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Google merchant listings support sale duration and product category

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Google has updated its merchant listing structured data to support sale duration and product category property. This is to more align the merchant listing structured data support within Google Search with Google Merchant Center feed support.

Sale duration. Google added a new section on “Sale duration” to the Merchant listing structured data help document. Google said, “this explains how to use the validFrom, validThrough, and priceValidUntil schema.org properties to set the effective range for sale prices, including best practices and examples for placement on either Offer or PriceSpecification nodes.” Google added this because it “aligns schema.org usage with the Merchant Center feed attribute sale_price_effective_date, providing clear instructions and best practices for merchants using structured data.”

Here is that new section:

Product category. Google also updated that document to include support for Product.category property.

Google wrote it has updated the Merchant listing documentation to detail how the Product.category property can be used with both Text and CategoryCode types. “This aligns with the Google Merchant Center feed specifications for the product_type and google_product_category attributes,” Google added. Google also said this is to “help merchants provide both merchant-defined and Google-defined category information within their schema.org markup, enhancing product information for Google Search and Shopping.”

Here is what was added:

Why we care. If you maintain merchant listing structured data for Google, these additions may be useful. Product category support can help Google understand more about the products you are feeding it, which may help with showing that product for more relevant queries. Google’s sale duration support can let you plan your product sales more effectively and efficiently when updating your merchant listing structured data.

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How to get the most from Microsoft Advertising campaigns

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How to get more from Microsoft Advertising than a campaign import

If you’re struggling to scale performance with Microsoft Advertising, you may be treating it as a place to replicate a strategy developed elsewhere.

Import can get you live fast. Performance comes from adding human judgment, Microsoft-specific structure, foundational measurement, controls tailored to your business needs, and a broad range of creative assets that help AI understand your products or services.

The strongest accounts share a common approach: Import is a starting point, visual creatives unlock more demand and better performance, and AI performs best when you give it the right structure, creative, measurement, and guardrails.

Here’s how to use Microsoft-specific mechanics to improve performance while avoiding common pitfalls.

Note: I’m a Microsoft employee, and this article was written as objectively as possible. I’ve also included hidden gems sourced from the community that highlight favorite features where relevant.

1. Start with import, but don’t stop there

Import is useful because it removes friction. It can bring over structure, assets, and settings from Google, Meta, or Pinterest so you can launch faster. The mistake is assuming a successful import means your Microsoft Advertising strategy is finished.

Imported campaigns preserve yesterday’s assumptions. Microsoft Advertising still requires decisions about budget, bidding, audiences, creative, measurement, reporting, and AI-powered opportunities.

Decide whether sync helps or holds you back

One of the most important import decisions is whether future changes from the source platform should continue syncing to Microsoft Advertising. If your goal is to mirror another platform, automatic sync may reduce overhead. If your goal is to build a Microsoft-specific strategy, automatic sync can quietly erase the optimizations you make after launch.

To access the full list of import settings, go to Manual import > Advanced settings. Review which settings should stay, which should change, and which Microsoft-specific opportunities weren’t part of the original structure.

Review budgets, bids, currency, and Microsoft-only options

Imported budgets may not reflect the opportunity or efficiency available, especially if you consolidate campaigns with ad-group-level controls. 

Imported bids may preserve assumptions from another platform instead of giving Microsoft Advertising room to optimize for its own auction dynamics, audiences, and conversion data.

Review Microsoft-specific settings after import

Import also can’t choose Microsoft-specific opportunities for you. Review these settings after launch:

  • LinkedIn profile targeting: Bid up or down, observe, and use LinkedIn profile data as a Performance Max audience signal. Microsoft supports Company, Industry, Job Function, and Seniority.
  • Ad-group-level scheduling and location targeting: Override campaign-level schedules and location targets at the ad group level. You have access to the same settings, including whether ads serve in the user’s time zone or the account’s time zone.
  • Impression-based remarketing: Target, exclude, or adjust bids based on someone seeing your ad. As long as there’s at least one Audience ads campaign or ad group in the source seed lists (up to 20), any campaign can target any other campaign (for example, search can target search). Impression-based remarketing doesn’t require an existing email list or pixel, and members can remain on the list for up to 30 days after a single impression.
  • Multimedia ads: Visual-heavy ads that occupy a unique position on the SERP and are eligible to serve in Copilot. They have their own auction and can appear on the same SERP as your text ad without competing against it. You can bid more aggressively for Multimedia ads and create them in standard search campaigns by selecting that ad type instead of responsive search ads (RSAs).
  • Cross-account portfolio bidding: If you need to launch a new account for the same brand, you can allow it to benefit from the conversion data of an existing account.
  • Microsoft Clarity: A free behavioral analytics tool that helps you understand how people and AI engage with your site. It can reveal whether landing pages create friction, are easy for people and AI to understand, and which grounding queries (the searches AI performs in the background) your site naturally appears for and whether they align with your target search terms.
  • Creative and editorial considerations: Microsoft has stricter advertising policies than many other platforms, but it also offers some unique capabilities, such as allowing exclamation points in headlines and disclaimers of up to 500 characters that don’t take up ad space. Note: If you enable disclaimers, your ads will only serve when the disclaimers can appear alongside them.

See exactly how your competitors win.

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2. Build the signal foundation before optimizing

Account-level settings may seem overly technical. In practice, they determine whether AI receives clean signals or learns from bad data. Settings like business attributes also let you communicate why customers should choose your business.

Verify conversion tracking and attribution before changing bids

The best bidding strategy can’t compensate for incomplete conversion data. Microsoft Advertising provides account-level settings that help ensure conversion and attribution data flow correctly, including:

  • Microsoft Click ID (MSCLID): Helps connect ad clicks to conversion activity.
  • View-through conversions: Help you correctly attribute the role of visual creatives in the path to conversion.
  • Simplified conversion setup: Enables intelligent conversion action creation.

Without verified tracking, it’s easy to blame bidding, keywords, audiences, or creative when the real problem is incomplete or inconsistent conversion data.

If your organization relies heavily on UTM parameters, validate how auto-tagging and manual tagging interact. The goal is clean reporting, not duplicated parameters or attribution confusion caused by mislabeling.

Treat creative inputs as signals

When enabled, Microsoft Advertising can use images from your landing pages to create more compelling, relevant ad experiences that better match a potential customer’s intent and context. If you have strong, well-maintained landing pages, this can improve creative asset coverage without having to manually build every image variation for every campaign type.

AI-optimized creative works best when your site already contains brand-safe, relevant, high-quality imagery. If your pages contain images you wouldn’t want appearing in ads, or if the imagery is sparse, text-heavy, or doesn’t represent the offer well, upload the assets you want the system to use. Auto-retrieved images reduce creative friction. They don’t replace creative strategy.

Use account-level negatives carefully

Account-level negatives help eliminate unwanted traffic patterns across your account. Microsoft supports phrase and exact match negatives. If you want to eliminate a root problem, a phrase match negative is likely the better option. For a specific search term, an exact match negative may work better. Neither negative match type accounts for close variants.

Use account-level negatives only for terms you’re confident shouldn’t serve anywhere in the account. Keep nuanced exclusions at the campaign or ad group level.

3. Use structure and controls to help AI perform

Microsoft Advertising gives you useful controls, but the goal isn’t to micromanage every lever. Give AI cleaner inputs, stronger guardrails, and fewer structural problems to solve. Use human judgment to guide the system.

Concentrate signals instead of fragmenting them

Ad-group-level location and ad schedule settings can reduce the need to create duplicate campaigns or split budgets across multiple accounts.

I’ve seen advertisers create separate campaigns solely to accommodate different geographies or schedules. In many cases, those settings can be managed at the ad group level, resulting in a simpler structure and more concentrated conversion volume.

That consolidation matters because automated bidding generally performs best with stronger, more consistent signals. A practical benchmark is to aim for at least 30 conversions in 30 days, where possible. That level of steady signal gives automated bidding a better chance of making stable decisions than a fragmented structure with thin conversion volume.

Use scheduling, location, and disclaimers as guardrails

Location targeting deserves review. Microsoft Advertising supports geographic targets, radius targeting, and exclusions, but city-, county-, metro-, or DMA-level strategies may be more practical than forcing ZIP codes.

If Microsoft doesn’t support a specific location target, it defaults to the next-highest level (for example, ZIP code to city or city to DMA). If you need narrow targeting, consider using exclusions.

Avoid unnecessary learning volatility

Large bid or budget changes can create performance volatility as the system adjusts. As a general rule, keeping bid or budget changes below 15% over a 14-day period can help reduce avoidable learning volatility. Larger changes may still be necessary, but make them intentionally rather than accidentally resetting the system’s learning rhythm.

Seasonality adjustments help when you expect a temporary conversion rate change because of a sale, event, promotion, or other short-term spike. Data exclusions help when conversion tracking breaks or reports misleading data you don’t want automated bidding to learn from. These tools aren’t bidding hacks. They protect automation from learning the wrong lesson.

Use conversion value rules whenever possible

The best way to communicate with the bidding algorithm is through conversion value rules grounded in accurate conversion tracking. They let you create if/then statements for devices, audiences, and locations to add a monetary amount to or multiply your conversion value.

Microsoft supports bid adjustments across audiences, devices, demographics, locations, and time. Multiple adjustments can compound. If a user qualifies for several categories at once, your bid may become more aggressive than intended.

Before adding another layer, ask whether you truly want to spend more to reach that audience, in that location, on that device, during that time. If you want the algorithm to understand value, meaningful conversion values and conversion value rules are usually stronger signals. If values aren’t reliable, CPA-oriented bidding with carefully chosen adjustments can still work.

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4. Use audiences, inventory, and creative to shape demand

Microsoft’s differentiated audiences, inventory, and creative formats can help you generate and shape new demand rather than only capture existing demand.

Use LinkedIn profile targeting intentionally

LinkedIn profile targeting remains one of the most unique audience capabilities in Microsoft Advertising. You can apply bid adjustments based on company, industry, job function, and seniority. 

Multiple targets within the same LinkedIn profile category act as “or” statements, while targeting across categories narrows the signal. A company target plus a seniority target is more restrictive than choosing two companies, which is useful when intentional and expensive when accidental because bid adjustments compound.

For B2B advertisers, this can be especially useful, but it isn’t limited to enterprise brands. Any business selling to specific professional audiences can use these signals to prioritize valuable traffic.

For example, if a brand is trying to reach someone traveling for work with local experiences or travel gear, it might bid up on someone with a “Business development” job function in an industry with a conference taking place in the next two to three weeks.

Build audiences from exposure, not just site visits

Traditional remarketing relies on someone visiting your website. Impression-based remarketing introduces another option: building audiences based on people who’ve been exposed to your advertising. 

A prospect may not click the first time they encounter your brand, particularly in formats such as Audience ads, Premium Streaming, or Multimedia ads. Impression-based remarketing lets you continue that conversation later rather than treating the initial exposure as a failed interaction. An impression can be the starting point for an audience strategy.

Reevaluate search partners and exclusions

Many advertisers disable search partners because they assume they behave like display network expansions on other platforms. Search partner inventory is still search inventory, and Microsoft provides publisher visibility, so you can evaluate it rather than reject it based on assumptions. 

Recent Microsoft studies have shown a 45% improvement in conversion rates and a 20% reduction in low-quality impressions tied specifically to Search Partner inventory, independent of advertiser optimization.

If specific publishers aren’t performing, use the available controls. You can manage unlimited exclusion lists at the MCC account level, and each list can exclude up to 2,500 URLs. If you need to protect a campaign’s ability to target a placement, such as when running Performance Max and Audience ads simultaneously, exclude domains surgically rather than cutting off useful inventory.

Use Multimedia ads to expand your SERP presence and build impression-based remarketing lists

Multimedia ads participate in their own auction and can appear in prominent visual placements on the search results page. A traditional search ad and a Multimedia Ad can both appear for the same brand, increasing your presence on the results page. 

Multimedia ads can be enabled at the campaign level, with ad-group-level decisions that help direct budget toward or away from the format.

They also matter because they can amplify your visual presence, serve as ads in Copilot, and qualify for impression-based remarketing. Their value isn’t limited to direct-click performance. They can connect search visibility, visual storytelling, and remarketing strategy.

Use Audience ads to expand reach

Audience ads (display, native, and video) can be a controlled way to expand reach, support full-funnel strategy, and build remarketing inputs that inform other parts of the account.

Audience ads support audience strategies, placement preferences, content category controls, and creative preview before launch. For organizations that require legal, brand, product, or executive approval, preview capability can simplify the review process.

Use creative and editorial details to reduce friction

Microsoft Advertising has editorial policies you should understand rather than assuming every platform evaluates ads the same way. Claims such as “best,” “number one,” or other superiority language need clear landing page support. 

Microsoft Advertising also allows some emphasis you might not expect, such as one exclamation point in headlines, but that flexibility doesn’t remove the need for substantiated claims and clean final URLs.

Editorial issues often get misdiagnosed as platform friction. In many cases, the issue is a specific asset rather than the entire ad, but final URL problems are more fundamental and can prevent an ad from serving.

Extensions and visual assets can also help brands communicate more value before users reach the landing page, especially in competitive categories where plain text may not provide enough differentiation.

5. Treat PMax, AI Max, and Copilot as AI opportunities with guardrails

Microsoft’s approach to AI is most useful when viewed as an augmentation rather than a replacement. Human-centered AI should enable thoughtful scale while preserving advertiser consent, transparency, and trust.

Know what Performance Max is designed to enable

Performance Max can be powerful, but it requires a different mindset from traditional campaign structures. Asset groups aren’t ad groups. There’s no asset-group-level equivalent to ad-group negatives, and you can’t force one asset group to take priority over another.

Performance Max is designed for AI-driven allocation. If strict control is your priority, traditional Search, Shopping, and Audience campaigns may provide clearer governance. The best way to influence Performance Max is through:

  • Strong audience signals: Include impression-based remarketing and LinkedIn profile targeting, which are unique to Microsoft.
  • Relevant creative: Copilot can pull creative from your landing page and adapt existing creative with tonal shifts, rewrites, or formatting improvements.
  • Thoughtful search themes: Including the same search themes as your exact match keywords makes it harder for Performance Max because exact match keywords take priority in the auction.
  • Meaningful conversion tracking: Ensure you have accurate conversion tracking and conversion values because Performance Max needs conversions to perform effectively.
  • Landing pages that clearly communicate the offer: Your landing page is a critical part of the matching and creative logic. If you don’t use clear language, the algorithm may struggle to identify which queries are a good match. It also makes it harder for people to do business with you.

If you run the same search theme as an exact match keyword, there’s a strong chance the exact match keyword will serve instead of the Performance Max campaign. Use search themes as testing grounds rather than duplicating exact match keywords.

Performance Max website URL reporting provides URL-level visibility into spend, clicks, impressions, and conversions. This gives you more to work with than impression-only reporting and can make automated campaign testing easier to justify.

Separate campaigns when budget separation matters

If budget separation matters, create distinct campaigns rather than forcing multiple business objectives into a single Performance Max campaign. Microsoft’s campaign capacity of 300 Performance Max campaigns, compared with Google’s 100, can be useful when meaningful budget priorities require separation.

For example, if you have two equally important products with drastically different tROAS goals, you wouldn’t want them to share budgets because there’s no way to specify which asset group or product should take priority. They’re better served in separate campaigns with distinct budgets and tROAS goals aligned to their margins.

The rule is simple: If related assets and audiences can share a budget, consolidate Performance Max campaigns to strengthen conversion volume. If budget separation matters, build that control at the campaign level instead of trying to force it through asset groups.

Evaluate AI Max and Copilot for new opportunities

AI Max now addresses many of the use cases that once made Dynamic Search ads valuable. If your goal is to let Microsoft AI better match queries, creative, and landing pages, AI Max may be the better place to focus your testing.

That doesn’t mean you should abandon existing high-performing campaigns. It means you should be intentional about whether you’re investing in legacy dynamic functionality or AI-powered capabilities built on Microsoft’s latest technology.

Ads can appear in relevant Copilot experiences when Microsoft determines there’s clear commercial intent and the ad may help the user. Ads have served in Copilot since 2024. The goal isn’t to force ads into AI answers. It’s to preserve a useful experience for the user.

Copilot isn’t a separate campaign type you manually opt into. Performance Max, AI Max, exact, phrase, and broad match search campaigns, Multimedia ads, and Shopping ads are all eligible to serve in Copilot. Performance Max and AI Max have the easiest time serving in Copilot because they can adapt to AI-driven experiences.

Use generative AI as a creative workflow and diagnostic tool

Copilot can help you brainstorm, rewrite, refine, and adapt creative across workflows, including Performance Max, responsive search ads, Multimedia ads, Audience ads, and other campaign types where you need to adjust tone, rewrite copy, or develop stronger variations. Copilot doesn’t replace the marketer. It reduces friction between strategy and iteration.

Ad Studio can generate new creative assets and make adjustments such as background modifications, seasonal refinements, location-specific tailoring, and additional aspect ratios. Its best use isn’t replacing the brand team. It’s accelerating iteration once the overall creative strategy is established.

AI-generated assets can also help diagnose how clearly your site communicates. If the outputs accurately represent your business, your site is likely sending clearer signals. If they consistently miss the mark, your landing pages, messaging, or content structure may be confusing both AI systems and people. The Performance Max campaign generator can serve as a useful diagnostic shortcut for the same reason. 

6. Use reporting and Clarity to diagnose before blaming the auction

No amount of AI, bidding nuance, or audience strategy can compensate for poor measurement. Microsoft Advertising provides extensive reporting visibility, and you should use it before making media-only decisions.

Use transparent reporting to make better decisions

Microsoft provides visibility into every search term that generates a click as part of its transparency approach. That visibility can reveal whether a query is:

  • Genuinely wasteful: There’s no business case for targeting that search.
  • An AI-driven match: It may seem questionable until you examine the customer journey with behavioral analytics.
  • A landing page issue masquerading as a traffic problem: Before adding a negative keyword, evaluate post-click behavior to determine whether the landing page or conversion tracking is the real issue.

Use Microsoft Clarity before you make campaign changes

Microsoft Clarity answers an important question: What happens after the click? It can show whether users engage with the page, get confused, abandon forms, encounter technical issues, or complete actions that aren’t being tracked correctly.

Clarity should be part of your diagnostic process before making campaign changes.

  • If people arrive and get stuck, the issue may be the landing page experience.
  • If they complete the desired action but conversions don’t appear in Microsoft Advertising, the issue may be tracking.
  • If they arrive and immediately disengage, the issue may be creative alignment, traffic quality, or the offer itself.

Clarity can also help you understand how AI systems interact with your content, including the grounding queries that led AI systems to cite your domain and recommendations for improving citation opportunities.

If AI systems cite your domain as relevant, that can validate your content strategy. If they don’t, or if the queries reveal mismatches, that may point to gaps in how your content communicates its value.

Every click they win is a customer you lose.

See where competitors are investing, which keywords drive their results, and how to capture more of the market.

See who’s stealing your traffic

Apply Microsoft-specific optimizations

You can import existing campaign structures and assets while also taking advantage of Microsoft-specific capabilities. AI can play a central role, serve as an occasional assist, or be used selectively, though scaling becomes more difficult without some level of AI adoption.

Testing Microsoft Advertising doesn’t require a large investment, but it does require getting the fundamentals right, including conversion tracking, bid-to-budget ratios, and creative that reflects the channel’s visual nature.

When you get those fundamentals right, Microsoft Advertising offers search term transparency, GDPR-compliant impression-based audiences, and opportunities to reach people across the surfaces where they work, live, and play. 

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The June 2026 SEO Update by Yoast recap

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Each month, we host the SEO update by Yoast covering the latest in search and AI. In this edition, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss discussed Google’s evolving stance on AI-driven search, publisher controls in the UK, and how to navigate visibility in an era where traditional SEO tactics are being reconsidered.

Watch the full recap on YouTube to dive deeper into these topics, hear some examples, and hear the answer to audience questions.

Remembering Bruce Clay

In this month’s SEO Update, we honor Bruce Clay, who recently passed away. He was a pioneer in SEO whose work shaped the industry. His mentorship and leadership left a lasting impact on professionals worldwide.

Google warns against manipulating brand mentions for AI

Google issued a clear warning: stop manipulating brand mentions to game AI systems. This includes tactics such as paying for unrelated brand citations, think dog food brands mentioned on sports betting sites, to artificially inflate perceived authority.

Why it matters: 

Google’s message is simple: if your brand mentions are irrelevant or forced, they won’t help your authority. Worse, they might backfire as AI systems get better at detecting manipulation. Focus on earning genuine mentions from relevant sources instead.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • Avoid paid or spammy brand mentions. 
  • Build authority through contextually relevant citations. 
  • If your mentions feel unnatural, they probably are. 

UK forces Google to give publishers control over AI use

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) struck a deal with Google, requiring the company to let publishers block their content from being used in AI features, without hurting their standard search rankings.

Why it matters: 

Publishers can now opt out of AI training data, but there’s a catch. If you block Google’s AI from using your content, you might lose citations in AI overviews, even if you rank well in traditional search. Users will instead see synthesized answers from other sources.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • If your content is truly unique and proprietary, blocking AI access might make sense, but only if you have a monetization strategy beyond search traffic. 
  • For most sites, allowing AI access is better for visibility. Ensure your content is structured and crawlable so AI systems can cite you accurately.
  • If you block AI access, provide a teaser, like Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, to encourage clicks. 

New AI visibility insights in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

Both Google and Bing rolled out new reporting features to help you understand how your content appears in AI-driven search. 

Google Search Console grounding queries

Google now shows grounding queries, the specific searches where your content was cited by AI. This helps you see which topics are driving AI visibility.

Why it matters: 

Grounding queries indicate that AI systems are using your content to generate answers. If you’re not seeing citations, your content might not be structured or visible enough for AI to reference.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • Check Search Console weekly for grounding queries. 
  • Focus on visible, structured content, so avoid hiding key info in accordions or tabs.
  • Use this data to refine your content strategy, so double down on what’s working or fix what’s not.

Bing Webmaster Tools: AI performance reports

Bing’s new reports include intents, topics, citation share, and performance comparisons for AI-driven search. This gives you a clearer picture of how your content performs in Bing’s AI experiences, like Copilot.

Why it matters: 

Bing’s AI integrations, such as Copilot in Windows, reach millions of business users. Ignoring Bing means missing out on a growing segment of AI-driven traffic.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • Set up Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already.
  • Compare Bing’s data with Google’s to spot gaps or opportunities. 
  • Use LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude to analyze exports from both tools for deeper insights.

Google’s new publisher profiles and business data integrations

Google introduced publisher profiles and enhanced business data integrations, giving creators and businesses more control over how their content appears in search.

Why it matters: 

These tools help you fill out your knowledge graph, which improves visibility across Google’s ecosystem, including Gemini. Think of it as Google+ for publishers, but with a focus on entity authority rather than social networking.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • Create or update your publisher profile in Google Search Console.
  • Ensure your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate.
  • Use structured data to connect entities such as authors, brands, and products to your content.

Google updates SEO guidance: Don’t blindly trust AI or SEO tools

Google’s latest guidance warns against blindly following AI-generated SEO advice or third-party tool recommendations. The example? An AI suggested changing “consultant” to “advisor” for a site, only for the site to start competing with financial advisors instead of its actual audience.

Why it matters: 

AI and SEO tools can misinterpret context. Always verify recommendations before implementing them.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • Trust but verify, so use AI and tools for ideas, but apply critical thinking. 
  • Check multiple sources, so compare Google’s data with Bing’s, or use tools like Semrush/Ahrefs for cross-referencing.
  • Prioritize human judgment, because if a recommendation feels off, it probably is.

Schema.org usage stats reveal underutilized opportunities

Schema.org released data showing that 95% of websites use only 12 of the 958 available schema types. Meanwhile, fewer than 1,000 sites use 485+ schema types.

Why it matters: 

Schema helps search engines understand your content, but most sites aren’t leveraging its full potential. Using more schema types can improve visibility in AI-driven search and rich results.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • Audit your current schema usage to identify any missed opportunities.
  • Explore less common schema types, like FAQPage, HowTo, or Event to stand out.
  • Use Yoast SEO’s schema blocks to simplify implementation.

German court rules Google liable for false AI overview claims

A German court ruled that Google can be sued for false claims made in AI overviews. This sets a precedent for holding AI systems accountable for inaccurate information.

Why it matters: 

If Google’s AI cites false or harmful information about your business, you now have legal recourse in Germany. However, prevention is better than litigation.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • Monitor AI overviews for inaccuracies about your brand.
  • Publish accurate, crawlable content to counteract misinformation.
  • If you find false claims, correct them at the source, such as on Reddit or in forums, and report them to Google.

Google’s open knowledge format: A new way to structure content

Google introduced the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), a way to catalog site content in markdown for AI consumption. This is part of Google’s push for structured, AI-friendly content.

Why it matters: 

While Google’s search team advises against duplicate markdown versions of pages, the engineering team is building tools like OKF. This suggests structured content will play a bigger role in AI-driven search.

Actionable takeaway: 

  • Wait and watch, as OKF is new, and adoption isn’t urgent yet.
  • Focus on structured content, like schema, clear headings, visible text.
  • Avoid gating critical information behind interactive elements, such as accordions and tabs.

Yoast news: Performance upgrades and new features

We rolled out performance improvements in versions 27.8 and 27.9, of Yoast SEO, including:

  • Faster admin pages and post editor for large sites.
  • Speed boosts for SEO analysis. For instance, a sitemap query on a 2M-page site dropped from 300 seconds to 25 milliseconds.
  • Yoast Duplicate Post plugin upgrades, including improved Rewrite and Republish functionality for easier content repurposing.

Sign up for the next SEO Update by Yoast

The next SEO Update by Yoast is on August 25, 2026, at 4:00 PM CET (10:00 AM EST). Sign up to join live!

The post The June 2026 SEO Update by Yoast recap appeared first on Yoast.

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The new SEO stack: What replaces your old toolset

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New SEO stack old toolset

Generative AI and automation are bringing excitement to some SEO professionals and anxiety to others. With 87% of Americans reading AI summaries, you’re falling behind if you’re not adapting your toolset to this trend.

Moving from rigid enterprise tools to agile, AI-driven ones positions you as a forward-thinking authority with clients or your employer.

This how-to will help you guide clients, employers, or your team through that shift.

Here’s what an old SEO stack looks like

SEO practices remain relevant because the company’s generative AI features are rooted in:

  • Core search ranking systems.
  • Quality systems.

Here’s a traditional “SEO stack”:

Rank trackers

Tracking keywords used to be every campaign’s heartbeat. Add target keywords, monitor SERP positions, and higher rankings would drive more search traffic. But rankings have fragmented over the last few years.

SEOs are now tracking:

  • AI Overviews
  • Local packs
  • Shopping carousels
  • And so much more.

A third-place local pack ranking might drive two or three times more traffic than a number one AI Overview ranking.

Keyword tools

What are people searching for? With a crystal ball, you could optimize for specific queries and target certain groups. Keyword research lets you write content that matches those queries and user intent.

You’ll choose keywords based on:

  • Difficulty
  • Search volume
  • Intent
  • Other factors

Dozens of options help you find keywords for campaigns, and some competitors had more access to keyword data than others.

Lagging search volume data may have hurt your campaign, but it still showed past performance.

For example, you might target a keyword with 10,000 monthly visits. But just because it reached that volume last month doesn’t mean it will perform the same this month. Volume could double or fall to a tenth of last month’s level.

The problem in today’s search environment is that a keyword with tens of thousands of clicks in 2022 may now appear in an AI Overview. Zero-click searches may steal your traffic, making some once high-click queries irrelevant or not worth the same investment.

Even if search volume hasn’t dropped, the opportunity has.

Site audit tools

Crawlers still crawl your site and interpret its content. Getting a complete picture of how these crawlers see your website has always been crucial to SEO.

Audit tools help you identify:

  • Broken links
  • Redirect issues
  • Missing metadata
  • Slow pages
  • Thin content
  • Other issues on your site

But don’t put these audit tools on the shelf just yet. You’ll still need them to know whether your site is technically healthy. Crawl audits don’t guarantee that your content will surface.

Factors such as brand mentions are crucial signals for inclusion in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Unfortunately, many site audit tools in your old stack lack mention-tracking functionality.

So while you may still rely on your old stack, it’s time to add new tools that cover these signals and change how you operate as an SEO professional.

Here’s what a new SEO stack looks like

IIf you’re still optimizing only for Google, it’s time to shift gears. Between the first and second half of 2025, LLM referral traffic grew by 80%. Conversion rates reached 18%, but LLM referrals still accounted for 2% or less of total traffic, according to the dataset.

Now is the time to shift to a new stack that helps you leverage growing LLM referrals.

Add the following to your SEO tech stack to stay ahead of the competition:

LLMs

You want your site to show up in LLMs, but these same tools can help power your SEO strategy. For example, you might use:

  • ChatGPT: Connect ChatGPT with Google Search Console to automate your SEO analysis, as I show you how to do in arecent article here.
  • Claude: Use Claude to write your copy, refine metadata and conduct a full content audit.
  • Gemini: Hop on Gemini to help generate schema markup, compare competitor sites with your own, or find issues with your site.

LLMs can help with everything from data analysis to competitor research.

Use the LLM you’re most comfortable with for these tasks, but keep human oversight in place. Use these tools to improve performance, not replace the human element.

Large datasets that once took hours, days, or weeks to review now take minutes with these tools. Keep learning LLMs and how to integrate them into your workflow.

APIs

Old dashboards with CSV exports into Excel were once standard. You logged into Google Search Console (GSC) and exported data. While it may sound too technical, LLMs can now help you connect to APIs for:

  • Google Search Console
  • Google Analytics

LLMs can help you authenticate requests and parse JSON. With this skill, you can open up a workflow

Lightweight scripts

Python scripts are now available to any SEO with some skill and Claude Code, or similar options in ChatGPT or Gemini. You can easily create scripts that:

  • Pull your top pages from GSC
  • Compare titles to character limits
  • Flag 30-day changes
  • Create a CSV output for you

Rather than waiting for vendor tools to add a feature that removes a performance bottleneck, create a script that does the same thing.

A hundred-line script can handle much of the work you used to do by hand, without a new license or SaaS upsell. If you hand the script to someone else, they can see the exact logic behind it.

Notebooks / local workflows

Your SEO team has data in many places:

  • Shared folders
  • Google Sheets
  • Notion docs

You might have a three-year content audit tracker in Google Sheets. A spreadsheet with monthly CSV dumps from your favorite tools leaves you with files you must manually open and decipher.

Notebooks and local workflows change how data fragmentation slows your team down.

Instead, Notebooks interpret these files and turn them into action. For example, a script may pull data, an API surfaces the signal, and LLMs make sense of the data and put the output into your Notebook.

Notebooks also offer the benefit of:

  • Consistent data formats
  • Shared access to data
  • Documented logic

SEO teams need to be agile and scalable to grow with the new era of search optimization and generative AI. Rather than starting over every time they need to pull data, teams can use local workflows for data consistency.

Creating hybrid workflows to mix old and new SEO stacks

Is your old SEO stack obsolete? No. Are these new tools the only ones you need? No. Hybrid workflows and search engine optimization stacks offer the best of both worlds.

Tool + custom script + AI layer

You’ll need to experiment to create a hybrid workflow that works best for your clients, projects, and teams. One hypothetical workflow that combines the old and new stack for well-rounded SEO includes:

  • Crawling the site with an audit tool, such as Screaming Frog
  • Running a Python script that dissects the file and joins it with GSC data
  • Scripts that flag pages where you have a lot of impressions but low clicks
  • Sending flagged pages to an LLM to evaluate titles against search intent
  • Putting LLM output into a Notebook or spreadsheet for editors to review
  • Turning approvals into change logs

Tasks like these used to take weeks, so teams put them on the back burner. At the enterprise level, teams quickly felt overwhelmed by this much data. But when you combine old and new SEO stacks, you can complete larger projects in a fraction of the time.

Replacing your current SEO stack with one that’s more agile and built for today’s massive datasets will make you an invaluable asset to any SEO team.

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Why AI search is forcing global SEO teams to rethink ownership

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Global SEO data hub

Earlier this year, I argued that the core fundamentals of international SEO still matter. Hreflang, localization, technical excellence, and market-specific content remain essential to successful international search because search engines and LLMs still need to discover, understand, and connect content with the right audiences.

The environment those fundamentals operate in has changed.

For decades, multinational organizations could treat markets as largely independent digital ecosystems. Content created in one market typically stayed there, and governance focused on managing websites, content, and technical implementations across regions.

Today, those boundaries are becoming less distinct.

AI systems translate content, synthesize information from multiple sources, and increasingly act as intermediaries between organizations and customers. Information once largely contained within a single market can now influence visibility, recommendations, and customer experiences across regions.

As market boundaries blur, the governance challenge expands. International SEO is no longer just about managing websites across countries. It increasingly requires organizations to manage the knowledge, expertise, and information that search engines and AI systems use to represent them globally.

Why the governance model must change

Historically, many website and localization decisions prioritized operational efficiency. Headquarters developed content, technology platforms, and standards for global distribution, while local markets adapted them for their audiences.

The model worked because scale often outweighed localization limits. Consistency improved, costs fell, and organizations could deploy content and technology across dozens of markets far more efficiently than independent local efforts allowed.

The challenge is that AI systems are changing what gets rewarded.

Scale and standardization still matter, but search engines and AI systems increasingly look for signals of expertise, relevance, and geographic specificity. Content reflecting local regulations, market conditions, customer expectations, and industry practices often provides context that translation alone can’t replicate.

At the same time, AI systems amplify inconsistency. Contradictory product information, conflicting entity definitions, inaccurate regulatory guidance, and fragmented technical implementations can create confusion across search engines, answer engines, and AI-powered experiences.

Organizations can no longer optimize only for efficiency or localization. They need governance models that preserve global consistency while enabling local markets to contribute the expertise and context that increasingly drive visibility and trust.

Hreflang solved routing, not understanding

In my previous hreflang article, I argued that even in the age of AI, hreflang remains an important part of international search strategy. That remains true.

What it doesn’t do is determine which market perspective to prioritize when synthesizing information from multiple sources, or which content shows the strongest expertise when AI systems generate answers.

As search shifts from retrieval to synthesis, organizations must think beyond routing users to the correct page and start governing the knowledge that powers those answers.

What should be centralized?

The simplest rule is this: activities that create enterprise risk when implemented inconsistently should generally be governed centrally.

Technical SEO standards are a clear example. Search engines and AI systems don’t evaluate websites one market at a time. They evaluate the broader ecosystem of signals the organization provides. CMS governance, structured data standards, entity definitions, AI crawler policies, measurement frameworks, and technical infrastructure all benefit from consistency.

Many international organizations have faced this challenge before.

Years ago, before hreflang existed, many global companies used IP detection to route users to the market website they considered most appropriate. The problem was that Google primarily crawled from U.S.-based IP addresses. When Google tried to access French or Japanese content, it was often redirected to the U.S. site instead.

Individual markets couldn’t solve this because the routing rules affected every market at once. The solution required global governance with local input.

AI crawler management presents a very similar challenge today.

Organizations must decide not only which AI systems can access content, but also whether those systems can reach the market-specific information they’re intended to understand. For companies still relying on geographic routing, market gateways, or IP detection, the governance challenge is familiar even if the technology is new.

The platforms have changed, but the governance lesson remains the same. Some decisions are too interconnected to manage independently.

What should be localized?

If technical infrastructure benefits from consistency, content benefits from expertise.

For years, multinational organizations followed a straightforward model: create content in the primary market, then translate, adapt, and distribute it globally. This approach delivered major efficiencies, helping organizations scale content production, maintain brand consistency, and support dozens of markets with shared resources and common technology platforms.

Traditional search engines could rely on signals like hreflang and country targeting to understand regional relevance. AI systems increasingly evaluate the content itself. When multiple markets publish highly similar versions of the same information, language models may treat them as variations of one source rather than distinct expressions of expertise.

To stand on its own, content increasingly needs market-specific signals such as local regulations, terminology, customer expectations, industry practices, and other forms of geographic specificity.

This is why content ownership, audience research, local authority-building, regulatory content, and market expertise should generally stay close to the market. The goal is not localization for its own sake. The goal is to ensure expertise comes from the people closest to the customer and that the content reflects the realities of the market it serves.

The most successful multinational organizations will continue to use global content frameworks, shared resources, and common technology platforms because their efficiencies remain valuable. The challenge is preserving those efficiencies while giving local markets enough space to contribute expertise that is visible, differentiated, and meaningful.

For years, organizations balanced scale against localization. Increasingly, they balance scale against representation. The markets that stay visible in AI-driven search experiences will often be those that contribute enough unique expertise to stand on their own rather than echo the dominant market version.

What requires shared ownership?

Governance ultimately comes down to accountability. Whether responsibility sits with a Chief Digital Officer, CMO, enterprise search team, or AI governance group matters less than clear ownership. As search becomes more intertwined with marketing, technology, product, legal, and AI initiatives, organizations need clear decision rights, escalation paths, and accountability.

The companies that succeed won’t necessarily have the largest SEO teams or the most sophisticated AI tools. They’ll be the ones with clear ownership for how knowledge is created, governed, validated, and represented across markets.

A practical rule for determining ownership

The distinction comes down to risk and expertise.

Responsibilities that create enterprise-wide consequences when implemented inconsistently generally belong closer to headquarters, while activities that depend on local customer knowledge, regulations, language, or market conditions are usually best managed in-market.

Many of the most important decisions require both and are best handled through shared governance.

The 10 governance decisions every global SEO team should review

The specific structure will vary by organization, but most multinational companies should evaluate ownership of these areas.

Typically centralized

1. Technical SEO standards

To ensure consistency in crawling, indexing, structured data, and technical implementation across markets.

2. CMS and infrastructure governance

To prevent fragmentation while maintaining a common technology foundation.

3. Entity definitions and taxonomies

To ensure products, services, brands, and organizational relationships are represented consistently across markets.

4. AI crawler and bot governance

To establish consistent policies for crawler access, monitoring, verification, geographic routing, and exception management. Governance should typically reside at headquarters, while markets retain the ability to request business-specific exceptions.

5. Measurement and reporting frameworks

To ensure markets are evaluated using comparable definitions and success metrics.

Typically localized

6. Market-specific content

To reflect local customer needs, regulations, terminology, market conditions, and the geographic signals that increasingly help AI systems recognize local relevance. Local teams should own creation and validation, while leveraging global content frameworks where appropriate.

7. Audience and search behavior research

To capture differences in language, intent, customer expectations, and emerging market trends.

8. Local authority building

To establish market-specific expertise, trust, partnerships, citations, and visibility.

Typically shared

9. Product and knowledge management

To combine global consistency with local validation, market expertise, and regulatory requirements. Headquarters should define the framework while markets validate that products, services, and policies accurately reflect local realities.

10. AI visibility and representation

To monitor how products, services, and brands are represented across AI systems while ensuring local accuracy and global consistency. Headquarters should establish monitoring and escalation processes, while local teams validate market-specific accuracy and identify emerging issues.

The new global SEO mandate.

The objective isn’t to centralize or localize everything. It’s to place ownership where decisions can be managed most effectively, and the organization can balance consistency with expertise.

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What Is an SEO Consultant & What Services Do They Offer?

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Key Takeaways

  • SEO consultants handle audits, keyword research, on-page fixes, link building, and AI visibility across platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. 
  • Hire one when your traffic stalls, your rankings drop after a Google update, your in-house team is stretched, or you’re ready to scale. 
  • Look for proven case studies, several years of experience, data-driven reporting, and a clear grasp of AI search. 
  • Consultants cost less and work one-on-one. Agencies cost more but deliver faster with a full team behind your account. 
  • In-house teams know your business best. Consultants bring deeper SEO expertise and faster results.

Need a little help improving your rankings? An SEO consultant could be the answer.

Chances are you already know the basics of SEO, but getting your desired results can be tough with everything else on your plate, especially with the changes AI is throwing into the mix.

That’s where SEO consulting services come in. These experts provide a range of services to boost your traditional and AI SEO results.

SEO consultant is a multifaceted role that requires a range of skills. They wear many hats, and for businesses struggling to rank, they can be a perfect fit.

By the end of this post, you’ll know all about what an SEO consultant is and what they do.

What Does an SEO Consultant Do?

The primary role is to provide a range of SEO consulting services to clients to help them achieve better rankings. They implement various strategies and best practices, including:

  • SEO audits. An SEO audit is an in-depth analysis of a website’s ability to rank in search engines. It looks at your site’s content, technical SEO, backlinks, and competitor performance, among other factors. An SEO audit also highlights ways a site can improve its SEO and provides a strategy for achieving those improvements.
  • Keyword research. Keyword research means finding relevant keywords that a website should aim to rank for. If a business hasn’t done any SEO before, it may not target any keywords. Even if they have worked with an SEO specialist in the past, it may not be targeting the best keywords.
  • On-page SEO. On-page SEO means optimizing the site’s content and HTML elements of individual pages to meet Google’s best practices. This can include refining page content, optimizing title tags and metadata, structuring headers, and improving internal linking.
  • Technical SEO. Technical SEO focuses on the behind-the-scenes elements that help search engines crawl, index, and understand a website. This can include improving site speed, strengthening site security, fixing crawl errors, optimizing site architecture, and ensuring mobile-friendliness.
  • Link building. The more and better quality links a website has, the easier it is to rank for high-competition keywords. If a site’s authority is low, an SEO consultant may create one or more link-building campaigns to improve the site’s backlink profile.
  • AI or generative engine optimization (GEO). While traditional SEO still makes a significant impact, SEO consultants also need to understand GEO. That means knowing how long-tail, question-based keywords affect visibility within AI elements of traditional search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google’s AI Overviews. It also means knowing how to earn citations across major AI platforms like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. 

In addition to these services, SEO consultants also typically provide monthly reporting services to clients. The report covers current rankings, the consultant’s work completed, and recommendations for actions they can take to improve results.

SEO Consulting Types

Countless factors affect your Google ranking, so before you begin, clarify exactly what you need help with.

An easy way to find that out is to ask, “Which part of my business brings the most sales?”

Got the answer? Good. From there, you can match your situation to one of these common SEO consulting service specializations:

  • Local SEO consultants help businesses rank in map packs and location-based searches. They’re a good fit if you have a brick-and-mortar store or serve a specific geographic area.
  • Ecommerce SEO consultants specialize in product page optimization, category structure, and the technical challenges that come with a large product catalog.
  • Content-focused SEO consultants specialize in topical authority, editorial strategy, and ranking through high-quality, in-depth content. They’re a strong fit for publishers and brands competing on expertise.
  • Technical SEO consultants dig into crawlability, site speed, schema, and infrastructure. They’re most useful when your content is solid but the site itself is holding rankings back.
  • Enterprise SEO consultants work with large sites that have complex architectures and significant existing traffic to protect.

Signs You Need an SEO Consultant

It’s usually pretty obvious when you need an SEO consultant. If your website isn’t generating leads or conversions from organic traffic and search engines and AI platforms are an important part of your marketing strategy, then working with an SEO consultant is a good idea.

Here are some other signs it’s time to consult a professional:

Your Website Traffic is Flatlining

Search engine traffic is the most basic indicator of whether an SEO strategy is working. If your traffic isn’t increasing (or decreasing) over time, you need to work with an SEO consultant or replace your existing one.

Search traffic won’t be important to some businesses, but that’s rare. Even if you don’t think search traffic is essential for your business, it probably is.

Although AIO and large language model optimization (LLMO) are changing where search happens, Google still accounts for almost 90 percent of the global search market. What’s also shifting is how these searchers interact with Google’s results.

With AI Overviews, customers are getting the information they need directly in the SERPs without clicking through to websites. That affects traffic numbers, but it doesn’t mean searchers are abandoning Google. Writing off traditional search means writing off a massive audience.

A line graph showing how Google dominates the search engine market share compared to other platforms like Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

You’re Struggling After a Google Update

Have your rankings tanked after a Google core update? You may have been hit by a Google penalty for falling out of step with its best practices. These penalties are notoriously difficult to overcome without the help of a search professional, and there’s a risk you could do even more damage if you try to fix the problem yourself.

Your rankings can also decline without a formal penalty. You may not be breaking any Google rules outright, but ignoring SEO best practices can still drag down your rankings. Working with a consultant with in-depth industry knowledge can help you avoid unintended SEO consequences and penalties.

Google may notify you directly through the manual action report in Search Console. Users receive these reports when a human reviewer has determined that their site violates one or more of Google’s spam policies. Expand the notification, and you’ll see a message like this:

A screenshot of Google documentation explaining which pages of a website are being referenced by a Manual Action Report

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en

More often, though, post-update drops are algorithmic. 

A good SEO consultant’s knowledge and guidance can be indispensable no matter the cause or scenario. They can help you navigate Google’s entire list of penalties and provide the most complete, efficient fixes available. 

Your In-House Team Needs Support

Some businesses try to build their own in-house SEO team or hire a marketing manager with experience across several areas of digital marketing. 

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work out. An SEO consultant often brings more experience, and the engagement can cost less than a full-time hire. 

For example, Ahrefs puts the average SEO consultant engagement at about $3,250 per month, which is typically far below the total cost of salary and benefits for a full-time SEO role. That said, the cost can vary significantly depending on the type of SEO consultant and the level of service.

Even effective in-house teams can benefit from hiring an SEO consultant. You may even have some SEO experts on your in-house team. While they may have the knowledge, there’s no guarantee you’ll have time to implement strategies to improve your rankings. A consultant can also help you with unique strategies and spotting unforeseen challenges as you scale. 

SEO is an important marketing channel, but small teams can’t do it all. If you’re busy dealing with customers, suppliers, and shareholders, outsourcing the work to an SEO consultant is smart.

You Want to Grow Operations

Whatever business you’re in, there comes a time to level up.

You could market your business in several ways, like social media, newsletters, and sharing case studies. But it’s SEO that grows your online visibility and helps searchers find you.

While you could implement a strategy yourself, an SEO specialist has the knowledge you need to drive online discoverability. 

This is especially true given how search is evolving. We live in a “search everywhere” environment now. The customer journey is rapidly moving away from the traditional straight-down funnel approach, and businesses increasingly need to be visible everywhere.

What does that mean for you? You need to work with a professional who can not only get you ranking well in SERPs like Google but also understands how AI prompts and platforms play into your visibility. 

Sold on the idea of hiring an SEO consultant? Read on for some tips on how to find one.

Finding Your Next SEO Consultant

Finding an SEO consultant isn’t hard, but finding a good one is. First, let’s look at some of the most common ways to find an SEO consultant:

  • Ask your network. Speaking to people you know and trust is one of the best ways to find an SEO consultant. If a fellow business owner or manager knows of a great SEO consultant, they’re usually happy to recommend them. As a bonus, you’ll know they can deliver.
  • Run a Google search. Unsurprisingly, Google is a great place to find an SEO consultant. If a consultant is ranking well on Google, there’s a good chance they know what they’re doing. However, this shouldn’t be the only factor you use in your decision. Just because they rank high on Google doesn’t mean they can do the same for your business.
Sponsored Google search results for “SEO consultant”
  • Use online directories. Several online directories collect reviews about SEO specialists. Clutch is a great place to start, but take these reviews with a pinch of salt. Just because a consultant is topping the rankings doesn’t mean they are the best for you. Like Google, they are a great way to get a shortlist of suitable candidates rather than pinpoint one.
Screenshot of Clutch’s user reviews for the top 60 SEO consultants

Source: https://clutch.co/seo-firms/consultants

  • Look through SEO blogs. Popular SEO blogs like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and The Moz Blog can be a great source of potential SEO consultants. They don’t just host journalists’ opinions; SEO strategists also routinely write how-tos and thought pieces on these sites.
Screenshot showing the search bar from The Moz Blog’s homepage
  • Post on job boards. Job boards like Upwork, AngelList, and Dynamite Jobs are great places to post ads. The beauty of this method is that SEO consultants will come to you, meaning all you have to do is interview them. Moreover, many of these job boards vet applicants before they can even apply.
Screenshot of Upwork search results for SEO Experts

Source: https://www.upwork.com/hire/seo-experts/

Traits of a Good SEO Consultant

Want to know what a great SEO strategist is?

Several traits set great SEO consultants apart from the rest. I recommend you look for the following attributes when interviewing potential candidates.

  • Several years of experience. You don’t want a rookie SEO as your consultant. The more experience an SEO consultant has in the industry, the better. They’ll have worked on more sites, better understand what’s effective, and have more case studies to back up their success.
  • Proven resuts. Any SEO consultant worth their salt will have many case studies to support their work. They can show exactly what they did to improve a previous client’s rankings and the impact they had. They should also be happy to put you in contact with previous clients. Here are some examples from my agency, NP Digital:
A screenshot listing Neil Patel Digital’s clients
  • A long-term vision. You want an SEO consultant who’s in it for the long haul, not someone who is going to leave you for a new client after a couple of months; choose a consultant who explains the long-term benefits of SEO to your business and has a roadmap of how you can achieve them.
  • Sees the bigger picture. SEO is just one part of a holistic marketing strategy, and a good SEO consultant will appreciate that. They should help you fold your SEO strategy into other marketing initiatives and be willing to work with other team members and departments in your company to improve your broader marketing goals.
  • A data-driven business model. The consultant you work with should be focused on data. They should be providing regular reporting on how strategies are working, as well as ways to improve those that aren’t, grounded in factual numbers. 
  • Understands AI visibility. A good SEO consultant needs to understand AI visibility in today’s market. They should have knowledge of prompting and which strategies work well on these platforms, both on- and off-page. 
  • Certifications. Just remember that certifications aren’t everything; practical experience is equally important in SEO.

SEO Consultants vs. SEO Agencies

So far, we’ve talked about SEO consultants in broad strokes. However, there’s a meaningful distinction worth drawing before you start looking for one. Both consultants and agencies often offer consulting services, but they operate very differently.

Many SEO consultants consist of an independent professional or a small team. They work directly with you, usually wearing multiple hats while focusing on strategy and high-leverage execution. 

An SEO agency is a larger organization, sometimes with dozens or hundreds of employees, structured to execute at scale across many clients simultaneously.

Both can get you results. The right choice depends on what you actually need.

SEO Consultants May Require Your Help. SEO Agencies Won’t.

If you choose to work with an SEO consultant, you might be looking for a personal, one-to-one service. What you might not realize is that they will likely need your help to improve your rankings, too.

SEO consultants often have specific niches and work independently, so they may not have the resources to provide comprehensive services. That means they could ask your team to write additional content, change your website, or perform other SEO-related tasks.

That’s very different from an SEO agency that often can perform every SEO task in-house.

Agencies Cost More, but You Get More for Your Money

Agencies will usually charge more for their time than SEO consultants. That’s because they have staff to pay and overheads to cover, whereas SEO consultants typically work from home. For smaller businesses, that may mean an SEO consultant is the way to go.

Other businesses may want to pay more for a top-tier SEO agency because they know they’ll get more bang for their buck. That’s because an agency gives you access to dozens of experts rather than just one. 

Having more people working on your project also means you get work delivered more quickly. There’s a good chance you’ll see results faster, too.

At the end of the day, if you choose a good SEO consultant or SEO agency, you’ll still be receiving excellent advice. Most consultants and agencies are dedicated to their craft, attend the right conferences, and test cutting-edge tactics. 

You may get access to a few more experts when you work with an SEO agency, but that doesn’t make an SEO consultant any less professional.

SEO Consultants vs. In-House Teams

For many companies, deciding whether to go with an in-house team or work with external SEO consultants is a challenge. As you’d expect, there are pros and cons to both options.

Factor SEO Consultant In-House Team
SEO expertise Brings established knowledge from day one Needs time to build skills and stay current
Business knowledge Learns your company from the outside Knows your customers, products, and market
Speed to results Skips the learning curve Requires training before output ramps up
Resources Access to agency tools and a wider team Limited to what you can hire or buy
Communication Works through scheduled touchpoints Allows quick, informal updates and meetings
Control & flexibility You guide the strategy at arm’s length You manage the work directly, day to day
Focus Frees your staff for core business tasks Keeps SEO tied to broader operations
Best fit for Small teams or businesses scaling fast Companies with the budget to build long-term

The most obvious benefit of working with an SEO consulting service is avoiding the steep learning curve of search engine optimization.

If you run a small business and know it will take time before your staff can get up to speed with SEO complexities, you can save yourself time (and headaches) by outsourcing. Agency staff can lean on their expertise and resources to stand up effective strategies right away.

You could also use an agency to focus on growing your business. While your team focuses on the day-to-day tasks, SEO consulting experts can create a strategy that delivers results.

Doing SEO in-house has its advantages, too.

The most obvious benefit of going in-house is that the staff knows the business better than an outside consultant. They know the customers, the market, and what appeals to them.

You may also find it easier to collaborate and communicate when you keep your SEO in-house. Team meetings, sharing updates, and changing course when needed can all be a lot easier.

Then, of course, there’s the greater control and flexibility. After all, you’re working on your own terms.

The Top 3 Options for SEO Consulting

Detailed below are three of the top SEO companies for consulting.


<h3>1. NP Digital for the Best Blog and Website SEO Consulting</h3>

Screenshot of NP Digital’s landing page

I can’t write an article about SEO consulting without mentioning the award-winning NP Digital agency.

It recently won the AdAge Performance Marketing Agency of the Year award. Pretty awesome, right?

NP Digital has also received recognition for the impressive ROI it delivers to clients, its paid search, and its ability to boost your visibility across platforms, including AI or GEO search results.

I could go on, but I don’t like to boast.

Since the start, NP Digital has offered a proven system to get your readers coming back for more content while also converting a high percentage of them.

Book a call with NP Digital today if you’re looking to outgrow your competitors and work with a well-established SEO consulting firm that brings consistent results.

<h3>2. Louder.Online for Dedicated Sales Funnel SEO Consulting</h3>

Screenshot of Louder.Online’s homepage, displaying some of the marquis brands they’ve worked with.

Source: https://louder.online/

Are you more into sales funnels?

Do you want to optimize your sales pages for SEO while maintaining high conversion rates?

Then you should speak with an SEO consulting company that specializes in delivering consistent, trackable results for your sales funnels.

In our experience, Louder.Online has been an atomic weapon.

Its SEO consulting experts have years of experience, and more importantly, they get results.

If you’re looking to optimize your sales pages, you should check out what Louder.Online has to offer.

Coalition Technologies for Ecommerce SEO Consulting

Screenshot of Coalition Technologies homepage

Source: https://coalitiontechnologies.com/ecommerce-seo

If your focus is ecommerce SEO, consider Coalition Technologies. With more than 530 ecommerce projects translating into over 20 million ecommerce transactions, Coalition Technologies has the track record to back its standing as a top-tier SEO consultant.

It offers services like web design, paid advertising, traditional SEO, and AI SEO. Its niche services include social media and forum marketing, platforms essential for converting online sales today. 

Coalition boasts more than 500 SEO case studies. These success stories come from clients in a broad range of industries, from fashion to legal. 

FAQs

What is SEO consulting?

SEO consulting is an advisory service where an expert audits your online presence and builds a strategy to improve your search and AI visibility. Some consultants also handle implementation.

What does an SEO consultant do?

An SEO consultant researches keywords and competitor content. Using what they find, they will recommend strategies to fix on-page and off-page SEO issues. They’ll also provide regular metrics and reporting. Some will even manage execution alongside your team.

How do you find a good SEO consultant?

Look for case studies, client reviews, and industry experience. Ask for references and confirm that they follow white-hat practices.

What should you ask SEO consultants?

Ask about their process, reporting cadence, past results, and pricing. Find out which tools they use and how they’re handling the new AI search environment.

How do you hire an SEO consultant?

Shortlist your top candidates, request proposals, and compare pricing against scope. Sign a contract outlining deliverables, timelines, and reporting requirements before work begins.

Conclusion

SEO consultants can deliver incredible results to small businesses, helping them improve every facet of SEO. A good SEO consultant offers a wide range of services and has the proof and industry knowledge to back up their promises.

You’ll want to make sure you choose a consultant that uses hard data as their guiding light and knows how to navigate modern search. Google is still critical, but the use of AI is rapidly changing how SERPs function and how users behave.

You’ll also need to decide whether an SEO consultant or agency is the best fit for your goals. For some businesses, working with an SEO agency is a better choice. If you have the budget, an SEO agency will help you get more done in less time, supercharging your results in the process.

Whether you’re hiring an SEO consultant or an SEO agency, you can look in many of the same places and search for similar traits. Or you can ask my agency for help.

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Why proving technical SEO ROI is so difficult

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Technical SEO shield

Six months ago, there was a core update that would’ve tanked your website. But it didn’t.

It didn’t because your team fixed your canonicals, redirection issues, duplication issues, and JavaScript rendering eight months earlier. It was the kind of drudge work a technical engineer or developer got stuck with because the ticket was last on their list.

And you don’t have any proof of it, not really. Other than the experience that comes from years in SEO and recognizing that your site had all the hallmarks of sites hit by the update.

It could’ve cut your traffic in half. It didn’t.

There’s no parallel internet timeline where you didn’t do the work, so there’s no way to confirm it. There’s no record.

This is why technical SEO ROI resists proof. It’s an inference problem with no control group, and we keep pretending it’s a reporting problem we can tool our way out of.

The internet doesn’t stop

We are in two open systems when we work in digital, at least: the internet and the market. Three, if you count the maturity and expectations of internet users. Four, if you count our own website infrastructure. More than that, really, but we don’t have time to list them all. 

The long and short of it is this: the sea we swim in is always shifting, moving, growing, and shrinking. There’s no way to pin down a single, solid “before” state, and there’s no clean way to project all of those influences into “what would’ve happened if I didn’t do anything?” We try to do it with things like Bayesian forecasting, but that’s still an educated guess.

Technical work might have an immediate impact on visibility today. Make the same change six months later, and it might not. That could solely be because Google decided to shift its crawl budget or change how it reads websites. 

Cause and effect come unstuck in time. Google recrawls and reindexes on its own schedule, so any effect lands far from the change and is washed out across a recrawl cycle, defeating the before-and-after pairing every clean test needs.

Just like SEO as a whole, there’s a lot we can’t control. Trying to track all of the changes across the web that might influence our website would result in many gray hairs and sleepless nights.

Technical SEO adds another layer because we rarely ship in isolation. It’s never just “here’s this single change to the website.” It’s “here are about 30 fixes from five different teams going out on a Thursday, so if things collapse, we have people on Friday who can triage.” (Please don’t ship on Fridays.)

Much of the technical work is also done to keep our heads above water: managing technical debt, or doing the work needed to stay on top of updated regulations and new releases of codebases or frameworks. Enhancements and improvements are tough. 

Technical work is a lot more like insurance or public health. You only realize how important it was when it stops working. What we’re doing with technical SEO is often disaster prevention, not building new cities. We can’t write an invoice for an earthquake that didn’t happen.

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The control group was never there

Another reality of technical changes, SEO-led or not, is that most of them are sitewide and, by necessity, have to be sitewide. There’s no control group. Render pipeline, crawl budget, site speed. It touches everything at once, so there’s no untouched slice left to act as the control.

Two examples to consider:

  • Sunsetting 301 redirects more than a year old: The server stops reading every redirect line on every page load. The benefit is crawl and resource efficiency, which is invisible in analytics.
  • A migration done right: The win condition is “we didn’t lose traffic.” A flat line, maybe a slight uptick. Migration work only becomes visible when it fails.

Your only comparison becomes the past, which existed under different external conditions. Time itself is now the trick. The only things to compare are relative, over time, and incremental, and the results shift depending on which metrics you use to measure success and which assumptions you and your leadership bring to the conversation.

When possible, we do want to run a proof of concept. SEO A/B testing, essentially. Pick a segment, make the change there and nowhere else. Measure and decide. But that isn’t always possible, and it requires a different kind of buy-in.

We’re also at a point where LLMs make everything probabilistic. Every answer is personalized, and many of the measurements we rely on have become less deterministic.

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So keep it relative

There are two levels of relative here:

  • How to prioritize work.
  • How to measure the impact.

How we prioritize the work helps determine the impact we want to make.

My approach to prioritizing technical work is to look at impact first. How much of the website does this issue affect, and how much of that impact lands on priority sections or pages? After that, it’s standard scoping and grooming discussions led by the development teams.

But for me, impact is what matters.

Now, when it comes to measurement and reporting, much of the SEO industry, myself included, is talking about how we actually measure everything now, not just technical work. We’re in a bit of a weird limbo because of everything LLMs have accelerated.

We don’t have the “what would’ve happened if…” for our own websites, but we do have our competitors. Observing how competitors’ websites respond to global events, such as Google updates, is probably the closest we’ll get to answering that question in technical SEO work. It’s an ROI-by-proxy adjacent to share of voice.

And the funding

Technical SEO is infrastructure. Insurance. If you’re having trouble getting it done or getting it funded, look at your framing.

At its core, technical SEO is insurance against the shocks of an open system. Treat it that way. It’s not a revenue driver.

Yes, it can deliver meaningful improvements and help that line go up and to the right, but the workhorse, the 80%, the majority of technical SEO, is keeping the engine running. The work doesn’t promise upside. It lowers the odds and the cost of getting tanked. The core update that didn’t sink you is the claim that paid out.

So do what I’ve recommended before and talk to finance. Learn how they quantify, value, and evaluate insurance, security, and infrastructure.

Start looking at your technical SEO that way. Start talking about it that way.

Technical SEO is growth resilience your flywheel can’t move without, not an investment you can’t justify.

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How to safely implement high-impact technical SEO changes

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How to safely implement high-impact technical SEO changes

Technical SEO changes can significantly improve how search engines access, understand, and evaluate your website.

The recommendations with the greatest potential impact carry the greatest implementation risk. URL changes, canonical updates, robots.txt modifications, internal linking updates, and site migrations can improve performance, but mistakes can also hurt crawling, indexing, and search visibility.

That’s why technical SEO isn’t just about identifying opportunities. Successful implementation requires evaluating impact, balancing effort and risk, coordinating across teams, and thoroughly testing changes before and after launch.

From audit to implementation to prioritization

The work isn’t done once an SEO audit is delivered. 

Prioritization is a critical part of technical SEO, requiring you to evaluate the severity of an issue, its expected outcome, the number of pages affected, the implementation effort, and any associated risks. 

Recommendations with the greatest potential impact often require buy-in from other teams because they also demand more resources and carry greater risk. A clear recommendation, test plan, and stakeholder alignment move implementation forward.

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Understanding the issue and potential outcome

Not every technical SEO issue identified during an audit requires immediate action. Before prioritizing a recommendation, validate it with manual checks and the context you have about the site, including priority sections and technical limitations. 

For example, missing meta descriptions on non-priority pages or title tags that fall outside recommended lengths may be flagged by auditing tools because they’re easy to measure, not because they have meaningful business impact.

Technical SEO audits rely heavily on crawling tools and automated reports to identify issues at scale. While these tools are invaluable, they don’t always provide the context needed to determine business impact. 

A warning may represent a legitimate concern, an intentional decision, a platform limitation, or an issue with little to no measurable impact.

Evaluating impact, risk, and effort

Once an issue has been validated, the next step is determining how to address it and whether to recommend it to the client. 

When evaluating and prioritizing technical SEO recommendations for a development queue, consider the number of pages affected, the expected outcome, the required resources, and the potential risks. 

For example, updating a handful of title tags may carry relatively little risk, while changing URL structures or modifying robots.txt directives can affect thousands of pages and influence crawling, indexing, and discoverability.

Understanding the upside and downside supports informed decision-making, resource allocation, and planning that minimizes risk while maximizing potential benefits.

High-impact technical changes that require extra caution

The following recommendations are common technical SEO initiatives that can meaningfully affect site performance. The goal isn’t to avoid these changes, but to understand their potential implications, risks, and benefits before implementation.

1. URL updates and changes

Whether you’re reorganizing pages into a more logical folder structure, consolidating content, supporting a rebrand, or improving site architecture, URL updates are a common recommendation. 

For example, a business may move service pages from the root domain into a subfolder to better organize content and improve site navigation.

While URL changes can provide significant benefits, it’s important to ensure those benefits outweigh the risks and that a proper redirect strategy is in place. 

Search engines treat a changed URL as a new URL, making redirects critical for preserving rankings, traffic, backlinks, and other signals associated with the original page. Missing redirects, incorrect redirect mappings, redirect chains, outdated internal links, and outdated XML sitemaps can all negatively affect crawling, indexing, and discoverability.

Before moving forward with URL changes, create a redirect mapping plan. Ideally, validate and test redirects in a development environment before launch, then verify them again after launch and update your XML sitemap. 

The launch plan should also include updating internal links across the site and monitoring performance. Planning and testing URL changes preserve existing SEO equity while supporting broader site goals.

2. Canonical updates

Canonical tags help search engines determine which version of a page should be treated as the preferred version when duplicate or similar content exists across a site. They’re often used to consolidate ranking signals, avoid internal competition, improve crawl efficiency, and indicate which URLs should be prioritized for indexing.

For example, an ecommerce site may use canonical tags to consolidate parameter-based URLs or faceted navigation pages to a primary product or category page. However, applying a canonical tag to the wrong page template could unintentionally signal that an entire set of pages should be consolidated elsewhere.

Canonical updates seem straightforward, but mistakes can be difficult to identify once they’re deployed across a site and can negatively affect search performance. Take the time to review canonical targets and validate implementation. This lets you avoid sending conflicting signals to search engines that could cause important pages to lose visibility or, worse, fall out of the index.

3. Robots.txt file changes

The robots.txt file lets you control how search engines and other crawlers access content on a website. SEO recommendations involving robots.txt often aim to improve crawl efficiency, prevent low-value content from being crawled, or limit access to specific sections of a site.

For example, an SEO may recommend blocking filtered URLs, internal search results, or other pages that consume unnecessary crawl resources. When implemented correctly, these updates focus crawl activity on more important content.

However, robots.txt changes become risky when implemented incorrectly. A misplaced directive or overly broad rule could block important sections of a site from being crawled, limiting discovery and visibility. Another risk is accidentally deploying a staging robots.txt file to the live site, which can affect how crawlers access content.

Because robots.txt changes can affect large portions of a site, carefully test rules, review proposed changes to ensure they work as intended, and always verify the implementation after launch. Even a small update can have sitewide implications if the wrong URL patterns are affected.

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4. Internal linking changes

Internal linking is highly valuable for content discovery, supporting priority pages, connecting related content, and guiding users through a website. This may include updating navigation elements, adding contextual links, consolidating content hubs, or improving pathways to key pages.

Over time, however, websites evolve, and internal linking often needs cleanup. Removing important links, creating orphaned pages, linking to staging environments, or accidentally linking to non-public URLs can negatively affect crawling and content discovery. Large-scale navigation updates can also affect how search engines access content, especially when key pages become harder to find.

As with any technical SEO recommendation, understanding the scope of the change is critical. A navigation update could affect thousands of pages, making it significantly riskier than adding a handful of contextual links to a few priority pages.

5. Site migrations

Every SEO team eventually manages a site migration, whether an organization is rebranding, changing domains, redesigning its website, or moving to a new CMS. Well-planned migrations can improve user experience, support long-term SEO performance, and positively affect the business.

However, site migrations are inherently risky because they often combine multiple technical SEO recommendations into a single initiative. Redirects, URL restructures, canonical tags, indexing directives, content updates, and internal linking changes can all happen simultaneously. With so many moving pieces, even a small oversight can significantly affect crawling, indexing, and visibility during launch.

Even the most well-planned migration can encounter issues if changes aren’t thoroughly documented, tested, reviewed, and validated throughout the process. That’s why pre-launch QA, post-launch testing, and ongoing monitoring are critical for identifying and resolving issues before they have a lasting impact on performance.

Working across teams to ensure success

Technical SEO updates often require multiple teams to work together to test and launch changes. This involves content teams, in-house developers, and multiple agencies. Clear communication is essential. 

Recommendations should be straightforward, testing and quality assurance should be built into the process, and success criteria should be clearly defined. You also need a plan to quickly identify and resolve issues if something goes wrong, minimizing any impact on performance.

Communicating recommendations effectively

Whether you’re discussing recommendations directly with the development team or documenting them in a structured ticket, recommendations should clearly define the issue, provide examples, and outline the required changes. 

Clear documentation helps set expectations, communicate the scope of the issue, identify the affected URLs, and define the expected outcome. It also lets you ask questions and raise concerns about the recommendation or the site’s limitations.

Testing in development environments

Whenever changes are made to a website, they should be thoroughly tested. Using a development environment lets you validate implementations, ask questions, and provide feedback before launch, helping confirm that everything works as expected while minimizing risk.

Post-launch testing and monitoring

Sometimes, a change that works perfectly in a development environment doesn’t behave the same way after launch. 

You should be ready to validate implementations, quickly identify issues, and begin troubleshooting as soon as changes go live. After launch, ongoing monitoring helps you measure the impact and catch issues early.

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Balancing opportunity and risk

Most technical SEO recommendations focus on improving crawling, indexing, or site architecture. When implemented correctly, they can significantly improve how search engines access, understand, and evaluate a website.

Technical SEO implementation requires multiple teams working toward the same goal. As recommendations move from audit to implementation, misunderstandings, assumptions, or overlooked details can lead to unintended consequences.

That’s why technical SEO isn’t just about identifying opportunities. It’s about understanding the issue, evaluating potential impact, weighing the required development effort, and managing implementation risk. 

While no implementation is completely risk-free, thoughtful planning, clear communication, thorough testing, and ongoing monitoring can help identify issues early and reduce their impact. Approach them with the preparation, testing, and caution they deserve.

Balancing opportunity and riks in technical SEO

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Local SEO: The Beginner’s Guide

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Local search has become a critical component of any small business marketing strategy.  With 69% of all Google searches seeking local information, it’s essential that your business appears at…

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Best Backlink Analysis Tools: Compare Free and Paid Options

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Key Takeaways

  • The right backlink analysis tool depends on the job: Ahrefs or Semrush for deep data, Pitchbox or BuzzStream for outreach, Linkody for monitoring, and Whitespark for local SEO.  
  • Referring domains carry more weight than total backlink count. One link from 100 different sites beats 100 links from a single source. Backlink tools help you target the most impactful ones. 
  • Every tool in this guide includes a competitor link gap report, which surfaces sites linking to your competitors but not to you.  
  • A quarterly link audit catches toxic links, broken backlinks pointing to your site, and outreach wins worth replicating.  
  • Monthly pricing spans $14.90 to over $500. Match the tool to the scale of your work, not to what an enterprise SEO team would buy. 

What comes to mind when you think about creating a “good” link profile? 

Search “What are backlinks,” and Google returns plenty of information, including the  steps  you can take today to improve your link profile and boost your rankings. 

In the past, I’ve provided a lot of advice on building quality links, where to find the best links, and tools that can help. 

Those tips can get you far, but there’s something else you need to do first: Examine your link profile. 

If your website is brand new, this won’t always be a big deal. That’s because you probably don’t have links pointing to your website yet. 

Conversely, if your website’s been around for a few months or longer, there’s a good chance you have some links pointing to it. Some may be good. Some may be bad. Others may not move the needle in either direction. 

It’s important to understand your link profile, as this will give you a clear idea of whether you’re on the right track. 

In a perfect world, you’d see nothing but high-quality, relevant links  pointing to your site. That’s rarely the case in the real world, though. 

Need help conducting a link audit and reviewing the results? If so, this post is for you. Below, you’ll find 14 backlink tools packed with features that shed light on your link profile.  

Backlink Analysis Tools: The Basic Comparison

Pages with backlinks get more organic traffic than pages without, according to Ahrefs research.  

A good backlink analysis tool tells you who links to you, who links to your competitors, and which links are helping your rankings. That way, you know where to target your outreach efforts next. 

The 14 tools I cover in this guide differ in several ways. Some are all-in-one SEO suites with strong backlink modules. Others focus narrowly on a single job, such as outreach or local citations. The right pick depends on your linking strategy and your budget. 

Here’s a side-by-side look at every tool covered below. Pricing reflects entry-level paid plans at the time of writing and may have shifted, so check the vendor’s site before committing. 

Tool  Best For  Standout Feature  Starting Price (Monthly) 
Ubersuggest  Small businesses and solopreneurs  Affordable lifetime plans  $29 
Semrush  Agencies and in-house marketing teams  Backlink gap analysis  $139 
Ahrefs  SEO professionals who need deep link data  Largest live backlink index  $129 
BuzzSumo  Content marketers and PR teams  Content + influencer discovery  $199 
AIOSEO  WordPress users running on-site SEO  Native WordPress integration  $49.50/year 
Linkody  Solo SEOs monitoring a few sites  Real-time disavow management  $14.90 
Cognitive SEO  Mid-sized teams cleaning toxic links  Unnatural link detection  $129.99 
Majestic SEO  Researchers focused purely on link metrics  Trust flow and citation Flow  $49.99 
SEOptimer  Agencies producing white-label audits  Customer-facing reports  $29 
Moz Link Explorer  Marketers who rely on domain authority (DA)  DA, page authority (PA), and spam score  $99 
Pitchbox  Outreach-heavy link-building teams  Automated outreach sequences  $300 
Whitespark  Local SEO specialists  Local citation discovery  $39 
Linkstant  Real-time backlink alerts (legacy)  Instant new-link notifications  $7 
BuzzStream  Outreach and digital PR teams  Built-in customer relationship management (CRM) for prospects  $24 

1. Ubersuggest 

A screenshot of the Ubersuggest homepage telling brands they can get mentioned in Google and Gemini. 

Ubersuggest is my own tool, and I’ve designed it to make serious backlink analysis accessible without an enterprise budget.  

You get a full backlink overview for any domain, including new and lost links, referring domains, anchor text breakdowns, and a domain authority (DA) score.  

The Backlink Opportunity feature is the one I use most. Plug in two or three competitor URLs, and Ubersuggest gives you every site linking to them but not to you. That’s a ready-made outreach list. 

  • Pricing: Plans start at $29 per month for individuals, $49 for small teams, and $99 for agencies. Unlike most competitors, Ubersuggest offers lifetime plans. 
  • Best for: Solopreneurs, small business owners, and in-house marketers who want a solid backlink workflow without paying enterprise rates. If you’re new to SEO, the interface is easier to navigate than that of Ahrefs or Semrush. 
  • Considerations: The link index isn’t as deep as Ahrefs or Majestic, but that won’t matter as much for most small to midsizedsites, that won’t matter. 

2. Semrush 

A screenshot of Semrush’s backlink checker homepage tells readers they can win backlinks that move rankings and offers a free trial.  

Semrush says it runs one of the largest backlink databases in the industry, with more than 43 trillion backlinks indexed. It earns its place on this list for that data depth alone. 

The free Backlink Checker is good for quick checks. You can see a site’s top backlinks, Authority Score, total backlinks, referring domains, dofollow percentage, anchor text, link attributes, and whether links are new or lost. That’s useful if you just want a snapshot of your site or a competitor. 

The paid tools are where Semrush gets more useful for serious backlink work.  

Backlink Analytics gives you fuller backlink and referring domain data, more reports, filters, and tracking. Backlink Gap lets you compare your link profile against up to four competitors in a single view.  

Semrush also includes Backlink Audit, which scores toxic links and flags candidates for the disavow file.  

Both pair well with Semrush’s keyword and traffic data, which is why many agencies consolidate on this platform. 

  • Pricing: Semrush’s SEO + AI Search plans start with the SEO plan at $139. The Pro+ plan is $299. The Business plan ($549) adds AI visibility tools and other functionality. Discounts for annual billing are available, and Semrush also offers a seven-day free trial. 
  • Best for: Marketing agencies and in-house teams that need backlink data alongside full SEO, PPC, and competitive intelligence. If backlinks are one of five or six things you analyze regularly, Semrush is hard to beat. 
  • Considerations: Semrush’s free backlink tools are fine for quick checks. You’ll need a paid plan for serious backlink work, though. 

3. Ahrefs 

Ahrefs Backlink Checker homepage offering a free trial version. 

Ahrefs is one of the strongest backlink tools for SEOs who need more than a quick link count. Its free Backlink Checker is useful for spot checks, but its Site Explorer tool is where serious backlink work happens.  

Ahrefs says its backlink index updates with fresh data every 15 minutes and includes 35 trillion external backlinks in historical records.  

Site Explorer shows referring domains, backlinks, domain rating, anchor text, followed vs. nofollowed links, backlink growth, and “best by links,” which helps you find the pages attracting the most links.  

Content Explorer helps surface link-worthy content ideas, while Link Intersect finds sites linking to competitors but not to you.  

Ahrefs does have free access, but there’s a catch. The free account gives verified site owners limited Site Explorer access for their own websites, including backlinks, referring domains, anchors, and “best by links.” Competitor research, larger reports, Content Explorer, and more advanced link-building workflows require a paid plan.  

  • Pricing: Lite is $129 per month, Standard is $249, Advanced is $449, and Enterprise starts at $1,499 per month. Discounts for annual billing are available. 
  • Best for: SEO consultants, agencies, and in-house specialists who live on backlink data daily. Ahrefs may be overkill for someone publishing one blog post a month but invaluable for anyone running active outreach or technical SEO audits. 
  • Considerations: Lite works for basic backlink monitoring, but Standard is the better fit for most serious users. 

4. BuzzSumo

A screenshot of the BuzzSumo homepage. 

BuzzSumo started as a content discovery tool, and that’s still its strongest trait. Its backlink data is built around content, not just domains, so you can see which articles in your niche earned the most links and where they came from. 

The Content Analyzer pulls the top-shared and top-linked content for any keyword. Pair it with the influencer search, and you have a workflow for finding the writers and publications most likely to link to a similar piece on your site. The link-building use case here is digital PR, not technical backlink audits. 

  • Pricing: Content Creation starts at $199 per month; PR & Comms at $299; Suite at $499; and Enterprise at $999. Annual billing knocks roughly 20 percent off. 
  • Best for: Content marketers and PR teams who build links through earned media rather than direct outreach. If you want to know what’s working in your space and who to pitch, this is the tool. 
  • Considerations: It’s not a replacement for Ahrefs or Semrush on raw backlink data. 

5. AIOSEO

A screenshot of AIOSEO’s homepage. 

AIOSEO (All in One SEO) is a WordPress plugin first and an SEO suite second. It’s not a dedicated backlink checker, but it can help WordPress users manage the links they control inside their own site. 

Its Link Assistant shows internal links, external links, affiliate links, orphaned posts, and top domains you link to. That makes it useful for improving internal linking and cleaning up outbound links, but it won’t replace a backlink database like Ahrefs or Semrush. 

Broken Link Checker is another useful add-on. It scans your content for broken links and images, then lets you address issues. The free version includes 250 internal and external link checks per month. 

  • Pricing: Annual plans range from $49.50 for Basic to $299.50 for Elite. 
  • Best for: WordPress site owners who want on-page SEO, sitemaps, and lightweight backlink data in one plugin. If you already pay for a dedicated backlink tool, AIOSEO is more of a complement than a replacement. 
  • Considerations: AIOSEO is not a true backlink analysis tool. Use it to manage links on your WordPress site. 

6. Linkody

A screenshot of Linkody’s homepage. 

Linkody is a tool built for backlink monitoring. Add your domain, and Linkody tracks discovered links and alerts you when links go live or drop. The platform even handles marking links for disavow with a built-in file generator. 

The dashboard provides backlink status, anchor text, follow/nofollow data, landing pages, Moz DA, spam score, majestic trust flow and citation flow, and other link-quality signals.  

The disavow workflow is what sets Linkody apart, though. You can flag toxic links inside the dashboard and export the file for Google Search Console in a couple of clicks. 

  • Pricing: Webmaster starts at $14.90 per month, Advanced at $24.90, Pro at $49.90, Agency at $99.90, and Agency XL at $153.90. Free trials and discounts for annual billing are available. 
  • Best for: Solo SEOs, freelancers, and small agencies who want backlink monitoring and disavow management without paying for a full SEO suite. The price-to-feature ratio is the main draw. 
  • Considerations: Linkody is great for monitoring and managing backlinks, but it’s not as deep as some of the other tools on this list for large-scale backlink research. 

7. CognitiveSEO

A screenshot of CognitiveSEO’s homepage. 

cognitiveSEO gets its reputation from the Unnatural Link Detection tool, which scores links in your profile for risk and flags candidates for disavow. If you’ve inherited a site with a messy link history or recovered from a penalty, this is the platform for you. 

Beyond toxic link cleanup, you get rank tracking, content optimization, and competitive backlink analysis.  

The main draw is the link-quality workflow. cognitiveSEO aggregates backlink data from trusted link databases, then crawls and analyzes links on demand, so it’s better framed as an audit and recovery tool than a pure backlink index play. 

  • Pricing: Starter is $129.99 per month, Premium is $199, and Elite is $499. Annual billing offers a discount. A free trial is available. 
  • Best for: Mid-sized teams and consultants who handle penalty recovery, link audits, or sites with risky historical link profiles. 
  • Considerations: cognitiveSEO is strongest for backlink cleanup and risk review. It’s less compelling if you only need everyday backlink discovery or broad SEO reporting 

8. Majestic SEO

A screenshot of Majestic SEO’s homepage suggesting they’re specialists in backlink analysis. 

Majestic predates most of the tools on this list and remains a go-to for pure link metrics. Its proprietary metrics, trust flow and citation flow, are highly regarded across the SEO industry and shown inside other tools, like Linkody. Trust flow estimates link quality, while citation flow reflects link quantity. 

Majrestic’s Site Explorer report shows referring domains, anchor text, and a topical trust flow that breaks down which niches link to you. The Link Context feature displays the surrounding paragraph for any backlink, helping you judge link quality at a glance. 

  • Pricing: Lite is $49.99 per month, Pro is $99.99 per month, and API access is $399.99 per month. Annual billing is available at a discount. 
  • Best for: SEO researchers, link prospectors, and analysts who care more about link metrics than the full SEO suite experience. Trust flow and citation flow are the reasons most people sign up. 
  • Considerations: Majestic is strong for backlink analysis, but it does not replace all-in-one SEO tools. 

9. SEOptimer 

A screenshot of SEOptimer’s homepage. 

SEOptimer is best known for white-label site audits, and its backlink research module fits into that broader reporting workflow. The dashboard pulls referring domains, anchor text, and link quality scores you can drop straight into client-facing reports. 

The embeddable audit tool is a nice touch for agencies. You can install a lead-generation form on your site that runs a free backlink and SEO audit for prospects, capturing the lead. 

  • Pricing: DIY SEO starts at $29 per month, White Label at $39, and White Label & Embedding at $59. Annual billing discounts are available, as is a free trial. 
  • Best for: Small agencies and consultants who need affordable, brandable reports for clients. If you’ve been using a tool called Monitor Backlinks, that product has now been merged into the SEOptimer platform. 
  • Considerations: SEOptimer is stronger for audits and lead generation than deep backlink research. 

10. Moz Link Explorer

A screenshot of the landing page for Moz Link Explorer. 

Moz Link Explorer is built around domain authority, the metric many SEOs still use as a quick read on site strength. The tool provides DA, page authority (PA), spam score, and a full backlink profile with link-quality filters. 

The Link Intersect report shows pages linking to your competitors but not to you, similar to Ahrefs and Semrush. Moz also tracks new and lost links over time, which helps spot outreach wins or drops in your link profile. 

  • Pricing: Standard starts at $99 per month, Medium at $179, and Large at $299. Annual billing is discounted, and a free trial is available. Free Moz access is useful for occasional DA checks and light backlink research, but it’s limited. 
  • Best for: Marketers and content teams who already work with DA and want a familiar backlink dashboard alongside keyword and rank tracking tools. 
  • Considerations: The link index is smaller than Ahrefs, but Moz’s data quality and reporting are reliable for everyday work. 

11. Pitchbox

A screenshot of Pitchbox’s homepage also showing a snapshot of their SEO campaign dashboard. 

Pitchbox is an outreach platform with backlink prospecting built in. You can create prospect lists, find contacts, run outreach sequences, manage follow-ups, track replies, and monitor links from one dashboard. 

Integrations with Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Majestic let you filter prospects by link metrics before reaching out, shortening the time from finding a prospect to sending a personalized pitch. 

  • Pricing: Pro is $300 per month, Advanced is $600 monthly, and Scale is $1,200 monthly. Enterprise pricing is custom. Annual billing discounts are available, and a free trial is available. 
  • Best for: Agencies and in-house teams running serious outreach programs. If link building is a primary channel and you’re sending hundreds of pitches a month, Pitchbox pays for itself quickly.  
  • Considerations: For occasional outreach, Pitchbox is probably overkill. 

12. Whitespark

A screenshot of Whitespark’s homepage. 

Whitespark focuses on local SEO, and its backlink-adjacent work centers on citations—the mentions of your business name, address, and phone number across local directories and review sites. 

The Local Citation Finder identifies high-value citation opportunities for any business or competitor. Whitespark also offers done-for-you citation building and cleanup, as well as a local rank tracker. The toolset is deliberately narrow. It’s built for local businesses, not enterprise SEO. 

  • Pricing: Local Citation Finder has a free starter plan. Paid plans start at $39 per month for Small Business, $49 for Specialist, $59 for Agency, and $149 for Enterprise. Annual billing is available at a discount. 
  • Best for: Local businesses and agencies serving multi-location clients. If you serve a geographic market and rely on Google Business Profile rankings, Whitespark is the tool for you. 
  • Considerations: Whitespark is not a backlink research tool in the Ahrefs or Semrush sense. Use it for citations, listings, Google Business Profile visibility, and local rank tracking. 

13. Linkstant

A screenshot of Linkstant’s homepage explaining why it’s powerful to discover your new backlinks instantly.  

Linkstant carved out a niche around one promise: instant alerts when a new link points to your site. While most tools poll for new backlinks once a day or once a week, Linkstant ran on near-real-time detection, enabling users to thank the linker, share the content, or correct a broken link within minutes. 

  • Pricing: Linkstant’s small business package is $7 per month, and its enterprise pricing is $27 per month.  
  • Best for: Anyone building outreach workflows around instant backlink notifications.  
  • Considerations: Linkstant is not a replacement for a backlink analysis platform. 

14. BuzzStream 

A screenshot of BuzzStream’s homepage. 

BuzzStream is an outreach customer relationship management (CRM) platform with link research baked in. You research prospects, find their contact info, send personalized pitches, and track every conversation from a single dashboard. The backlink piece comes from integration with Moz and built-in link metrics that help you qualify prospects. 

The list-building features make it easy to import prospects from a Google Sheet or scrape them directly from search results. From there, the CRM handles the rest of the outreach cycle. 

  • Pricing: Starter is $49 per month, Growth is $174, Professional is $424, and Custom starts at $999. A free trial is available. 
  • Best for: Digital PR and link-building teams that prioritize relationship management over raw link data.  
  • Considerations: BuzzStream is best paired with a dedicated backlink tool if you need deep competitor link research or large-scale backlink audits. 

Finding the Right Backlink Tool for You (and Getting the Most Out of It)

The right backlink analysis tool depends on three things: what you do with backlink data most often, how many sites you manage, and what you can spend. A solopreneur running one blog doesn’t need the same setup as a large agency. 

Start with your goals and the task at hand.  

  • If you mostly research competitors and prospect for new links, Ahrefs or Semrush makes sense.  
  • If outreach is the bottleneck, Pitchbox or BuzzStream pays for itself.  
  • For budget-friendly monitoring and disavow management, choose Linkody or CognitiveSEO.  
  • Local businesses should look at Whitespark first. 

Once you’ve picked a tool, get the most out of it by following a few rules. 

  • Audit your link profile quarterly. Look for new toxic links, broken backlinks pointing to your site, and outreach wins worth replicating. 
  • Track referring domains, not just total backlinks. One link from 100 domains beats 100 links from one domain. If the difference between referring domains and backlinks is fuzzy, start there. 
  • Pay attention to link attributes. A lot of people get hung up on dofollow vs. nofollow backlinks when creating their strategy, but these attributes don’t change much. A toxic dofollow link can hurt your rankings, while a high-quality nofollow link still drives referral traffic. Your energy is better spent on routinely auditing and maintaining your profile. 
  • Use competitor gap reports. Every tool in this guide offers some version of a competitor link intersect. That report alone justifies the subscription for most users. 

If picking and running a backlink strategy still feels like a lot, my team handles this work for businesses every day. NP Digital builds custom link strategies, and I offer SEO consulting for businesses that want a more hands-on approach. 

FAQs

What is a backlink profile?

A backlink profile is the full picture of external links pointing to your site, including referring domains, anchor text, dofollow or nofollow attributes, linking-site authority, and link velocity. A healthy profile draws from varied, authoritative sources. Backlink tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Moz can help you pull yours in seconds. 

What is a backlink analysis tool?

Backlink analysis tools help website owners analyze their website’s backlink profile. It provides information on the links pointing to their website from external sources, including the number, quality, and relevance of the links. You can use this information to identify areas for improvement in the website’s link-building strategy and improve its search engine rankings. 

How to check backlinks of a website?

Open Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, or Semrush and run the report for your target site’s root domain. You’ll see total backlinks, referring domains, anchor distribution, top-linked pages, and a domain authority score. Focus on referring domains rather than raw link count, and watch for unnatural anchor patterns to weed out bad links. You should also study top-linked pages for you and your competitors to see which content is working for specific keywords in your industry.  

How to check competitor backlinks?

Run three to five competitor domains through a tool with a link gap or link intersect report (most, if not all, of the tools in our list offer one). The report surfaces sites linking to your competitors but not to you. Sort by domain authority, then prioritize relevant high-authority targets for outreach.  

Why use a backlink monitor tool?

Manual tracking can’t keep up. The average site gains and loses dozens of links each month, and Search Console won’t catch a toxic link spike or a competitor pulling ahead. A monitoring tool automatically runs alerts for new links, lost-link notifications, toxic scoring, and trend data.  

Conclusion

Your link profile is one of the strongest signals Google uses to rank your site, making picking the right backlink tool an important decision for your business. 

The 14 options above cover virtually every budget and use case, so the right one for you is the one that fits the work you actually do and teaches you how to build backlinks correctly. Pick the tool that matches your goals, then commit to using it regularly. 

A tool you check once is wasted money. A tool you check weekly drives real results. 

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