SEO SOPs

Laura Smith of ICS-digital runs a pre-flight before any campaign goes into a new market. Eight steps covering audience, channels, local media, hreflang and reporting, plus a one-page PDF in The Vault.

Ross Hudgens of Siege Media finds the use-case pages a site is missing in its own reviews. Seven steps to mine review descriptors, check them against keyword data, and build pages that carry their own proof – plus a one-page PDF in The Vault.

AJ Kohn checked how many pages in the “Crawled – currently not indexed” bucket were actually indexed. Across 24 clients it ran from 99.8% down to 0.5%. Seven steps to score your own bucket before you spend a penny fixing it.

Erika Braeger of Ten Speed builds Claude skills that absorb the hour of data-gathering before an analysis starts, and stop there. Eight steps to scope, build, QA and measure one for your own team.

ChatGPT invents URLs on your domain and sends real people to them. Your 404 report is the list. The step-by-step for turning invented pages into real ones, from Stephanie Long’s Unscripted SEO interview.

Before you commit six months of SEO to a keyword set, buy three weeks of ads on it. The three-keyword validation test Gert Mellak runs when a client’s keyword choice is wrong.

AI removed the build constraint and replaced it with a harder one. The backlog triage Ben Senescu ran when sixty pull requests arrived faster than he could safely check them.

The two-item onboarding pass Isaac Justesen runs on every new local client. Categories and services on the Business Profile, then conversion tracking end to end. Both nearly free, both usually broken.

A repeatable process for auditing every source on the open web that describes your business, finding where they contradict each other, and making them agree. Distilled from Ann Smarty of Smarty Marketing on Unscripted SEO.

You rank consensus, not pages. Malte Landwehr of Peec AI turns a query fan-out into a named list of third-party pages to go get: run prompts repeatedly, mine cited sources at URL and domain level, target the pages already listing your competitors, and harvest the words the model appends itself.

Stop sorting keywords by volume. Jeremy Rivera of SEO Arcade scores relevance with the one signal Google gives you free – how many of the top 10 ranking URLs co-rank for the same phrase – then flips the sort for long-tail, strips the legally forbidden terms with the client, and runs the survivors through volume, CTR, conversion and sale rate into a tiered revenue proposal.

Clicks are no longer attributable, so move the measurement to the one file you already own. Chris Green of Torque Partnership turns raw server access logs into an AI-visibility metric: segment your content, baseline the bot hits, split-test, verify the IP ranges, and report user-triggered AI bot visits as a leading indicator – never as revenue.

A repeatable SOP for judging a link by topical relevance instead of DA or DR, built on what Bradley Benner and Kristiyan Yankov actually check first.

Bots now do most of the crawling and they have a preferred content type. Dan Kurtz of Miss Pepper AI turns that into a repeatable play: publish a stripped markdown companion for your highest-stakes pages, link to it, and verify pickup in your server logs.

Go one level below the city page: build dedicated pages for named sub-communities where owner intent is highest and competition is near zero. Distilled from Alex Zweydoff of ClearLead Digital.