages to prevent them from appearing in search engine results.
Regular Monitoring and Updates: Regularly review the website’s search console and monitor indexed content to identify unusual activity early on and take corrective actions.

Security Measures

Input Validation and Sanitization: Validate and sanitize all input included in search query parameters to reduce the risk of malicious content being embedded in URLs.
Secure URL Generation: Avoid reflecting raw user input directly into URLs. Implement secure URL generation methods to prevent harmful content from being inserted into links.
Server-Side Logging and Anomaly Detection: Implement server-side logging to track searches and use anomaly detection to identify unusual activity. Early detection of misuse can help mitigate potential exploits before they escalate.

Why Google Should Be Smarter About This

Despite Google’s nauseatingly repetitious claims that they consistently make algorithm updates to battle spam in search results, they still haven’t figured out how (or cared) to address this dangerous type of exploitation in their search engine.

With all of the company’s investment in developing artificial intelligence (including buying nuclear reactors to power it), you would think Google would be smart enough by now to catch this extremely simple form of search spam.

The fact that illicit content from government and university domains is being indexed shows that Google’s algorithms simply aren’t being intentionally applied to catch this specific type of SEO abuse.

Sadly, I’m not surprised. Google’s search result quality has been falling apart for many years now because they just simply don’t care about organic search results anymore.

Why The Government Should Be Smarter About This

Drugs aren’t the only thing that could possibly be promoted with this incredibly simple technique – porn, malware, scams, etc. are all commonly promoted topics in SEO poisoning.

This easy-enough-for-a-five-year-old-to-do tactic could also be used to spread fake news and propaganda messages – all seemingly “endorsed” by a university or government agency.

I informed FEMA today that this vulnerability is currently compromising their DisasterAssistance.gov site. FEMA’s disaster recovery efforts are currently the focus of intense misinformation campaigns, so hopefully they get this fixed soon.

Need Help with Your Search Engine Results?

I have 20 years of experience driving traffic to websites and have owned an SEO agency for 13 years. If you’re having trouble with your SEO results, contact me to set up a consultation.

The post Google is Helping U.S. Government Sites Advertise the Sale of Illegal Drugs appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

Google Has Been Ruled a Monopoly in Antitrust Lawsuit (Video)

Pam Aungst Cronin — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 19:54:17 +0000

Breaking news in the world of SEO: The Department of Justice has ruled that Google is indeed a monopoly.

Video

Why Was Google Declared a Monopoly?

AP news reports, “A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle Innovation.”The ruling says that Google quote “enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search Services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices.”¹

Google’s search engine processes 8.5 billion searches per day. However, a big part of the reason for its popularity is that Google is the default search engine that is pre-installed on many mobile devices. In 2021 alone, Google spent $26 billion to maintain these agreements.

What Was Google’s Response to the Ruling?

After indicating that it would appeal, Google mocked the decision, stating, “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”²

What Happens Next in this Case?

It is not yet known what the remedy to this situation will be; there will be an entirely separate phase of the court case that will decide that. However, it’s interesting how closely this coincides with last week’s news that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, are creating their own search engine called SearchGPT.

Between Google having to pull back in some way, shape, or form and OpenAI launching a search engine, this might be the biggest shake-up to the SEO industry since its inception. On the flipside, this may end up not affecting Google at all. The appeals process will effectively pause this decision for a very long time, and…

What’s a More Immediate Threat to Google’s Search Business?

Google is facing a much more immediate threat to its search dominance: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Of particular concern is OpenAI’s upcoming SearchGPT product. On top of that, existing competitor Bing and new competitor PerplexityAI are also in the AI arms race against Google.

A former Google employee, Arvind Jain, recently said: “I think for Google right now, AI (is) a much bigger deal than the ruling. AI is fundamentally changing how the search product also works.”³

Another former Google employee summed it up like this: “AI is going to move faster than the speed that DOJ can move against Google. The whole monopoly will be over, in other words, the speed at which AI will take over search.”⁴

By the time the legal system forces Google to change to improve the competitive landscape, it will already have transformed. This whole case is likely to be a moot point by then, perhaps with the exception of the contracts with manufacturers where Google pays tens of billions of dollars to be set as the default search engine on new phones.

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Sources for this article

https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8 ︎
https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8 ︎
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-is-bigger-threat-google-than-us-regulators-2024-08-08/ ︎
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-is-bigger-threat-google-than-us-regulators-2024-08-08/ ︎

The post Google Has Been Ruled a Monopoly in Antitrust Lawsuit (Video) appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

New Domain or Subdomain? Which is Better for SEO?

Pam Aungst Cronin — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 18:02:37 +0000

You finally made it! Your business website finally gets tons of organic traffic and converts well. You have put years of effort into your content, design, structure, SEO, UX, etc. Your visitors love your content, and you get good feedback from your users.

Now your business is successful, and it’s time to scale. You and/or your partners come up with a brilliant new expansion idea. The plan is created, and you’re almost ready to show your new idea to the world, but something is missing, isn’t it? It needs a website!

We know it’s exciting at this point to dive into the design of a new brand and website for your new offering or target audience but take a moment to consider that from an SEO point of view, you’d be starting over from scratch. Why not ride the tailwinds of your already successful website instead?

You can still do all the fun stuff: creating a new logo, design, messaging, etc. – essentially, a whole new website. But consider hosting this new site on a subdomain of your existing website.

We have a case study from our very own website that speaks to the SEO power of the subdomain approach.

But first, let’s go over what we mean by “subdomain.”

What is a Subdomain?

The term “subdomain” refers to the beginning part of a URL, for example:

https://www.yoursite.com/

https://otherthing.yoursite.com/

In the first example, the “www” is the subdomain. In the second example, “otherthing” is the subdomain. Since “www” is such a common subdomain, it often doesn’t get referred to as such. Usually, when people talk about a website subdomain, they are referring to using something other than “www” in front of the website URL.

How does a subdomain work?

Using DNS, subdomains can be pointed to an entirely different CMS (Content Management System) than the main site. They can even be pointed to separate servers as well.

Because of this, Google and other search engines treat subdomains as somewhat of a different site; however, a subdomain makes it apparent that both the main site and the subdomain website are tied to the same entity. So, creating a subdomain is like a half-new site, half-not-new site (in the eyes of the search engines).

Subdomain vs. Subdirectory (or Subfolder)

You may also hear people refer to “subdirectories” or “subfolders.” Both of these terms mean the same thing, which is the middle part of a URL. For example:

https://www.yoursite.com/subdirectory/pageURL1/

https://www.yoursite.com/subdirectory/pageURL2/

Subdirectories organize content on a website and are good for SEO as they help the search engine bots understand the structure and organization of your content.

Are Subdomains Good or Bad for SEO?

You’ll find mixed opinions on this, but the real answer is the same as the answer to many other SEO questions, which is… “It depends.” Let’s get into some of the factors that this decision should depend on:

Use Subdirectories If…

First, here are some situations where you should not consider hosting your content on anything other than a new URL or subdirectory of your existing site:

Your target audience for the new offering is the same as the existing offerings
You are adding a new content section to your site, such as a blog or resource library

In those situations, just add a new page or subdirectory (a.k.a. subfolder) to your existing site. When separate audience messaging or different branding isn’t required, then it’s best to simply expand your existing site.

Use Subdomains If…

Now here are some situations where you really should consider hosting the new site on a subdomain instead of a separate domain:

You need to market to a new and different target audience than the existing site
You are launching a new product or service that will have its own distinct brand
Your new website will be for a new collaboration (e.g., joint venture) that will be co-branded with another company
You’re opening an office in another region or country, and you need a local traffic acquisition channel and/or need to have multiple language versions of your site
Your existing website was never an online store, but now you have products to ship to your customers and need to launch an eCommerce platform
You’re running PPC or other ad campaigns that require landing pages that, if added to your current site, would make it a little too messy
You need a separate domain for marketing materials (business cards, email addresses, etc.) (Go ahead and buy it – but redirect it to the subdomain URL)
You already bought a domain for it but never used it (again, just redirect it to the subdomain)

Use Separate Domains If…

Lastly, here are some scenarios where it might make more sense to use a separate domain:

You already created a separate website that receives a decent amount of Google rankings and SEO traffic
You are merging two existing brands with two existing sites/domains that generate SEO traffic

As you can see, the main difference is whether or not you already have another domain (or domains) actively receiving SEO traffic. In those cases, it’s best to consult with an SEO professional to create a custom strategy for preserving and enhancing the SEO traffic of the various domains.

What are the benefits of using a subdomain versus launching a new domain?

The Subdomain Will Benefit From the Main Domain’s SEO Authority

First of all, since a subdomain uses your existing domain (e.g., newsite.existingdomain.com), your existing domain’s history and authority (a.k.a. “domain rank”) will serve as a foundation for the new site’s SEO “juice” (traction). As opposed to starting from zero SEO authority, the subdomain will benefit from the authority of the main domain. The new site will still need to build its own traction with technical SEO optimizations, content, and keywords, but at least the domain authority will not be starting from zero. The subdomain won’t be assigned all of the authority of the main domain, but it will certainly be assigned some authority just from the fact that it’s tied to your existing domain.

So you will still need to develop an SEO strategy for the new site. You’ll need to ensure that it’s technically optimized, has specific high-intent keywords assigned to your new pages, and is regularly updated with high-quality SEO-optimized content that will help the audience understand the topic and add some “fuel” to your new “engine.” But at least you’ll get a head start in the domain authority-building part of your new site’s SEO efforts.

The Main Domain Will Also Benefit From the Subdomain’s SEO Authority!

In addition to the main domain immediately giving the subdomain an SEO authority boost at launch, any new inbound links that the main site receives in the future will also have an influence on the new subdomain – AND vice-versa! As your marketing efforts earn you new backlinks for your subdomain, that additional authority will also benefit the main site. Yes, it works both ways!

The New Brand Will Benefit From the Existing Brand’s Trustworthiness

Your new offering will automatically gain a certain level of trust, as users will see that this new site is affiliated with your widely known existing brand. You can further optimize for this effect by offering an additional menu bar at the top of your site that presents a tabbed layout similar to a web browser. This immediately demonstrates to the user that you own both brands. We did this with the Pam Ann and Stealth sites, as you can see below.

https://pamannmarketing.com/

https://stealth.pamannmarketing.com/

Streamlined Maintenance & Management = Cost Savings!

If you will be using WordPress, which we prefer for SEO, you can take advantage of a WordPress Multisite installation. This can greatly streamline your content management, user management, and technical website maintenance efforts – thereby saving you money!

Even if you don’t utilize Multisite, there are still savings that can be realized for hosting and other services that are priced on a per-domain basis.

Conclusion: In Most Cases, a Subdomain is Better for SEO

In conclusion, the decision between choosing a new domain or a subdomain hinges heavily on your business goals and existing digital assets. But hopefully, we’ve convinced you by now that in most situations, the subdomain option will offer more benefits (SEO and otherwise) than launching a new site on a separate domain.

Our own case study vividly illustrates the power and potential of leveraging an established domain’s authority by opting for a subdomain.

If you are on the brink of expansion or diversification, consider a subdomain over a new domain, as it can offer a multitude of benefits, from financial savings to SEO advantages. It’s a strategy that merges the strength of an established online presence with the promise of new initiatives, ensuring both are set on a path to digital success.

A Few Final Tips Before You Go…

Search Console

Don’t forget to verify your subdomain through Search Console separately so that you can easily monitor the keyword rankings for the subdomain separately from the main domain. We always recommend setting up a Search Console domain property, but in addition to that, you’ll want to create two URL prefix properties as well: One for the main site and one for the subdomain.

Google Analytics

You’ll also want to monitor the Google Analytics traffic separately – although we do recommend sharing a single GA4 property across both the main site and subdomain so that you also have the option of seeing everything in one place and seamlessly tracking user behavior across the sites. Monitoring performance separately while sharing a single GA4 property can be achieved by creating custom Google Analytics 4 reports using Looker Studio.

Let Us Help You!

Lastly, and most importantly, reach out to us before you start! With our professional SEO services, we can help you create an SEO “blueprint” for your new site, regardless of whether it’s on a subdomain or a new domain.

The post New Domain or Subdomain? Which is Better for SEO? appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

The Importance of Developing an SEO Friendly Website Design

Pam Aungst Cronin — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 03:31:04 +0000

When you think about SEO, the first thing that may come to mind is improving your ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs) by incorporating relevant keywords into your website that resonate with your target audience and customers. You may not immediately think about how having an SEO-friendly website design can impact how well your website ranks in search engine results.

The philosophy behind Google’s new Core Web Vitals is, as Google states, to measure “how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page and contribute to our ongoing work to ensure people get the most helpful and enjoyable experiences from the web.” To comply with Google’s Core Web Vitals and ensure a great user experience, it’s crucial to balance the art and science of website design and SEO when you’re creating your business’s website right from the beginning of the project. I had the opportunity to speak with Lisa Sabin-Wilson, co-founder and COO of WebDevStudios and founder of the website design studio, eWebscapes, about ensuring your website is effective for both humans AND search engines with an SEO-friendly web design. Read on to learn more.

The Importance of Developing an SEO-Friendly Web Design

Whether you’re designing a website from scratch or undergoing a website redesign project, the importance of incorporating a comprehensive SEO strategy from the beginning of a website design project cannot be overstated. Sabin-Wilson shared, “It is vitally important to make sure that you are taking SEO into account from the very beginning of a website project. Planning that is just as important as planning what the header looks like or what font you’re going to use.”

And while you may have the best of intentions to combine your web design and SEO right before your new website is ready to launch, Sabin-Wilson explains why you should flip the script on that thought process. “SEO is not just one department. You don’t just bring in the SEO expert at the end of a project to go through it. It is really a strategy that your designers need to take into account, and your developers need to take into account. And it’s something that needs to be part of that initial analysis.”

If you’re worried about how creating an SEO-friendly web design will affect the artistic design of your site, Sabin-Wilson urges you to keep this in mind: “Search engines are going to find [your website] because you’ve given them a reason to find you. And search engines don’t care about what your website looks like from a visual perspective.”

Best Practices to Ensure You Have an SEO-Friendly Website Design

It can be overwhelming to know where to start your website design and SEO project. You can begin by mirroring your website’s design based on the following considerations:

What are your business goals?
How do you want your target audience to find you?
What are the marketing trends for your industry?
What keywords do you want to rank for?
Of those keywords, which are leading to the most conversions?

From there, you can use this information as the foundation for your SEO-friendly website design. Here are some best practices to keep in mind, or ensure your website design partner is adhering to:

1. Include Copy on the Home Page

It may be tempting to keep the amount of information on your home page to a minimum, but search engines like to see copy on your home page. An SEO-friendly website design for your home page should include enough space to incorporate optimized copy that features your keyword search terms. Take a look at an example of tweaking the construction of a home page that balances both website design and SEO.

The original design didn’t incorporate any space to include optimized content on the page. However, the second, more SEO-friendly website design incorporates a small text box to include enough optimized content to please search engines and humans.

2. Use Keyword Research to Inform Your SEO Website Design, Architecture, & Site Map Construction

When you use your keyword research to inform your website construction project, your selected keywords can help with the construction of your SEO-friendly website design. In addition, when you know which search terms your target audience is using, you can use that knowledge to optimize your design strategy and marketing strategy to ensure your content resonates with them.

Common Mistakes that Can Hinder the Effectiveness of Your SEO Website Design

There are some common mistakes to be on the lookout for once you’re ready to launch your SEO-friendly website design. Most importantly is to monitor your site’s performance very closely after your new website design goes live. If you notice a dip in the number of customer inquiries or your page rankings on SERPs, notify your website designer or SEO partner. The point of your new SEO website design is to drive more traffic to your site and increase conversions, so if you notice even the slightest dip in your site’s performance, there could be a couple of different problems to consider:

The no-index tag, which tells search engines not to look for the site during the design phase of your website redesign SEO project, should be turned off once your site goes live. It can be a small but costly mistake not caught early enough.
The 404 redirects for your website haven’t been properly for all of the URLs for your website, NOT your website’s pages. Your site’s URLs include blog posts, videos, images, PDFs, etc.

There are a couple of tools you can use to ensure your website design and SEO strategy are performing as they should:

Google PageSpeed Insights – PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.
WebPageTest – WebPageTest is an open-source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of its efforts to make the web faster. Note: Make sure you check the “private” checkbox!
Tenon.io – Tenon.io can identify Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 issues in any environment – even on your local. Because production is a bad place to discover bugs.
TotalValidator – Total Validator will validate your HTML and CSS, check that pages are accessible, run a spell check, and check for broken links.
CrossBrowserTesting.com – Cross Browser Testing can help you test your website’s browser compatibility, especially on mobile.

Need an SEO Expert for Your SEO-Friendly Web Design Project? We Can Help

While most web design companies advertise that they implement SEO website design practices for every project, that doesn’t mean that they’ll create a comprehensive SEO strategy for your website. We specialize in SEO “architecting” services for website design and redesign projects. To be successful at SEO you need a well-thought-out plan, and we’re here to provide our expertise to develop your SEO-friendly website design. Contact us for more information about our professional SEO services.

The post The Importance of Developing an SEO Friendly Website Design appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

Create the Right Digital Marketing Strategies for Your Small Business

Pam Aungst Cronin — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 03:31:04 +0000

Marketing strategies are key to any business’s success. For small businesses, developing the right digital marketing strategies is vital to their success. While it might be tempting (and convenient) to put all of your marketing spend behind one digital marketing promotion idea, it’s better to spread the wealth between different tactics. Small businesses need to develop a multi-channel marketing strategy to increase their chances of connecting with their target audience, which means every business’s digital marketing strategy will be different.

To decide which tactics are best for marketing and promoting your business, you need to understand the available digital tactics. Here are some of the most common digital marketing strategies for small businesses to consider.

Common Digital Marketing Promotion Ideas

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

This strategy to marketing and promote your business is critical because it allows you to compete against some of your large company competitors. SEO is one of the best digital marketing strategies small businesses can use to help get people to visit your website when they are searching for the products and services they need, both online and locally. It can also help to establish brand awareness for your business by repeatedly showing up in the results for various related searches through:

Keyword research and volume
Optimizing content to include high-quality, relevant information across your website
Internal link building to connect your content to already high-ranking, reputable websites

PPC (Pay-per-click) Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are designed to generate click-throughs to your website, but they can ultimately be used for a variety of digital marketing strategies for your small business, including building brand awareness, expanding your client base through sales, and retaining your current customers. When people are searching for the products and/or services that you provide, your ad should appear if they meet the demographic and behavioral criteria you established for your advertisement campaigns. In addition to marketing and promoting your business directly to your target audience, PPC advertising can help you establish brand awareness by enabling your brand to repeatedly show up in the results for various related searches, or “stalking” your website visitors across the web with your ads through:

Banner/Display
Social Ads
Content Discovery
SEM (search engine marketing)
Comparison shopping engines
Retargeting

Content Marketing

The goal behind this digital marketing strategy for your small business is to give prospective customers the information they need to know about the products and services you provide. For your target audience to get the full picture of your company, you need to direct them to your website. While everyone is trying to promote their business through digital marketing, the businesses that take the time to educate and inform their target audience are more likely to be viewed as thought leaders and experts in their field. And once people attribute a certain level of expertise to, and confidence in your company, you’ll be more likely to expand your business. Content marketing relies on delivering high-quality and valuable information to your target audience digitally, typically through:

Blogging
Podcasting
Whitepapers, e-books, etc.
Video

Social Media

While there’s no denying that social media is everywhere, it can be a difficult digital marketing strategy for small businesses to properly utilize. When done right, social media marketing can be an incredibly effective digital marketing promotion idea. It can help:

Establish thought leadership and provide evidence that you’re an expert in your field
Build and nurture relationships with:
- Prospects
- Brand champions
- Existing customers
- Strategic partners

Keep in mind that if you’re trying to utilize all of the social media platforms to market and promote your business, it can be difficult for small business owners with limited resources to maintain all of those accounts at once. Social media marketing is all about developing a relationship with your target audience, not just creating content to sell to them. Rather than trying to communicate across all social platforms, find out which channels your target audience is active on and use those platforms to engage with your audience.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great digital marketing strategy for small businesses, but it does require you to build a list of existing and prospective customers and clients for it to be truly effective. Once you have your list in place, email marketing provides you the opportunity to:

Share updates, promotions, and general messaging about your business and industry to establish yourself as a thought leader and drive visitors to your website
Build and nurture relationships with prospects and existing customers
Convert subscribers into leads

Affiliate Marketing

It might seem strange and counter-intuitive, but this digital marketing strategy for small businesses allows you to harness the power of other company’s networks and marketing efforts by offering them an incentive to generate leads and sales for you.

Conversion Optimization

No matter which digital marketing strategies for your small business you choose, you’ll need to figure out which ones are helping to move your customers onto the next step of the sales funnel. Much like a science experiment, you’ll need to perform ongoing testing and measuring to understand which digital marketing promotion ideas are resonating with your target audience so you can increase your investment in those tactics and less in the tactics that aren’t working.

While you’re measuring which digital marketing strategies for your small business are working, we’ve laid out some of the pros and cons to consider below.

Pros and Cons of Each Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses

Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses	Pros	Cons
SEO	Can generate a lot of “free” trafficTends to produce higher quality leads than PPC	Time-consuming, requires constant content marketing and strong social media Takes a long time to work Technical aspects of SEO are hard to do on your own
PPC	InstantaneousGenerates a lot of exposure	Can be very expensiveHard to do on your own
Content Marketing	Creates invaluable reputation for being an industry thought leaderHelps to convert site visitors into leads and subscribers	VERY time consumingCan be outsourced, but can’t be handed off completely Expensive to outsource
Social Media Marketing	Creates invaluable thought leadership contentBuilds invaluable relationships with your audience Enhances your SEO	VERY time consumingCan be outsourced, but can’t be handed off completely Expensive to outsource
Email Marketing	InexpensiveNurtures and converts your leads into purchasing customers	Can be a bit time-consumingNeeds to be consistent
Affiliate Marketing	Others do the heavy lifting for you	You have to give up a piece of the pieYou need to find and/or solicit the right affiliates to partner with
Conversion Optimization	Guaranteed results	Time-consumingTechnical, making it difficult to do on your own

How Each Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses Enhance One Another

The tactics that you choose to promote your business through digital marketing are ultimately attempting to drive more traffic to your website. The more website traffic you generate will enhance your site’s overall SEO while also, potentially, growing your list of subscribers. Enhancing your SEO and growing your email marketing list, in turn, continues to drive more traffic to your website. There are some additional factors to consider when choosing the right digital marketing strategies for your small business. The most important of which are:

How much of your time each of these marketing strategies will take
How much each of these strategies costs
How do these tactics play into the short- and long-term sales cycles

Need Help Developing the Right Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business?

That’s where we come in. Your website and marketing strategy are vital to your company’s success, and we believe that business owners have the right to be aware of what their SEO company is doing to their site. That’s why we don’t touch your site without first planning out your complete SEO marketing strategy plan. Contact us for more information about our professional SEO services.

The post Create the Right Digital Marketing Strategies for Your Small Business appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

2026 Update: Mangools’ KWFinder Review – Still My Favorite SEO Keyword Research Tool!

Pam Aungst Cronin — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 03:31:04 +0000

Eight years later, this is still my absolute favorite SEO keyword research tool! I’ve updated our original review with my latest thoughts and added more about my favorite features.

Implementing a comprehensive SEO strategy is vital to your business’s success. To do so, you’ll need to find the right keywords to incorporate throughout your website and branded content. How do you do that? You’ll need an SEO keyword research tool to identify the right terms to use.

While Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Ahrefs might be the most well-known SEO keyword research tools, KWFinder is a great alternative and one that can provide extra search volume data for an extremely reasonable price.

Not quite sold on making the switch? We’ve compiled a review of Mangools’ KWFinder to help you decide if it’s the right keyword research tool for your business.

Mangools’ KWFinder SEO Keyword Research Tool Review

KWFinder is an SEO keyword research tool developed by Mangools. It’s sought after not only for its simplicity but also for its user-friendly design.

For long-tail keyword research, including questions and autocomplete results, I have found nothing better in the past handful of years that I’ve been using this tool. It’s also great for getting search volume data on specific keyword variations that other tools can’t provide.

A quote from their blog explains the reason behind this:

However, in some cases, Google Keyword Planner shows higher volumes for the same keyword. This is caused by the fact, that in KWFinder, we do not group the close variants keywords, so you can see the exact search volume data for every single close variant of a keyword.

To give you an example of how close variants grouping work:

If you want to know the search volume of the keyword “apple iphone 7”, KWFinder gives you an exact number of searches for this very keyword, while GKP may group more keywords under one phrase (“apple iphone 7”, “iphone 7 apple”, or even “apple iphone 7 buy”, “apple iphone 7 price”, etc. ) and therefore show higher search volume.

How to Get Started with KWFinder by Mangools

To get started using KWFinder, you’ll need to input a seed keyword to be able to identify the actual terms your target audience is using in their searches. For this example, we used the keyword “SEO agency”.

As you can see, the KWFinder results include related keywords, search trends, CPC, PPC, and keyword SEO difficulty.

On the right-hand panel, you are presented with a summary of the keyword results, including the difficulty of your keyword and monthly search volume trends.

One of the most important pieces of data to focus on is the keyword SEO difficulty score.

To continue our example of “SEO agency”, the monthly searches are consistently high, which is good. However, the keyword SEO difficulty score is 60. A score this high will make it difficult for new content to rank for this particular keyword.

To work around this finding, you’ll want to look at the similar keywords listed on the dashboard. You can see if there are any that have a lower keyword difficulty score. In this case, “SEO firm” has a difficulty score of 42. Although the search volume is less (1,300 vs. 14,700), it’s usually best to use an easier-to-rank-for keyword that has lower volume than to fail to rank for a difficult keyword that has higher volume. Then you get no volume at all!

One caveat to keep in mind is that the SEO difficulty score shown on the KWFinder dashboard is a metric invented by the tool. So, the score may be different if you compare it to other keyword research programs. However, despite different keyword research tools using different difficulty algorithms, all of them are based on the actual competitive landscapes of the SERPs. So despite the variance between tools, keyword difficulty is still a reliable metric for strategic purposes.

KWFinder by Mangools: The Pros and Cons

Now that you’ve taken the tour around KWFinder by Mangools, here’s an overview of the pros and cons of our KWFinder review.

Pro: User-Friendly Interface

One of the best features of KWFinder is its user-friendly interface. As you can see in the screenshots above, the layout makes it very easy to understand the results of your keyword research.

Pro: Being able to easily see search volume trends is awesome.

I absolutely love the monthly search volume trend chart that appears on the right-hand panel for each search. It makes it so easy to see if a keyword’s popularity has been trending upward, downward, or has been steady. In this case, I was very happy to see that the search volume for “SEO agency” has been trending upward pretty steadily in recent months.

Pro: The long-tail keyword research tools (autocomplete & questions) save a ton of time!

Two of my favorite things about KWFinder are their autocomplete and questions features. These help you find very long-tail (yet still often searched) key phrases and questions to use in your content.

Autocomplete

The autocomplete feature grabs all of the Google search suggestions that start with the phrase you entered:

Questions

The questions feature saves tons of time because it keeps you from having to go to Google, search your phrase, and then copy and paste all of the “people also ask” questions from the results.

Pro: It’s one of the most cost-effective SEO keyword research tools available.

If you’re running your content marketing strategy on a shoestring budget, Mangools has very competitive pricing options available. With KWFinder, you should plan to spend between $49-$129 per month (as of February 2026). However, even their most expensive plan is significantly less expensive than most other keyword research tools. Especially if you’re planning to purchase an annual membership. That brings the prices down to the equivalent of $29 to $89 per month.

Pro: The keyword data aggregation for lists is a huge plus.

With KWFinder, data for your keyword search results are displayed in one convenient dashboard that gives easy-to-understand visual representations of keyword difficulty and search volume trends over time.

On top of this, you can create individual keyword lists and see the data aggregated for all of the keywords in your list:

I’ve highlighted the SEO-related metrics in this screenshot, but it’s worth pointing out that this keyword research tool is excellent for planning and budget forecasting for paid search campaigns, too.

Pro: It supports copy-and-paste keyboard shortcuts!

Back in 2018, when I first started using KWFinder, the only way to copy some keywords to your clipboard was to check them off in the list, then scroll to the bottom, click “Export”, then click “Copy to clipboard.” While that option is still available, at some point (I don’t remember when), they added support for the Cmd+C (or Ctrl+C) keyboard shortcuts! Let me tell you, I was one VERY happy camper when that came out! (Update: Still loving this little feature in 2026 – I’m shocked how many tools STILL don’t have this!)

Pro: The import and export features are excellent.

As someone who couldn’t live without Google Sheets, I need to be able to easily move keyword data in and out of any SEO tool that I use. The import and export features of KWFinder are perfect for this.

Import Feature

The import feature allows you to either paste in a list of keywords (that you got from another spreadsheet, tool, or Google Search Console) and then run the data for them in one click. You also have the option of importing a CSV or TXT file if you’d like.

Export Features

The export features are equally easy to use. You can just click the “Export list” icon on any of your lists.

Alternatively, you can easily export from the bottom of the keyword results while you’re in the middle of your research. It allows you to export all of the results, or select certain keywords to export by checking the box next to the ones you want.

It’s nice to be able to do this on-the-fly without having to make and save lists for every little thing. I certainly don’t want to do that for every single blog post that we research for ourselves and our clients – it would be too messy. It’s nice to be able to just grab the keywords I want, copy/paste or export them, and move on.

One thing to note is that when you use the copy/paste keyboard shortcuts, or the “Copy to clipboard” option, only the keywords are copied to the clipboard. If you want to get all of the metrics associated with each keyword, use the export option instead.

Pro: Fast and high-quality support.

Mangools has a knowledge hub with comprehensive documentation as a self-help option. If you do better speaking with someone, the Live Chat function is a great option for assistance.

Con: It’s not the ideal keyword program for competitive research.

Although you can search for keywords based on what a specific domain or URL is ranking for, the information that KWFinder returns is not as comprehensive as what some other tools provide.

Con: Keyword results are capped and there are strict request limitations for frequent users.

One of the biggest drawbacks is Mangools’ request and result caps. In theory, it makes sense to limit the number of requests for each user so the program’s resources aren’t constantly strained, but it is a caveat to consider before purchasing a membership.

Here’s a look at the keyword request caps (as of February 2026):

If you register for KWFinder’s basic package, you’re limited to 100 keyword searches every 24 hours. Another limitation is that you can’t see all of the related keywords in your search; depending on your membership, you’re restricted to either 200 or 700 results for each search, which is well below what other SEO keyword research tools offer.

Con: You can’t customize the SERP Checker preview.

While the SERP Checker is a great part of the Mangools’ toolset, it would be even better if users could customize the data columns in KWFinder’s SERP overview.

Con: Although they have several tools (and a cool Chrome extension), it’s not a comprehensive SEO platform for all purposes.

The glaring hole in Mangool’s suite of tools is that there isn’t a tool (other than its Chrome extension, which is cool but not a full-blown tool) for on-site SEO auditing. You’ll have to turn to other tools for that. Our favorite for this purpose is Screaming Frog.

Determining if KWFinder is the Right SEO Keyword Research Tool for You

While the Mangools’ KWFinder SEO keyword research tool is one of the best search optimization tools available, it’s not the right tool for everyone. If you’re just getting started with optimizing your website, KWFinder’s user-friendly dashboard interface and accurate keyword research data for the affordable price tag make this a great option for beginners. However, if you’re looking for a full all-in-one suite of SEO tools, this isn’t the right fit for you. (Side note: I actually prefer to use individual tools versus all-in-one software applications. The individual tools do a better job of being excellent at what they do. They’re REALLY good at one thing, versus the all-in-one SEO software platforms that are kind of good in a lot of different things.)

Working with a very strict budget? You can still take advantage of the KWFinder tool. Sign up for one month to create an extremely comprehensive keyword database while you have access to the tool. You can download the results and refer back to them while you’re planning your long-term keyword strategy without paying the monthly price tag.

Ready to take your keyword research game to the next level? Get started with KWFinder by Mangools today.

Not Quite Ready to Try Kwfinder for Yourself?

We know that developing your SEO strategy — including deciding which SEO keyword research tool will find the right keywords for your business — can be overwhelming. We are happy to spend time educating potential clients on how to create the right SEO strategy for your company. And we know it can be nerve-wracking to trust someone else with your website. That’s why we guarantee 100% transparency and we will teach you how to do what we do. Our professional SEO services are “white hat” and completely in line with Google’s guidelines. Contact us to discuss your particular SEO needs.

(This post may contain affiliate links and/or paid advertisements. Our company may receive a tiny commission from sales generated from these links; however, this is not why we promote these products. We ONLY promote the products and services that we use and love ourselves.)

The post 2026 Update: Mangools’ KWFinder Review – Still My Favorite SEO Keyword Research Tool! appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

10 Lessons I’ve Learned in 10 Years of Business

Pam Aungst Cronin — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 03:31:04 +0000

In April, my company celebrated 10 years in business. I can’t even begin to describe the level of gratitude that I have for achieving this milestone, especially because, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “approximately 20 percent of small businesses fail within the first year. By the end of the second year, 30 percent of businesses will have failed. By the end of the fifth year, about half will have failed. And by the end of the decade, only 30 percent of businesses will remain — a 70 percent failure rate.”

In addition to giving a heartfelt shoutout to EVERY single person who has even remotely helped me along the way, I also want to give back by sharing my top 10 business lessons I’ve learned over these 10 years in business.

So here they are, in no particular order. These valuable business lessons have all played a crucial role in our ability to survive and thrive as a company, and my ability to enjoy the flexible and incredibly rewarding lifestyle of an entrepreneur — which I am INSANELY grateful for.

1. Competitors can be your best source of revenue.

You can’t pay for things with a “competitive advantage,” and you SHOULD “give away the farm,” so long as you’re getting paid for it!

When I first started my company, I was terrified of competitors. They seemed like such a serious threat to my livelihood, which depended upon securing every dollar of revenue I possibly could.

Over the years, though, through a lot of networking, I met a lot of “competitors” that on the surface seemed to do the exact same things my company did. However, after getting to know them more, and getting to know my own target audience more, I realized that there are plenty of projects and clients that competitors don’t want to take on that I would love to take on — and vice versa.

Beyond that, even competitors that did prefer to take on the same types of clients and projects as my company often ran into either bandwidth or skill deficits within their own teams. They would then reach out to us and ask if they could subcontract us to fill gaps in their workforce.

We actually received SO many requests of that nature, that we started a whole separate brand to serve this exact need: Stealth Search and Analytics.

Last, but certainly not least, one of the most important business lessons I’ve learned is that “competitors” also often turn to us for training. Whether it’s skill training for new team members, or process optimization training for their SEO or PPC operations, we often earn revenue by training our competitors to do what we do and how we do it.

That’s another thing I used to be afraid of — “giving away the farm” as some would say. Many people feel as I used to feel, that my company’s intellectual property (proprietary processes and procedures) should be kept under lock and key as a competitive advantage.

However, if you’re getting paid to share that IP with others, competitors or not, you’re not giving away anything! I’d rather take the guaranteed money from the training than hang onto an imagined competitive advantage that may or may not actually lead to more revenue for me someday down the line. A “competitive advantage” can’t pay my bills, but payments for training sessions can.

Plus, after all these years of doing what we do at such a high level and, in turn, gaining such a rock-solid reputation from that, I’m not really worried about anyone else being able to magically gain all the benefits of 10 years of blood, sweat, and tears just by taking a few training sessions from us.

Today, my company’s biggest source of revenue comes from these alliances with competitors that lead to referrals, reseller work through Stealth, and training other agencies. In no way do I feel like I “gave away the farm” by not protecting my supposed competitive advantage. Quite the opposite, actually. One of the most valuable business lessons I’ve learned is that collaborating with “competitors” is what BUILT my farm!

2. Networking is NOT “not working.”

Without networking, you really will be “not working” because you’ll have no clients to work for!

A running joke amongst some business owners is that “networking” is “not working.” Granted, sometimes networking events are nothing more than a gathering of humans with adult beverages in hand (in person or virtually, as the birth of the “Zoom Happy Hour” has shown).

However, if you think of small businesses that you repeatedly use, you probably keep going back to them because you either know them, like them, and/or trust them. That’s who people choose to hand their money over to (or refer people to): people they know, like, and/or trust.

So how do you get people to know, like, and trust you? Well, spending time with them and getting to know them via networking is clearly one very effective way to do that.

A majority of the revenue I made in my first few years of business came either directly or indirectly from networking. I would go to the same events over and over, and see the same faces over and over, talk to the same people over and over, until seemingly suddenly everyone knew who I was and I was getting referrals left and right. Plus, I now had a network of trusted professionals to refer my clients and friends to, and my giving of referrals further strengthened those relationships, leading to more referrals from them to me. Rinse + repeat that = revenue growth.

Nowadays, one of the business skills I’ve learned is to do most of my networking via speaking engagements where I can network with other speakers and attendees both before and after my presentations, as well as some excellent mastermind groups that I partake in when I can. I also now have my own VIP Facebook Group where people in my network get to know each other and help each other out with real-world needs. These are all different flavors of the same delicious networking sandwich, and one of the skills I’ve learned as a successful entrepreneur is that I wouldn’t survive without them.

In short, I like to flip this saying on its head and say that WITHOUT networking, you will be “not working” because you’ll have no clients to do work for!

3. People buy processes, not services.

Having a solid process and giving prospects a visual to help them understand what you’re selling will close more business in less time.

This one hit me like a Mack truck. (Does anyone even use that saying anymore? Anyway…)

After several years of pulling my hair out trying to create an internal system that worked for efficiently delivering our services to clients, while at the same time providing high-quality work, I had come up with something that worked. It’s always being slightly tweaked, even now, but the foundation of it works and works well.

After spending what felt like most of my waking hours on prospect calls explaining how the process would work if they sign on with us, the light bulb went off. One of the valuable business lessons I’ve learned is that in my proposals, I was only explaining the services themselves (i.e. what we would do), not HOW we would do it. So, duh… it’s no wonder I had to spend so much time on the phone explaining how we would go about getting the work done for the client.

I started to put descriptions of our process into our proposals, and my hour-long prospect calls suddenly got shorter. Then, another light bulb went off, and I started including flowcharts (like the one shown on our SEO services page) that gave a visual representation of the process.

That’s when I started seeing light bulbs go off for the prospects I was speaking to. Now, in a fraction of the time I used to spend, I can explain how our process works and what the experience will be like for a client to work with us. I can’t even accurately describe how enormous of a difference those visuals made. My prospect calls are now MAX 30 minutes, often shorter. I could even probably do most of them in 15 minutes if I tried hard enough, but I don’t like to make potential clients feel rushed. Point is, though, that I could if I needed to.

But wait, there’s more! Another unforeseen business lesson benefit of adding the descriptions and visual representations of our process was that I ended up CLOSING a lot more business. I started to get feedback from prospects that mine was the only proposal they had seen that actually described our process, and some even said that we were the only company that even claimed to have a process at all!

I could feel the prospects’ tangible sense of relief once they realized that a) we have a solid, proven process that we follow, and b) they can easily understand what that process is by looking at the flowcharts.

Especially in the complex digital marketing world where clients are fearful of paying for services that they don’t totally understand, and that makes a WORLD of difference. It’s SO easy, and SO quick, to close new business now — which made me realize that people are buying into our process more so than the services themselves.

4. Retention is easy.

More important than caring about your clients is SHOWING them that you care.

I have a former employee, who is now one of those friendly “competitors” mentioned above, who constantly says that “Pam’s retention is INSANE.”

In the digital marketing world, one of the business lessons I’ve learned is there is a high rate of attrition. Clients tend to move around to different agencies pretty frequently. I tend to say that we are lucky enough to have many clients that have stuck with us for 5, 6, or 7+ years at this point, but when I really think about it, it’s got nothing to do with luck.

I would attribute some of our high retention rate to our ability to get results, but I definitely won’t credit it to that entirely. In the world of digital marketing, results take time, particularly with SEO where the timeframe to even BEGIN to see results can be RIDICULOUSLY long.

What I credit our retention more to, is this:

“68% of customers leave as a result of perceived indifference.” | John Gattorna

One of the skills I’ve learned as a successful entrepreneur is that the clients that have stuck with us for a half-decade or more do not feel as if we are indifferent about them. Even in the longest of SEO journeys, we are constantly communicating with our clients and helping them understand exactly why it’s taking the time that it’s taking.

This avoids the “perceived indifference” effect. Even if you care about every one of your clients more than life itself, one of the most valuable business lessons I’ve learned is if clients FEEL like you don’t care, they’re going to leave.

So this one is easy… don’t just care about your clients, SHOW them that you care. That can be by doing something as simple as scheduling monthly phone calls to maintain genuine, honest communication.

5. Great people lead to great results… but… you can’t expect what you don’t inspect.

Without great hiring practices, you can’t find great employees. And without great employees, you can’t have a great company. But even with a great team, expecting what you’re not inspecting will veer you off course.

If I had to pick one business lesson that was the hardest throughout this journey, it would be hiring. I truly believe that without great employees, you cannot have a great company. However, one of the lessons I’ve learned in entrepreneurship is that getting the right applicants, interviewing them, making hiring decisions, negotiating salary, training, giving feedback, etc. was a big struggle for me for a very, very long time. I occasionally would hit the jackpot by finding an awesome new employee, but I really struggled to find a way to make that a repeatable process.

Thankfully, my business coach, Dave Schoenbeck, came to the rescue here. Through his many years of team-building experience, he had developed the system I needed and helped me see that my hiring process was flawed. It took some trial-and-error tweaking to make his system fit for my particular company, but once I finally nailed it, I was able to consistently find the right kind of team members. That involved not just assessing their skill sets, but (and this was the big puzzle piece my hiring process was completely missing) assessing how their behavioral tendencies and beliefs aligned with the values of my company. Dave taught me how to do values-based interviewing that digs into a person’s core values to ensure a truly correct fit, both culturally and skill-wise.

Today, I have an incredibly awesome team that needs so very little of my attention. They are so self-sufficient at carrying out their roles, taking great care of clients, and upholding the company’s reputation.

That being said, one of the business lessons I’ve learned is that the more awesome a team member is, the more I fall into a trap of assuming that since I’ve found a great employee and trained them, now everything is going to go perfectly smoothly all the time. Obviously, I should know that isn’t the case and that course correction will be needed along the way, but it was always such a relief to have good help that after the training period, I would stop checking in on their work.

Over time, that lack of oversight on my part would allow certain processes and procedures to veer off course from their original intention. One slight misunderstanding, when not caught quickly and when compounded with several other slight misunderstandings, can take a system far off track. And once that train is off the track, it’s so much harder to get it back on than if each minor misunderstanding was caught quickly and course-corrected along the way.

Communication is challenging, and no matter how well I think I’ve described and demonstrated something or how thoroughly I’ve written out instructions, inevitably some part of the training will be misunderstood or misinterpreted. And when clients are buying into our process more than anything else, it’s crucial for that process to be repeatable and consistent.

Therefore, as Coach Dave has drilled into my head over the years, one of the business lessons I have learned is that “you can’t expect what you don’t inspect.” Despite my thorough and complete trust in my team’s intentions and their sense of accountability, it’s still important for me to inspect what they’re doing on a regular basis in order to consistently provide minor course corrections to keep the process train on its tracks.

6. Business is math. Period.

2 + 2 = 4. Revenue — Expenses = Profit. Therefore, all business decisions are essentially math problems. Business = math.

If you’re looking to become a business owner, but you don’t like math and don’t plan to hire a C-level employee who does, you’re going to have a bad time.

One of the most important business lessons I’ve learned is that running a business is essentially an accounting job. Yeah, you may get lucky and the math may work out in your favor even if you’re not constantly counting your beans. However, if you want guaranteed success, you’re going to have to do a LOT of math. All of the time. Every damn day. Math, math, math.

I’ve learned to embrace the fact that budgeting and constantly monitoring our P&L, despite not being fun, is basically the equivalent of monitoring vital signs. Keeping an eye on the numbers is like monitoring the heartbeat, blood pressure, and the other vitals of your business.

7. Your time is your inventory.

If I bought a pair of sneakers at a cost of $20 and someone offered me $15 to purchase them from me — I would easily and very quickly say no. Envisioning labor hours as physical products help me make sure they keep moving “off the shelves” at an appropriate markup.

If you own a services business, where you do things for your clients as opposed to selling them products, your clients are giving you money as a medium of exchange for your TIME. Yes, they expect you to do something specific and skillful with that time, but essentially you are in the business of reselling your time.

I was way more than halfway into my entrepreneurial journey before this valuable business lesson light bulb went off. I was watching the show “The Profit” with Marcus Lemonis and was thrilled that he was finally doing an episode on a services business (he usually invests in product-oriented businesses).

To those product businesses, he often says things like, “Bad inventory management can bankrupt your business,” and “If you can’t track what’s selling or not selling, [then] you can’t do any forecasting to build inventory. You can’t even monitor trends or customer behavior. You have no shot at success.”

I had always dismissed inventory advice as not applying to my business, until that one episode when he explained to the service business owners that their time, and the time of their employees, is their inventory.

It hit me like a ton of bricks — my time has a cost and my employee’s time has a cost, so why am I not thinking of each hour of our time as something tangible that I purchased and that I need to resell at an appropriate markup? I envisioned hours of time sitting on shelves in boxes in a warehouse just like sneakers or gadgets or any other physical product that one purchases in order to mark up and resell.

I have to purchase those hours from myself and from my team whether I resell them or not. If they just sit there getting dusty on a shelf, or if I sell them for less than I paid for them, then I’ll go out of business.

To some, this may seem obvious or even a bit silly, but for me, envisioning labor hours as physical products that I bought at a certain cost helps me stay laser-focused on making sure they keep moving “off the shelves” and that I am marking them up enough to avoid becoming an example of Lemonis’ mantra that “Bad inventory management can bankrupt your business.”

I now have an “inventory management” spreadsheet where I keep track of exactly how many working hours I purchase each year, from both my employees and myself. Between this and our time tracking records, I can figure out what percentage of each person’s time is billable, and create a markup that covers both their billable time and non-billable time.

There’s one more big benefit to this business lesson learned, and that is how it helps me stand strong against prospects that try to negotiate with me. Envisioning the hours that I pay for labor in my business as physical products with a cost that I can never resell below makes it SO VERY EASY to instantly shut down requests to negotiate on our prices.

8. One-to-many is the only way to scale.

If we spend an hour of time MAKING a thing, instead of DOING a thing, then we can make the thing ONCE and resell it MANY times!

This next revelation followed the inventory business lesson light bulb. If I am running a services company, which means I’m in the business of purchasing hours of people’s time and reselling them, and clients are only willing to pay up to a reasonable market rate for those hours, then how will I ever make more money than I am now?

I have indeed increased profitability over the years by focusing on efficiency, but people can only do things so fast no matter how organized we are, especially when maintaining high-quality work is one of our core values. So there’s a profitability ceiling there that can’t be penetrated by increased efficiency or productivity.

Value-based pricing is another way I’ve increased profitability over time, where we charge a rate based on the value of what we provide as opposed to basing it on the exact amount of time it takes, but again going market rates and what clients are willing to pay is a limiting factor here as well.

In the end, there’s a fixed one-to-one relationship between my cost and my revenue. I purchase an hour of time, and I sell an hour of time. If I want to sell more hours of time, I have to purchase more hours of time.

Unless…

(Drumroll leading up to valuable business lesson light bulb moment number 8…)

If we spend an hour of time MAKING a thing, instead of DOING a thing, then we can make the thing ONCE and resell it MANY times!

Again, I realize that this sounds like I’m being Captain Obvious, but it was a process for me to get this to fully sink in. I kept thinking that with increased efficiency and value-based pricing, profitability would continue to increase year-over-year. And it did, until it didn’t. When I finally hit that ceiling, we experienced several years of TOTALLY FLAT profitability. I mean like within a few dollars year-over-year. Almost exactly the same profit EVERY year. A total plateau.

I’m now in the process of trying to wrestle my way out of that plateau by developing products that can be created once and sold to many different clients. We’re currently working on educational products like courses and digital downloads, and in the future, I plan to develop software products as well.

9. Change doesn’t have to be scary.

If you are running a company, you are in the business of navigating constant change. It comes with the territory. Get used to it.

“SEO changes all the time, right?” People say that to me constantly. I used to agree, but then I realized that it actually doesn’t change. It evolves. It grows in complexity, but the core tenants never change. Search engines want to deliver high-quality results to searchers. The exact definition of “quality” continues to evolve, but the basic practice of making sure your website answers people’s questions has never changed.

The business landscape changes all the time as well, and I used to get very stressed out about that. Over this last decade, so many things have changed. We used to not be considered a legit business until we got an office with a real conference room where prospects could come meet with us in person. Now, paying for an office can be looked at as an unnecessary expense. People said I was smart to get an office, then several years later, people said I was smart to let it go.

A few years ago, if someone accidentally turned on their webcam during a GoToMeeting, it was SUPER awkward. Now, it’s super awkward to NOT turn on your camera for a Zoom meeting.

The ever-changing nature of the business landscape is the same as the ever-evolving nature of SEO. Yes, it changes, but it also stays the same. Whether it’s a conference room, a camera-less GoToMeeting, or a Zoom “face-to-face”, we’re still doing the same thing: helping our clients.

That same ever-changing nature of the digital marketing landscape does terrify me at times. I thought the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was going to end us. The current looming death of the third-party cookie has me pretty on edge for our PPC line of business as well. But after all this time surfing over tons of waves of change, I realize that there’s no need to be afraid of it. Change is the only constant. Expecting things not to change is actually quite ridiculous if you really think about it.

The same business skill to learn as the “math is business” principle applies here. If you are running a business, your job is essentially to do math constantly. Similarly, if you are running a company, you are in the business of navigating constant change. It comes with the territory. Get used to it.

And it doesn’t even have to be scary. If you use your mission, vision, and values as your guiding principles for each and every decision, you’ll find a way to navigate all the changes just fine.

10. Perfectionism is lethal.

“You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.”

Oh boy, if I had a nickel for every time I got caught up in my own perfectionism… Well, I don’t think that many nickels actually exist.

This article is case-in-point. Our anniversary was in April, and I’m sitting here in mid-June still working on this article because of my crippling, downright debilitating, perfectionism. My business coach keeps joking with me that if I don’t wrap this up soon, I’ll have to change it to “11 Things I’ve Learned in 11 Years of Business.” Left to my own devices, that is absolutely the way this would’ve gone!

Obviously, I haven’t fully learned the perfectionism lesson just yet – but I have made a lot of progress. “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself” used to be my mantra in life. I used to feel almost psychotically compelled to double-check every single tidbit of work before it went out to a client. Micromanager was my middle name.

But after enough years of my extreme perfectionism resulting in negative consequences (<– and yes, yours truly was the inspiration behind that article), I’m slowly but surely starting to truly embrace that to run a business successfully, the owner has to GET OUT OF THE F(*&#%G WAY.

The more I treat this business as “my baby”, the longer it’s going to stay a baby and not grow. One of the most crucial skills of a successful entrepreneur is the ability to build a high-quality team, establish high-quality processes, and then GET OUT OF THE DAMN WAY.

I’m also realizing that I set completely unrealistic expectations of myself. Countless times, I’ve worked on something when I was short on time and had to deliver it in a state that I considered to be maybe 50% of where it should be. Every one of those times, the clients perceived that same work to be like 120% of what they expected. My 50% is their 120%. I need to get that in check, otherwise, clearly, I’m just wasting my time.

To help with that, I’m trying to adopt a new mantra. I absolutely love this line from the book Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson:

“You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.”

And with that, despite my brain’s current urge to keep working on making this the most perfect article of all time, I’m going to tell myself that I did good enough and wrap this thing up before I have to change it to “11 Things I’ve Learned in 11 Years of Business.”

Download a copy of the accompanying infographic here!

The post 10 Lessons I’ve Learned in 10 Years of Business appeared first on Pam Ann Marketing.

Pam Ann Marketing

Why All AI-SEO Studies are Flawed (and What to Trust Instead)

Introduction

Conclusion (TL;DR)

High-Level Summary of the Four AI-SEO Studies I Reviewed

Study #1: SEMRush: “Can AI Content Rank on Google?” (2024)1

Study #2: Ahrefs: “AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings” (2024)2

Study #3: Graphite.io: “AI Content in Search & LLMs” (2024-2025)3

Study #4: NP Digital: “Performance Engagement Analysis” (2024)4

The 8 Deadly Flaws of AI-SEO Studies

Flaw #1: Survivorship Bias (Only Analyzing Winners)

What is Survivorship Bias?

How Do AI-SEO Studies Fall Victim to Survivorship Bias?

Survivorship Bias in These AI-SEO Studies

SEMRush Study: Strong Survivorship Bias

Ahrefs Study: Strong Survivorship Bias

Graphite.io Study: Solidly Attempted to Avoid Survivorship Bias

NP Digital Study: Unclear, But Unlikely to Include Strong Survivorship Bias

Flaw #2: Use of Unreliable AI Content Detection Tools

What is an AI Content Detection Tool?

Unreliability of AI Detection Tools

My Experience

Use of AI Content Detection in These AI-SEO Studies

SEMRush Study: Includes AI-Content Detection

Ahrefs Study: Includes AI-Content Detection

Graphite.io Study: Included AI-Content Detection, But Did Adjust for Error Rate

NP Digital Study: Avoided AI-Content Detection

Flaw #3: Correlation Does Not Equal Causation

What’s the Difference Between Correlation and Causation?

Correlation vs. Causation in SEO

Correlation vs. Causation Example

Correlation vs. Causation in These AI-SEO Studies

SEMRush Study: Has Correlation / Causation Issues

Ahrefs Study: Has Correlation / Causation Issues

Graphite.io Study: Has Correlation / Causation Issues

NP Digital Study: (Presumably) Has Correlation / Causation Issues

Flaw #4: Flawed Survey Data

SEMRush Study: Has Flawed Survey Data

Ahrefs Study: Has Flawed Survey Data

Graphite.io & NP Digital Studies: Avoided Survey Data

Flaw #5: Conflicts of Interest

SEMRush Study: Strong Conflict of Interest

Ahrefs Study: Strong Conflict of Interest

This one is a very poorly disguised attempt at an advertisement for their AI content detection tool. They don’t even attempt to hide it.

Graphite.io Study: Light Conflict of Interest

NP Digital Study: Moderate Conflict of Interest

Flaw #6: Statistical Methodologies

SEMRush Study: No Use of Statistical Tests At All

Ahrefs Study: Misuse of Linear Correlation

Graphite.io Study: Solid Application of Statistical Testing

NP Digital Study: Unclear, and Therefore Unlikely That Statistical Testing Was Used

Flaw #7: Lack of Time-Based Analysis

Potency of AI-Generated Content by URL vs Domain

AI-Generated Content Traffic Loss Over Time – Case Studies

Not Worth the Risk

Case-in-Point: The March 2024 Core Update

Flaw #8: Lack of Clarity On Hybrid Content

What Amount of Human Editing Makes AI-Generated Content Acceptable?

What Google Actually Says About AI-Generated Content

What Are Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG)?

Relevant Excerpts from Google’s Updated-for-AI Quality Rater Guidelines

Section: 3.2 Quality of the Main Content

Section 4.6.5: Scaled Content Abuse

Section 4.6.6: MC Created with Little to No Effort, Little to No Originality, and Little to No Added Value for Website Visitors

Google’s Self-Assessment Questions

A Simple and Scientific Method for Measuring Content Originality

Introducing “The Level 3 Content Originality Framework”

Conclusion: Rely On Common Sense, Not Flawed Studies

Bonus Tip! Always Disclose AI Usage

AI Usage Disclaimer for this Article

Reference Material for This Article

How Much AI-Generated Content is Acceptable for SEO Writing?

The TL;DR (“Too Long, Didn’t Read”)

The ELI5 (“Explain It Like I’m Five”)

What is E-E-A-T?

Forget the Amount of AI, Focus on the Amount of “E”

How Search Evolved

“Level 1” Primitive Search Engines

“Level 2” Entity-Based Search

“Level 3” AI-Powered Search

Study #1: SEMRush: “Can AI Content Rank on Google?” (2024)¹

Study #2: Ahrefs: “AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings” (2024)²

Study #3: Graphite.io: “AI Content in Search & LLMs” (2024-2025)³

Study #4: NP Digital: “Performance Engagement Analysis” (2024)⁴