Working from home this morning.

*Knock on the door*

I see a man outside on the sidewalk, dressed in a stained and faded Carhartt staring at our front yard tree.

He's standing near an older pickup truck, early-00's model with lawn equipment in the bed, no trailer. Normally, I let the barking dogs chase away the interlopers, but something compelled me to shush them and open the door.

"Want to trim that tree, I will give you a good price!"

He shouted at me from down the sloping front steps standing at the bottom of our walkway.

ChatGPT's popularity has waned considerably since February 9th.

Shown here in both a 7-day and 90-day chart from Google Trends. Bing's took a small jump before dropping back to normal [1].

In fact, Bing was more popular back in 2013 [2].

It's that time of year where I get bombarded with calls by SMBs who are stuck in a really awful position and are realizing they got trapped into a bad SEO arrangement by a web design agency.

Here's a 🧵of warning signs that you are in the same boat.

All based on real calls. 1. Your site was built a few years ago and still has a Google+ icon, you are told this helps SEO.

Bonus points if that icon links to the Google.co.in domain, a surefire sign that your agency is outsourcing work to a Fiverr worker in India.

Ranking Story:

A thread about how we climbed to rank number one in Google on a valuable keyword.

Vitals:
- Volume: 35,000 / month
- Competition: Fierce
- Initial ranking: No. 73
- Number of days to Number 1 ranking: 422 Our work started on July 1st, 2020. We started by assessing the top 5 ranking pages in Google. We reviewed their:
- Title tags
- Text Content
- Page Elements
- UX
- Inbound Links
- Inbound Anchor Text
- Internal Links
- Structured Data
- Page Structure
- CTAs
- Page Speed

I've been accepted into Forbes Agency Council and thought I'd share some in-depth information about it from my hour long call for any colleagues out there curious.

THREAD

(I haven't joined and not sure I will, but I have been accepted to join). The Agency Council is a fee-based membership. I was told the fess or dues increase yearly as new perks get added. Whatever fee rate you signup at is locked in for as long as you are dues paying member.

Current dues:
1 year - $2,200
2 years - $3,700

Really loving this talk from @1918 about his wife starting up a cabinet painting business and doing the local marketing and SEO for her. #RaleighSEO Published content on their WordPress site showing before and after photos of their work. Each post had the paint color name and neighborhood + city where the work was being done.

This might come as a shock to no-one, but I'm not a perfect SEO and in early 2015 as I was starting my own agency one of my first 3 clients fired me when their traffic tanked suddenly and I couldn't fix it.

THREAD I spent months diagnosing the sudden drop, reviewing competitors, and putting my ear to the SEO ground to listen for any whispers of what happened.