Generic SEO advice is a prescription written for nobody in particular. Would you trust a doctor who gave every patient the same medication without looking at them first?

If you coached a basketball team and your only game plan was "score more points," you'd get fired pretty quick. But that's basically what most SEO advice is. Get more backlinks. Write more content. Use your keywords. Hit a word count. Great. Thanks. Very helpful. A real coach watches film. They study the opponent. They figure out what the other team does well and where they're weak. Then they build a game plan specifically for that matchup. SEO works the same way. Nobody treats it that way. They just repeat the same checklist on every site. Here's the part nobody says out loud. You're not competing against Google. You're competing against whoever is currently ranking above you for your keyword. Those are your opponents. Their site is the film you need to watch. And every set of opponents is different. The businesses ranking for "dentist Houston" aren't the same as the ones ranking for "dentist Boise." Different strengths. Different weaknesses. Different backlink profiles. Different content depth. Same keyword on paper. Two completely different matchups. One generic game plan can't win both. When you read that you need a certain number of backlinks. Or a certain keyword density. Or a certain word count. Ask yourself: according to who? Some guru who rank-tracked one site in one niche four years ago? The only opinion that matters is the data sitting on page one of Google for your keyword. Right now. Those top 10 results are the answer key. They're showing you exactly what Google considers good enough to rank in that specific environment, for that specific keyword, today. No checklist beats that. Study the opponent. Not the textbook.

Such a great song

Man, just recorded an hour long video. Something that I've been coming to learn, appreciate, and get a deeper understanding of is when you look at these big content creators. I think a great, perfect example, especially for me, is Alex Hermosi. You watch, or for me I consume his content. The things that you don't really notice. I think a proxy of understanding this is when someone asks you a question; it can quite reveal a lot about them. When you go to consume Alex's content, not having to talk on camera for an hour straight, you don't really know how to ask that question or deeply appreciate the thing or the skills that he has in order to talk on camera for an hour straight. You can't appreciate how the way he talks is so detailed and poignant. Just talking, talking for an hour straight, especially for me, is definitely something I must get better at and I will. It also just for me shows the deep level of skills and it also makes me appreciate more one, like developing my skills in this content creation and also seeing and consuming other people's content and realizing, 'Oh man, there's a lot that actually went into this.'

When someone says you need a certain keyword density or a certain number of backlinks, ask: according to who? The only opinion that matters is the data on page one for your keyword.

There are over 130 different HTML tags. The plumbers ranking above you are using about 5 of them. I pulled the top pages for a plumber keyword and read their on-page structure. Every one of them left easy wins on the table. I ran the top plumber pages through the Ahrefs content tool and View Page Source. Same story on every page. The keyword was in the title tag, the meta description, the H1, the H2, and the H3. That is where most plumbers stop. Here is the part nobody checks. Not a single plumber page put the keyword in an H5. Not one used an H6 either. Having an H5 is a ranking factor. Having an H6 is a ranking factor. Put the keyword in each and that is four factors they handed you. Next I counted the actual tags across all five plumber pages. Heading tags showed up about 20 times per page. Paragraph tags landed around 9. Alt text around 4. List tags barely showed at all. Those numbers are the bar you have to clear. You do not need a fancy tool to do this. Search your plumber keyword. Open a top result. Right click and hit View Page Source. Then Control F and type the tag you want to count. Headings, paragraphs, alt text, lists. Count them all. So the play for a plumber page is simple. Match their averages on paragraphs, headings, alt text, and lists. Then add the keyword to the H5 and H6 they skipped. Same effort, more structural coverage than the page above you. One honest note before you run with this. HTML tags are a few factors out of a couple hundred thousand. This alone will not put your plumbing page at the top. But the gap between what ranks and what is possible is wider than anyone admits.

You're not competing against Google. You're competing against whoever is currently ranking above you for your keyword. Those are your opponents, and every set is different.

You don't have to beat your competitors. You have to do what they're doing 5% better. That's the whole game in local SEO.

Interesting to me, that I have a post that's performing better than all my other posts. But to me, it's not that good of a post... For me this solidifies or gives me more evidence of how Alex Hormozi and Gary Vaynerchuk speak about how the quality is subjective. (More of an Gary idea) Also the different mediums in which you communicate or the different platforms, like video, text-based, or how it's constructed, will all hit people differently. Ultimately the people that consume your content will be the gauges of the quality of it. Also, gives me more confidence to just continue posting, even if I don't think it would meet my standard of "good" "quality" content. To someone else it may, and they might get a lot out of it. More than if I didn't post it

Stop debating whether schema is a ranking factor. Search your keyword and check who's ranking. I checked 21 top sites across three searches and 20 had schema.

You update your plumbing site's main service page. New copy, new offer, the works. Then you wait. A week later Google still hasn't noticed. That isn't Google being slow. That's your internal linking. Here's how Google actually finds your pages. It crawls your homepage, grabs every link, and drops them in a queue. Then it crawls those pages, finds the next set of links, and queues those too. Layer by layer. Each hop can take days. Say your water heater repair page sits five clicks deep. Google might not reach it for over a week. A page with zero links pointing to it is an orphan. Google may never crawl it at all. So you optimize it, sit back, and nothing moves. The fix isn't complicated. No developer or fancy plugin needed. Every page on your plumbing site should be reachable in three clicks. The way you get there is hubs. A hub is one simple page that lists and links to a whole group of related pages. Build three hubs for a plumber. A service hub linking to every service page: drain cleaning, water heaters, repiping. A location hub linking to every city you serve. A blog hub linking to every post. Now Google finds them all in one pass instead of waiting days between hops. Don't overthink how the hub page looks. Google doesn't care if it's pretty. It just needs to find the links. A clean list of every service, city, and post does the job. The crawler wants connections, not a design award. Here's the part most people miss. Internal links aren't just for crawling. They're a ranking factor. When your service pages and blog posts all link to the one city page you want to win, you tell Google that page matters. The anchor text you use is a signal too. So here's the whole thing in three lines. Three clicks to every page. Hubs to flatten the structure. Anchor text aimed at the page you actually want to rank. That isn't extra work. That's just doing it right the first time.

You have to out-earn what you see around you. Rent/housing, groceries, healthcare, etc. If you're just getting started...stop complaining that things are hard, and start finding paths forward. Yes they are hard, and they will always be hard. What are you going to do...give up? You do not yet know, how hard poverty will be...and that it will touch everything in your life & your family's life. Be bitter if you want, that's fine. Carry anger and direct that energy to finding a way forward and being resolute about it. Never give up. Keep pushing. Life is not easy for many people, and coming from 0 is hard stuff. But if you need a wake up call, let this be yours... Start today, and do *something* Do not give in, and do not give up. Not everyone needs a Ferrari, but you should have security and no one will give that to you, but you. You may have health issues, a terrible job, barely making ends meet, or waiting for luck...but there is rarely luck you do not create. You are on your own. Time to make a strategy, and act now.

What's the over under bet on Anthropic requiring ID verification via driver's license ID and other face photos to allow access to Fable 5 and Mythos for only US citizens

You can audit your own website in about 10 minutes. No tools, no agency, no jargon. I do this on client sites before I touch anything. It's just a checklist. Run it top to bottom. Here's the whole thing. Start with the page itself. Is it thin and hard to read? Light text on a busy background is a problem. Put a solid block behind it. Then describe what you actually do, in plain words, and reference your service area. Google reads that and gets more confident you serve that area. Right click your page, view source, then Ctrl F for "canon". No canonical tag? That's a flag. It tells bots which URL is the real one. Now check your links. Mixed www, http, and trailing slashes all point to the same page. Without a canonical, Google can see several duplicate versions of you. Every page needs three things: a title tag, a meta description, and one H1. Your H1 should be your main service or keyword, the words people actually type. Don't know where to put them? Your builder hides these, so go find the setting. Stuck on wording? An AI can draft solid ones in seconds. Two files to check. First, robots.txt. An empty one is totally fine. Second, your sitemap. Go to yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and see if anything loads. A sitemap is just a list of every URL on your site, one line per page. It's how Google finds all your pages instead of guessing. Last on the page: your images. Each one needs alt text. Alt text describes the image in words, and you should work your keywords into it. That helps Google understand what the photo is and how it ties to the page. And put your best photos right on the homepage. That's the whole audit. Content, canonical, title and H1, robots and sitemap, images. None of this is exotic. There's no secret tool and no magic setting. It's a checklist, and now you have it. Most sites miss at least three of these. So open your own site and run it today.

Google doesn't return to a page because it's an author page. It returns because the page updates frequently. Build pages that refresh with new URLs and you train Google to come back often.

I looked at the top-ranking articles and only three or four lacked an author card. If you're ranking blog or informational content, put an author card on every page.

Most plumbers think the way to win Google is to find the one strongest ranking factor and pour everything into it. That's exactly how you set yourself up to lose it all. The factor winning today is the one Google can quietly turn down tomorrow. I pulled Search Console data on a plumbing site that went too heavy in one factor. First it climbed. Then it dropped off a cliff. It clawed its way back, got a little higher, then lost everything again. When that one factor lost its power, the site lost its rankings with it. Here's the part nobody warns you about. It's a double edged sword. You don't even need your factor to get weaker. If a different factor you ignored suddenly gets a boost, the same thing happens. The plumbers who covered that base start beating you out. Enough of your competitors pick it up and you slide down the page. Page two. Page three. Page four. Anything past page one of a "plumber near me" search basically doesn't exist. Nobody calls the plumber on page three. And it gets worse. Factors don't just shift inside your plumbing market. They shift across all of search at the same time. One day pages with a certain factor get a boost everywhere. The whole board can move under you at once. So how do you survive that? You diversify. You spread your strength across the right factors instead of betting it all on one. Watch what's ranking right now to see what's coming into play. Some factors die, then get revived years later as the new hot thing. There's over a hundred thousand ranking factors now. The plumber who is most diversified in the right areas ranks higher and stays there longer. Everyone chasing the one magic factor is just waiting for the algorithm to take it away. Don't build on one leg.

This has been super fun to test. I almost feel bad for anybody looking at prehistoric plankton or these other super low search volume niche words. I've just been testing parasite SEO with, social profiles. Now when you go to search these terms, I'm like the first five pages of just all my social content. It's hilarious.

When your Search Console traffic drops to zero after a big site change, don't panic and don't touch anything. Google is putting you through a re-trust process. Give it two to three weeks.

Past 7 months I've been using residential proxies to get data off of GMB's previous opus said that were required, so that I could get the data I was looking for Fable was like... Nah bro, here's the fix for you. Save the residential proxy money.