Google’s AI Mode isn’t just an upgrade to the search experience—it’s a foundational shift. As Liz Reid, Google’s Head of Search, said, it’s “a search that goes beyond information to intelligence.” But what exactly is AI Mode, and how should SEOs respond? AI Mode Explained: Search, Reimagined AI Mode is powered by Gemini 2.5, Google’s […]
What AI Content Policies Should Your Organization Have?
AI chatbots are amazing tools that can help us with various tasks, such as finding answers, creating or editing content, and more. However, they also come with some risks and limitations we must be aware of and follow when using them at work. In this blog post, I will share with you a draft policy […]
Google’s AI Overviews & Perspectives
Editor’s Note: The title of this blog post has been updated. AI Overviews was formerly known as Search Generative Experience (SGE). What is it? Google’s AI Overviews are live in most countries. The only way to opt out of having your content included in the AI answer is to block Googlebot (Google’s crawler) from accessing […]
Why .govs need an SEO strategy
Discover why federal agencies need an SEO strategy and the common challenges faced by .gov websites from an SEO that has worked with three different federal agencies. In my 18 years as an SEO, I’ve run into folks that seem to think federal agencies don’t need an SEO strategy or that hiring an SEO is […]
A look back at 2021, and some 2022 optimism.
Happy New Year! 2021 as a year was full from all angles. WO Strategies assisted with a platform migration of its largest site to date. The site had 16 subdomains, 2M URLs, and 35M backlinks. The migration was bumpy for all sorts of reasons. We wished it went more smoothly, but many of the bumps […]
Sharing a Googlebot Persona With Your Developers
If you’ve ever wanted to illustrate to your developers why Googlebot needs to be considered a target website audience segment, this post is for you. Why create a Googlebot persona? What I’ve found amazing over my 15+ years of working as an SEO is that the unique needs and requirements of Google and specifically Googlebot […]
Featured Snippets Writing Guide
Editor’s note: Post updated on September 14th, 2022. Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, WO Strategies LLC will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Some of my clients are big federal agencies already ranking in Google’s top 10 for their […]
Audio SEO – The Ultimate Checklist
Interested in optimizing your audio assets? This post is for you.
Optimizing podcasts and audio assets for search is a relatively new effort, and now it has even more focus from Google in relation to surfacing podcast landing pages and episodes in search.
[Editor’s note: This is a long post, so if we’ve created a .pdf of it here that you can grab and print if that’s easier for you.]
Calculating Organic Share of Voice on Multi-Topic Enterprise Sites
Are you working to figure out how to calculate the search share of voice (SOV) but don’t have an enterprise search tool at hand to do it for you? This post walks through how I developed a rough SOV calculation for an enterprise client across one topic set using SEMRush and Ahrefs.
Deadly Combination: Relative Links and Lack of 404s
I’m going to get technical with you all because once I see an SEO issue with more than one client, I feel compelled to put together a sort of PSA. This is one of those “don’t do this at home” type of posts. The SEO issue I’m going to outline probably only happens on large […]
Optimizing for Google Scholar vs Googlebot
Are you working on a Google Scholar site that could be more optimized for Google search? Then this post is for you. Over the past year, I’ve been working with professional journals that are in Google Scholar but need to improve their visibility in Google Search. My focus has been to ensure that I don’t […]
Goodbye rel=prev/next – Why you might still want to use it
Did you see the Google announcement that they don’t use rel=prev and rel=next? The SEO community is in an uproar around not being told that this signal has not been used by Google for YEARS without telling us. If you’re just catching up, here’s the Google announcement: And here’s a screenshot from their blog post about […]
