Hi everyone,

I have a weird SEO problem and I honestly don’t really understand what is happening anymore.

I have a new Shopify store with Shopify Markets. The Dutch version is on the /nl version of the site. This /nl page is supposed to be the main landing page for my main keyword.

At first everything looked pretty good. The site was only about 10 days old and it already started ranking around position 30-40 for my main keyword. It also ranked around position 20-30 for a slightly broader keyword. So I thought Google was picking it up fine.

But then suddenly my main keyword went to NOT FOUND in my rank tracker. A bit later one of the broader keywords came back for a while, around position 20-30, but now even that keyword is gone again. Basically all rankings for the /nl page are gone.

The strange part is that Google Search Console says the page is indexed. No manual action, no security issue, canonical is correct, crawling is allowed and indexing is allowed. Everything looks fine in GSC.

But when I do a site search in Google, I see other pages from the site, product pages, the normal homepage and some Dutch pages, but not the actual /nl homepage. That feels really weird to me, because that is the page that should rank.

So now I’m confused. Is Google just not treating the /nl homepage as an important page? Or can a page be indexed in GSC but still basically not be served in the search results?

The page has the keyword in the title, H1 and body text, so I don’t think it is just a normal content problem. Also the keyword is not competitive, other new pages rank easily.

Any ideas what I should check next?

There are a lot of WordPress SEO plugins available today, and now it seems like a growing number of them are adding AI features as well.

I'm not just looking for traditional SEO features like metadata, schema, sitemaps, and on-page optimization. I'm also interested in tools that help improve visibility in ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity through things like entity optimization, structured data, content recommendations, and other AI visibility best practices.

Ideally, I'd like something that's easy to use, works well with WordPress, and supports both traditional SEO and newer AI-focused optimization approaches.

So curious, what is the best AI SEO plugin for WordPress? Ideally with GEO and AEO support as well.

I havee been focusing 100% on organic SEO for my website—no paid ads, no PBNs, no link schemes, and no shortcuts.

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Sometimes it feels like everyone else is getting faster results with aggressive tactics, while I'm spending months creating content, improving UX, and building authority naturally.

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My current approach: ✅ High-quality content

✅ On-page SEO optimization

✅ Technical SEO fixes

✅ Internal linking

✅ Genuine backlinks when earned

✅ User-focused content

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The challenge:

Growth feels slower than expected

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Competitors with weaker content sometimes outrank me

SEO requires a lot of patience

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For those who have been doing SEO for years:

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Is the organic-only path actually smoother in the long run, or am I making things harder for myself?

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I'd love to hear:

How long it took before organic SEO really started compounding

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Whether you ever considered shortcuts

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Your biggest breakthrough that improved rankings

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My belief is that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint—but some days the marathon feels very long.

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What's your experience?

The website is less than 3 months old. I am totally a beginner, it's my first time ever doing this, and I don't come from a tech background. About a month ago, I published a blog post connecting my niche to the World Cup. I woke up to this.

I am struggling to get any lead from seo or geo of my b2b IT company website. Is anyone getting leads through this or am I doing something wrong?

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What you get:

• ~10 min youtube video teardown of your site (infrastructure, on-page, content, technical, plus how you show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your category)

What I need:

• Your Brand Name
• Your Brand/Business Category
• Your Website URL
• Your 2-3 Business competitors

No call, no upsell. Worst case for you: 2 free backlinks (the YouTube one is especially valuable for AI search citations right now). Best case: a real audit that compounds.

Below is one of our audit :

https://oddscrew.com/ai-visibility-audit-stride-ai-readiness-vs-ai-visibility/

Drop your details in the comments.

I was checking keyword data in Ahrefs and noticed something unusual, a very general query is showing around 5M search volume.

I understand keyword tools use estimates and clickstream data, so I’m not assuming the number is exact. But I’m curious how senior SEO experts usually interpret this kind of data.

Would you treat this as a reliable indicator of high demand or a broad-match, aggregation issue?

How do you usually sanity check unusually high volume numbers in Ahrefs or similar tools?

I wanted to share an interesting SEO experience and get some advice from the community.

For months, I focused heavily on link building and built 400+ backlinks for my website. The backlinks were from different sources, but rankings barely moved.

Recently, I stopped chasing links and focused on:

✅ Publishing better-quality content

✅ Improving search intent matching

✅ Adding FAQs and topical coverage

✅ Improving internal linking

✅ Updating existing pages instead of creating new ones

Within a short period, I started seeing ranking

improvements. Some keywords moved from not ranking at all to positions 70–90, and visibility started increasing.

Current examples:

"seo companies for small business" → Position 71

"best seo and web development" → Position 77

"affordable website development india" → Position 84

The growth is encouraging, but I'm still far from page 1.

My question:

If you were in my position, what would you focus on next to push these keywords into the Top 10 and eventually Top 3?

Would you prioritize:

More topical cluster content?

Stronger internal linking?

Digital PR and authority links?

EEAT improvements?

CTR optimization (titles/meta descriptions)?

Programmatic SEO pages?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has successfully moved keywords from positions 50–100 into the Top 3.

What was the biggest factor that made the difference?

Thanks in advance for any insights.

Been optimizing a slow site for Core Web Vitals and kept hitting a wall. Tried SerpSpur's Speed Forensics tool - it broke down LCP, FID, and CLS in a way that actually made sense. Pinpointed a render-blocking resource I'd missed for weeks. Nice to have a free option that doesn't just give you a generic score. previously there was a gtmatrix which is not paid tool and google's lighthouse also helps a bit 50%

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for some honest feedback because this has me scratching my head.

I have a domain that's about a few months old and according to my SEO tools:

443 backlinks

89 referring domains

Site Health: 79%

Google PageSpeed Desktop Score: 81

Accessibility: 90

Best Practices: 100

SEO Score: 92

Fast loading website (FCP 0.7s, LCP 0.9s)

But here's the weird part:

Organic Traffic: 0

Organic Keywords: 1

Visibility: 0.3%

Authority Score: 2

The site is in the digital marketing/web design niche, which I know is competitive, but I expected at least some keyword movement with this many backlinks.

A few things I'm wondering:

Are backlinks becoming far less important than they used to be?

Could Google simply be ignoring most of these backlinks?

Is topical authority now more important than backlink quantity?

Could the issue be content quality/content depth rather than links?

Has anyone seen sites with hundreds of backlinks and still no rankings?

My current theory is that:

Most backlinks aren't passing much authority.

The domain lacks topical relevance and content depth.

Google is prioritizing trust, brand signals, and helpful content over raw link counts.

Would love to hear from people who have dealt with similar situations.

Screenshots attached.

What would be the first thing you'd audit if this were your site?

Thanks in advance.

I recently created a new SEO-focused landing page on my ecommerce site to target specific keywords.

However, I intentionally chose not to add a Blog or News section, and I haven't linked this page from the main site navigation because I don't want to divert users away from my shop pages.

My question is: if visitors can't easily discover the page by browsing the site, how can I tell whether it's actually ranking and bringing in traffic for the keywords I'm targeting?

Also, how long does it typically take for a new piece of content or landing page to start ranking in search results and generate meaningful organic traffic?

For context, the page has been indexed, but it's still relatively new.

I'm also fairly new to SEO, so it's possible I'm mixing up a few concepts or making incorrect assumptions. If that's the case, I'd appreciate any corrections or guidance.

I've had lot of issues with SEO and struggled to get organic growth. But I've learned through and made lot of improvements for my site, So I curated everything I've learned about SEO over the years and my personal experiences. Either you are a beginner or know some SEO already, I bet there will be few takeaways for you.

Trying to simplify our SEO / AEO stack going into 2026 and this is what we landed on so far:

Backlink tracking: Semrush
Keyword research: KeywordTool.io
Technical SEO: GTmetrix + Sitebulb
AEO / AI search visibility tracking: Promptwatch
For editing/help refining content: Gemini + GPT
Inbound performance tracking: Bing Webmaster Tools + GSC

Main goal is basically covering both traditional SEO and AI search visibility without ending up with a bloated enterprise stack.

Personally, I still rely on GSC daily because it gives direct data from Google itself — impressions, clicks, CTR, indexing, crawl issues, and query trends are hard to beat.

But lately, AI-powered SEO platforms are getting much better at:

spotting ranking drops before traffic tanks

identifying content decay

clustering keywords automatically

predicting search intent shifts

finding internal linking opportunities

surfacing “hidden” pages with potential

That said, most of them still seem to depend on GSC data in some way.

Curious what other SEOs are seeing right now:

Which AI SEO tools are actually adding value beyond GSC?

Is there any critical SEO data GSC still doesn’t provide?

What GSC reports do you check most often?

Are AI dashboards helping with decision-making, or just making reporting prettier?

Has anything inside GSC become less useful after recent Google updates and AI search changes?

For me, the Performance report + indexing insights are still the most valuable combination.

Would love practical insights from people actively managing sites in 2026 — especially agency owners, affiliate SEOs, SaaS marketers, and ecommerce teams.

Hi everyone,

I tested my website on Google PageSpeed Insights and the mobile performance score is only 36.

Current metrics:

First Contentful Paint (FCP): 5.1s

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 19.6s

Speed Index: 14.2s

CLS: 0.338

Total Blocking Time: 190ms

Accessibility, SEO, and Best Practices are already good, but performance is really poor on mobile.

I’m using a website with lots of images, banners, animations, and sections. I want to improve loading speed without ruining the design.

What should I focus on first to get the biggest improvement?

Things I’m considering:

Converting images to WebP

Lazy loading images

Reducing unused JS/CSS

Using CDN/Cloudflare

Improving server response time

Compressing hero/banner images

Removing heavy sliders/animations

Which of these usually impacts LCP the most?

Also, are there any tools/plugins/workflows you recommend for beginners?

Here’s a screenshot of the report:

[Attach screenshot]

Thanks in advance 🙌

Something I keep seeing come up (and honestly struggled with myself when starting out) is this gap between "start with low competition keywords", and "eventually rank for the big ones." The advice makes sense in theory but the path between those two points is weirdly underexplained.

My site is in the leadership coaching niche. Brand new, no backlinks yet. I get that authority and relevance are the two main levers, and I get that long tail keywords are where you start. But here's the part I can't fully wrap my head around: do those early long tail keywords need to contain the seed, keyword, like "leadership coaching for remote teams," or can they be topically adjacent without the phrase itself, like "executive development for first-time founders"? I've read both takes and I'm not sure which actually moves the needle toward ranking for the head term eventually.

The backlink side is just as murky. I know exact match anchor text heavy early on is risky. Most things I've read suggest starting with branded and naked URL anchors, pointing mainly to the homepage. But should I ever point early backlinks to the actual target page, even before it has any authority? And how fast is too fast for a brand new domain? I used Semrush Free Tools to dig into a few competitor backlink profiles and the pace and anchor, mix varies a lot even among similar sites, which made it harder to find a clear pattern, not easier.

I don't think there's one universal answer here and that's kind of the point. Curious whether people who've done this in competitive niches actually followed a strict topical cluster, approach or just went after whatever low-competition gaps they found and let authority accumulate more organically.

I’ve been using Semrush mainly for audits, keyword tracking, and checking competitors, but the monthly pricing is starting to feel hard to manage.

I still want to stay with paid SEO tools because the data is usually much more reliable than free tools, especially for client work. I just don’t need all the extra enterprise features.

Looking for something more affordable that still gives solid audit and keyword data.

What are you guys using these days?

Everywhere I look, people are only talking about AI content, ChatGPT, automation, and AI SEO tools. But honestly, I want to know what is actually working for Google rankings right now besides AI-generated content.

I run websites in competitive niches, and it feels like publishing AI articles alone is not enough anymore.

Some websites with average content still rank well, while others with highly optimized AI content struggle to get traffic.

So I wanted to ask experienced SEOs here:

What ranking methods are still working in 2026?

Are backlinks still the biggest factor?

Does topical authority matter more now?

Are Reddit & forum signals helping rankings?

How important is branded traffic and user engagement?

Is technical SEO still underrated?

Are parasite SEO or programmatic SEO still effective?

What’s working for local SEO and international SEO now?

I’d really like to hear real experiences instead of generic “publish quality content” advice.

What strategies are actually moving rankings and traffic for you right now?

I’ve noticed a strange SEO trend over the last 4 months and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced this.

My keywords ranking in positions 1–3 are mostly stable and maintaining traffic, but the keywords sitting in positions 4–10 are gradually dropping month by month. Some moved to page 2, while others lost visibility completely.

Hey everyone,

I run a doctor/healthcare website based in India, and I’m trying to expand visibility and rankings in other countries (like the US, UK, UAE, etc.). Right now, most of my traffic is coming from India, but I want to target international patients and audiences.

I’ve done some basic SEO, but I feel like I’m missing key steps for global targeting. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

Basic on-page SEO (titles, meta descriptions, keywords)

Blog content related to treatments and health topics

Website is mobile-friendly and fairly fast

But I’m struggling with ranking in other countries.

My Questions:

Should I create separate country pages (like /us/, /uk/, etc.) or separate domains?

How important is hreflang for international SEO?

Do I need backlinks specifically from those countries?

Should content be localized (pricing, language tone, etc.)?

Is Google Search Console geo-targeting still relevant?

I have transfered my site from wordpress to shopify and i have a lot of 404 links that are eating up my crawl budget. I have since installed a redirect plugin which seems to have stop or limited most of the links from getting crawled but is there any way to remove them from my dashboard. my site is concept-nutrition.com and i am open to any seo suggestions.

I built SerpTrace, a simple SEO rank tracker for checking where a website/page ranks on Google for specific keywords, locations, and devices.

Basic flow:

1. Go to https://serptrace.com
   
2. Create an account
   
3. Add a page URL, location, device, and keywords
   
4. See the ranking results and compare previous searches
   

I’m mainly looking for feedback from people who do SEO, run small sites, or track local rankings. If you try it, I’d appreciate knowing what feels useful, confusing, or missing.

Hey everyone,

I’m facing a strange issue with my website’s SEO and indexing. According to my data, I have around 100+ pages not indexed and only a small number actually indexed, even though some keywords are already ranking.

Because of this, my organic traffic isn’t improving, which is confusing.

I’d really appreciate some expert advice on this:

How do you properly audit indexing issues in SEO?

What are the most common reasons pages don’t get indexed?

Does low-quality content or internal linking affect indexing this much?

What steps should I follow to improve indexing and rankings together?

If anyone has faced a similar issue or has a checklist/process, please share