5 cool SEO things I got this week.
Facebook pages are excellent for reputation management
I uploaded this video testimonial of my SEO course 6 days ago to my Facebook page.
5 hours later it was showing on Google for “Compact Keywords Review.”
Now, 6 days later, it’s still showing.
You work hard on your business. Every bit of positive feedback is a chance to show others how great your brand is. Most people squander these opportunities.
Get in the habit of sharing EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE.
Google crawls your WHOLE website when you change your Google Business Profile
The founder of Whitespark, one of the top local SEO companies, came on my podcast this week.
He explained how your website acts as the authoritative data source behind your Google Business Profile.
Think of it like this:
- Your Google Business Profile = a snapshot of your business.
- Your website = the full database Google uses to verify and contextualize everything.
Darren Shaw, the founder, said: “If you make any change on your Google Business Profile, you’ll see an explosion of activity on your site. Google immediately crawls your website – the whole damn thing.”
So when you update GBP, Google needs to re-check your site to:
- Validate the new information.
- Look for consistency.
- Recalculate local rankings.
- Update entity understanding in the Knowledge Graph.
This is why your website’s server logs will explode with Googlebot every time you change anything on your Google Business Profile.
So have a thorough website with everything you offer, lots of details and reviews, and information that is consistent to your GBP!
It’s okay to make a “Best X for Y” SEO listicle where you place yourself first
Well before generative AI, SEOs have wondered if it’s okay to do this.
This article has been going viral, sharing how ChatGPT LOVES these “Best X for Y” articles and cites them A LOT, even when the company writing it places themselves as the top choice.
- Best CRM for Logistics
- Best Air Purifier for Schools
- Best Sneakers for Running in the Cold
I made this podcast about the top takeaways from the article:
- For relevant prompts, these “Best X for Y” blog lists represented 43.8% of all page types analyzed.
- 79.1% were last updated in 2025, and 26% were last updated in the past two months alone (recency is IMPORTANT).
- These listicles are underrepresented in ecommerce.
- Blog posts announcing your wins get cited by ChatGPT, too (SHARE YOUR WINS)!
- SEO landing pages work very well with ChatGPT, but not enough businesses across industries do them.
- Common mistakes:
- Don’t spam these “Best X for Y” listicles. They should be a fraction of your site’s content output.
- Make sure to link out to competitors, write in a neutral way, and demonstrate the article is well-researched and factual.
So make a few of these listicles (not many) putting yourself first. Keep them up-to-date. Do them especially if you’re in ecommerce, where they’re underrepresented. Make SEO landing pages for everything you offer. Make blog posts announcing all of your wins. Chunk it out – just a bit each day!
The above video has a lot more of my analysis.
For more strategies like this, these are my top ways to do AI SEO/GEO/AEO so you can find LLM prompts people use, and show up for those prompts so you get mentions, visits, and conversions.
Creating your own subreddit to use for SEO
Ivan Palii came on my show this week, as well.
He talked about how he created this SEO subreddit so he could share stuff that might get taken down on other subreddits.
The biggest SEO subreddits have strict moderation rules. Ivan wanted to make his own rules.
He got members to the subreddit with his newsletter, LinkedIn sharing, 𝕏 sharing, and cross-posting to other subreddits. He also plans to integrate his subreddit into onboarding emails to grow it faster.
For those who don’t know, Reddit ranks easily and very well in Google, and is one of the most cited websites in LLMs.
What’s shocking:
- Within his first month of starting the subreddit, it already has a post ranking on Google.
- He predicts posts on the subreddit can rank for competitive keywords within 6-12 months. Not a bad investment.
- The subreddit only has 186 members and is still ranking.
Ivan runs a lot of SEO and marketing experiments. Another was him spending $20,000 on LinkedIn influencer marketing. My podcast with him is worthwhile:
YouTube Shorts rank on Google even years later
I made these last year and they still show on the first page of Google.
- December 2024
- June 2024
Don’t neglect targeting your keywords with video! Be it a Facebook Page, a YouTube Channel, an Instagram Reel (though YouTube definitely does the best, so crosspost everywhere).
#1 thing I’ve noticed in SEO
I posted this a few days ago, “The #1 thing I’ve noticed in SEO. NUMBER ONE. Is most people try sprinting, not even running, FULL-ON SPRINTING, before they can even walk… before they can even crawl – or be crawled. And then wonder why SEO seems so hard.”
I posted that because I got these messages:
Compact Keywords, my SEO course, shows how to find and target keywords that bring actual customers, users, warm leads and also has thorough sections on basics of SEO.
Years ago, in 2016, I started a pretty popular SEO meetup in NYC, where I’m from.
Something I quickly learned was that even people who had been in SEO for a while didn’t know the fundamentals of having a site that Google likes, how to properly do a site audit, sustainable link building strategies, how to structure an SEO page, how to do information architecture, and more.
And especially now, there’s just SO. MUCH. NOISE. about churn and burn site tactics that seem flashy and cool, but lead to penalizations, stress, and heartache – tactics people really should be avoiding.
Plenty of famous SEOs have come on my show and have shared how their entire Google Search Consoles have gotten penalized from things only one of their sites was doing…
Trust me when I say,
- You don’t need dangerous flashy SEO tactics.
- Straightforward solid SEO and targeting proper high-intent keywords is 99% of the game.
Lots of people have been loving Compact Keywords. I look forward to you being one of them.
