Choosing SEO consultants, DIY vs professional SEO, building online authority, avoiding scams, ROI considerations, business advice
Last night, my phone rang at 9:47 PM. It was a former client: someone I hadn’t spoken to in nearly three years. We’d parted on good terms when his business pivoted and he no longer needed ongoing SEO support. But the panic in his voice told me this wasn’t a social call. “Eric, I need…
Here's the thing nobody told you about the AI revolution: it was supposed to make agencies obsolete. Instead, it's making the right agency relationships more valuable than they've ever been. Full disclosure: we're living through a moment where 73% of marketers report using AI in their workflows, and that number climbs every quarter. But here's…
The digital marketing landscape has fundamentally shifted, and here’s the data that proves it: 65% of AI chatbot conversations have absolutely nothing to do with buying anything. This isn’t speculation: it’s the hard reality uncovered by Dan Petrovic’s comprehensive December 2025 analysis of 3.9 million AI conversation turns. For SEO professionals and content marketers, this…
The AI search landscape has produced a bewildering maze of contradictory statistics that's leaving marketers scratching their heads. One study claims only 25% of #1 rankings appear in AI Overviews, while another reports a 33.07% chance of AI citation for top positions, and yet another suggests 87.6% of AI Overviews feature Position 1 results. Here's…
What do we call this brave new world of AI-powered search? The industry can’t agree—but your strategy needs to account for all of it. If you’ve been following digital marketing discussions lately, you’ve probably noticed something: the industry is having an identity crisis. We can’t even agree on what to call the thing we’re all…
Healthcare advertising just got way more complicated. The CMS 2026 Proposed Rule fundamentally changed what counts as "marketing" requiring approval, and multiple states rolled out AI restrictions that could tank your mental health campaigns if you're not careful. Here's the thing: 25% of Medicare beneficiaries live with mental illness, and roughly half are enrolled in…
Bryan Casey from IBM opened with a self-deprecating note: “I am one of seven current or former IBMers here today. And unfortunately for all of you, I am the worst technical SEO of all of them.” What followed wasn’t a technical talk—it was a masterclass in building and selling an enterprise-scale owned media program. Over…
Jess Joyce from Inbound Scope took a different approach at Tech SEO Connect. Instead of technical implementation, she talked about the human side of frameworks—and why they fail. “We spent the last two days talking about tech and nerdiness and implementations,” she said, “but at the end of the day, this room is filled with…
Max Prin from Condé Nast closed Tech SEO Connect with a refreshing admission: “I’m not going to talk about AI or LLMs or AEO or GEO. Well, we’ll talk about GEO, but not that GEO.” His topic was international SEO—a discipline where nothing fundamental has changed in 14 years, but the execution at scale remains…
Mike King doesn’t do subtle. The two-time Search Marketer of the Year (no one else has won it twice, as he reminded us) opened his Tech SEO Connect presentation with an “I told you so”—and then spent the next 40 minutes backing it up with data, tools, and a roadmap for where SEO needs to…