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SEO Is Not That Hard
Are you eager to boost your website's performance on search engines like Google but unsure where to start or what truly makes a difference in SEO?
Then "SEO Is Not That Hard" hosted by Edd Dawson, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in building and successfully ranking websites, is for you.
Edd shares actionable tips, proven strategies, and valuable insights to help you improve your Google rankings and create better websites for your users.
Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned SEO professional, this podcast offers something for everyone. Join us as we simplify SEO and give you the knowledge and skills to achieve your online goals with confidence.
Brought to you by keywordspeopleuse.com
Episodes
364 episodes
Why I built Salience.com
For eleven months I stopped podcasting and built a company with my co-founders. This episode is the full story of Salience: what it is, why server logs matter more than ever, and how three people built an enterprise product using a team of AI a...
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The biggest year in SEO I've ever known
This has been the biggest year of change in search I've known in over twenty years of doing this. In one episode, here's what actually happened while the podcast was on hiatus, and what still works.I start with the shift that hit every ...
The pause experiment: 11 months later
On the 1st of December last year I paused this podcast for a month, as an experiment. The month lasted eleven. This episode is a hello, an apology and the results, all at once.First, the experiment. What actually happens to a 361-episod...
Update and December Plans
Ever wondered why people in Glasgow ask different questions than people in London about the same service? We pull back the curtain on a major update: city-level People Also Ask targeting that lets you research real local queries and build conte...
Link Building SEO Megapod!
Links still move the needle, but the way we earn them has changed. We pull together the best of our link building series and lay out a clear, low-risk path to stronger rankings and lasting authority. No gimmicks, no cloak-and-dagger—just assets...
Link Building ep 10 : Promoting your content to get links
Want links without cold emails or sketchy deals? We dive into a practical system for earning citations by putting useful work in front of the right people, then letting trust and timing do the heavy lifting. Ed Dawson, founder of Keywords Peopl...
Link Building ep 9 : Link Building with Ego Bait
Want links people actually want to share? We unpack ego bait link building and show how to turn recognition into rankings, authority, and AI-era citations. Instead of waiting for links, we create reasons for people and brands to amplify our wor...
Link Building ep 8 : Building versus Buying Backlinks
If your backlink comes with a receipt, it’s probably a liability. We break down the crucial difference between buying placements and earning genuine editorial links, tracing the story from PageRank to Penguin to today’s AI-driven search where c...
Link Building ep 7 : Engineering as Marketing
What if one small, free tool could earn you more backlinks, leads, and trust than months of blogging? We dive into engineering as marketing, a strategy that turns lightweight, useful tools into link magnets and lead engines, especially powerful...
Link Building ep 6 : Link Building Using Awards
Want more high‑quality links without playing whack‑a‑mole with paid placements or low‑value directories? We walk through a strategy that flips the usual script: stop entering awards and start running them. By becoming the awarding body in your ...
Link Building ep 5 : When Guest Posting Goes Wrong
Guest posting sounds harmless: write for a reputable site, add a link, meet a new audience. But when that link is part of the deal—and it passes PageRank—you could be stepping straight into “unnatural links” territory. We break down a real manu...
Link Building ep 4 : Linkbuilding with Digital PR
Want links that don’t vanish with the next algorithm update? We dive into digital PR and show how to earn authoritative coverage that boosts rankings, brand searches, and even AI search citations. Instead of paying for links, we focus on creati...
Link Building ep 3 : Content That People Link To: Tools
Want links that arrive without endless cold emails or paid placements? We make the case for building interactive tools that solve real problems, create a defensible moat, and keep earning citations for years. From consumer broadband to B2B keyw...
Link Building ep 2 : Understanding Blackhat - PBN's
Ever wondered why PBNs still tempt smart SEOs? We pull back the curtain on private blog networks—how they’re built on expired domains, why they deliver short bursts of rankings, and where the true costs and risks hide. From anchor text control ...
Link Building ep 1 : Backlinks - the Good, the Bad & the Ugly
Want search visibility that survives the next update and shows up in AI answers? We dive straight into the real calculus of link building: what still works, what crumbles under scrutiny, and how to build a backlink profile that compounds rather...
The Complete Entity Series Megapod
What if your site could be read like a map of meaning instead of a pile of keywords? Edd walks through a complete reframe of SEO around entities — the people, organisations, products, places, and ideas that define your niche — and shows how to ...
Entities Part 12 : Beyond Your Website: Building Off-Page Authority
Authority doesn’t live on your site alone—it’s earned in public, where other trusted names choose to cite, invite, and stand beside you. We wrap our entities series by moving beyond links-as-votes and into the richer world of entity association...
Entities Part 11 : Future-Proofing for Answer Engines
Search is quietly rewiring how people find answers, and the biggest shift isn’t on the results page—it’s inside the models that compose those answers. We dig into a practical playbook for turning your content into the source that ChatGPT, Gemin...
Entities Part 10 : Speaking Machine - Your Practical Guide to Schema Markup
Tool mentioned in the podcast: https://validator.schema.org/Machines don’t reward guesses; they reward clarity. We walk through a practical,...
Entities Part 9 : Content That Builds Authority
Ready to stop sprinkling keywords and start building authority that lasts? We take one neglected concept in your niche and turn it into a structured topic cluster that both readers and search engines recognise as a trusted resource. From mappin...
Entities Part 8: Your Competitors Entities
The prompt mentioned in the episode is:You are an expert SEO analyst specializing in Natural Language Processing and entity-based optimization. I will provide you with the text from a competitor's webpage. Your task is to pe...
Entities Part 7 : The Audit - Identifying Your Core Entities
Search engines understand the world through entities, not just keywords, and that changes how we plan, write, and structure content. We take the entity conversation out of theory and into practice by building a simple, durable audit you can com...
Entities Part 6 : Fighting AI Fiction: Grounding Your Brand in Reality
Tired of confident AI answers that crumble under scrutiny? We pull back the curtain on why large language models hallucinate—and how to stop the damage by turning your website into a source AIs can safely cite. Instead of treating models like f...
Entities Part 5: How ChatGPT Really Thinks About Your Brand
Forget neat rows of facts—your brand lives inside AI as a point on a vast map of meaning. We unpack how large language models like ChatGPT convert words into vectors, arrange them in a multi‑dimensional latent space, and “reason” by navigating ...
Entities Part 4 : Beyond 10 Blue Links
The search results page is no longer a tidy list of links—it’s a dynamic canvas where knowledge panels, rich snippets, featured snippets, and AI Overviews signal who Google trusts. We dig into how entities underpin every one of these features a...