Show notes
E1136: Charles Floate has been doing SEO for years, across everything from brand-new sites to companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on backlinks. In this episode, Charles lays out how he approaches SEO from A to Z: starting a site, building authority, finding keywords, structuring pages, getting links, becoming a topical authority, scaling what works, and changing the strategy as a site gets bigger. We get into: - Charles' "zero to 100" strategy for launching a brand-new site - How he uses entity stacking, citations, directories, social profiles, and reference sites to establish a new brand - How many backlinks he would build to a 10-page site vs. a 1,000-page site - Why backlink velocity has to match the size of the site - What actually makes a backlink valuable - Why a backlink that never gets indexed may provide no value - Why Charles doesn't force-index every backlink - How to find your real SEO competitors instead of just your business competitors - How to reverse engineer competitors' backlink profiles - Why Charles looks for referring domains shared across multiple ranking competitors - How smaller companies can beat larger competitors by doing better link due diligence - Why he usually targets long-tail, higher-intent keywords before the biggest keyword in a niche - How he knows when a site has reached topical authority - How topical authority changes the economics of publishing new pages - How Charles thinks about page-level relevance - The weight-loss site that lost most of its revenue after expanding into gardening and composting content - How to expand into adjacent topics without destroying your existing topical focus - How Charles would structure categories, URLs, navigation, and core site pages - His process for building topical maps - How he uses ranking competitors to expand one keyword set into hundreds of related queries - How SEO changes between a new site, a growing site, and an enterprise site - Why enterprise SEO is often easier to rank but harder to execute - When keyword cannibalization becomes a serious problem - How Charles approaches "crawled, currently not indexed" pages - Why refreshing existing content can outperform constantly publishing new content - How optimizing for traditional Google results differs from optimizing for ChatGPT, Claude, and AI Overviews - Semantic triples and how machines understand relationships between entities - Brand mentions, citations, consensus, and AI visibility - Charles' experiment getting an AI Overview to recognize his SEO awards site - Parasite SEO and satellite microsites for taking more positions in long-tail SERPs - What Charles considers the most important ranking factor in traditional Google search - How user engagement signals matter after you start ranking - How hidden keyword stuffing in schema and source code can over-optimize a page - What SEO tactics Charles thinks Google is likely to go after next This is Charles Floate's SEO process from a site with zero authority and zero rankings all the way through large-scale and enterprise SEO. ⭐️ Charles Floate on 𝕏 - https://x.com/Charles_SEO ⭐️ Charles Floate on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesfloate/ ⭐️ Charles Floate on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@CharlesFloate ⭐️ Charles Floate on Facebook - https://facebook.com/thecharlesfloate ⭐️ Charles Floate's community - https://seo.stream 💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 00:00 SEO Playbook Kickoff 00:40 Meet Charles Floate 01:24 Authority And Links 02:44 Zero To 100 Launch 06:56 Social Profiles Activity 07:48 What Makes A Good Link 10:27 Backlink Indexing Reality 12:24 Reverse Engineer Competitors 18:55 Buying Links And Due Diligence 23:21 Competitor Link Overlap 26:38 Relevance And Topical Focus 31:46 AI SEO And Semantics 35:43 Generic vs Topical Authority 36:43 HubSpot Traffic Drop 38:49 Refresh Content Strategy 40:55 Pivoting Beyond Weight Loss 45:00 Building Topic Bridges 47:50 Site Structure Basics 51:19 Keyword Research Framework 55:52 Topical Maps Explained 57:00 Enterprise vs Small SEO 01:01:10 Indexing Issues Fixes 01:03:55 Content Overlap ROI 01:07:44 CRO Beyond Rankings 01:09:32 Sell Outcomes Not SEO 01:10:43 Auditing Traffic Drops 01:13:42 Common Decline Causes 01:16:20 Quality Score Explained 01:19:16 AI SEO Opportunity 01:22:49 Training Data Tactics 01:25:39 Gaming AI Overviews 01:29:42 Parasite SEO Plays 01:30:48 Ranking Factors Today 01:33:49 Future Updates Focus 01:35:46 Information Gain Framework 01:37:40 Episode Wrap Up The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ #searchengineoptimization #seo #linkbuilding #seopodcast