Intermediate SEO: keyword research, content, on-page, links, local and measuring

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0:00 Why Google picks someone else0:25 What you'll learn0:42 Who it's for (11 chapters, ~2 hours)0:56 Before you start, and how to read it

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Starts with · 0:00Why Google picks someone else

Intermediate SEO (2026): Why Google Picks Someone Else, and What to Change

All 4 chapters

1. 0:00Why Google picks someone else
2. 0:25What you'll learn
3. 0:42Who it's for (11 chapters, ~2 hours)
4. 0:56Before you start, and how to read it

YouTube

This is guide 2 of 5 in our SEO learning path. It picks up where "SEO for beginners" stopped: your site is set up, Search Console works, and you've fixed your first pages. Now the question changes from "can Google find me?" to "why does Google pick someone else?"

It's written for small business owners who want to do more than the basics, for in-house marketers, and for junior SEOs and freelancers. There are eleven chapters, about two hours in all. Read one chapter at a time, with your own site open in another tab, and do its how-to before moving on.

Everything here comes with its source, and the stories are from our own work: a women's wear store, a perfume brand, a sports platform, and the students I taught. Where a number comes from a vendor study or a small sample, the text says so.

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0:00 Four topics, one skipped0:14 Why score keywords0:34 Your Search Console queries1:07 Your customers' words1:24 Autocomplete and People also ask2:06 Keyword Planner ranges2:45 Don't trust chatbot numbers3:02 Check 1: intent3:29 Check 2: traffic potential3:55 Check 3: difficulty4:21 Check 4: business potential4:50 Your keyword sheet

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Keyword Research for SEO, Free: Search Console, Keyword Planner and 4 Checks

All 12 chapters

1. 0:00Four topics, one skipped
2. 0:14Why score keywords
3. 0:34Your Search Console queries
4. 1:07Your customers' words
5. 1:24Autocomplete and People also ask
6. 2:06Keyword Planner ranges
7. 2:45Don't trust chatbot numbers
8. 3:02Check 1: intent
9. 3:29Check 2: traffic potential
10. 3:55Check 3: difficulty
11. 4:21Check 4: business potential
12. 4:50Your keyword sheet

YouTube

Guide 1 showed you how to find your first 20 keywords. This chapter is about choosing between them. Most sites don't fail for lack of keywords. They fail because they wrote pages nobody searches for, or pages that could never beat what already ranks. Ahrefs looked at about 14 billion pages in its own index in 2023 and found that 96.55% of them got no traffic from Google at all. One of the main reasons it gave: nobody was searching for the topic.^[1]

Start from what you already own

Seeds come before tools. A seed is a starting phrase you feed into the tools, and the best ones are already in three places you own.

Search Console. Open Performance, then the Queries tab, and set the date range to the last 3 months. Filter to non-branded queries so your business name doesn't crowd the list. That filter has been open to all eligible sites since 11 March 2026, which means whole-site properties with enough impressions; small sites may not see it yet.^[3] Now sort by impressions. The queries with many impressions and few clicks are searches Google already connects with you. You're on the edge of them. They are usually the cheapest wins on the whole list.

Your customers' own words. Look at enquiry calls, WhatsApp chats and emails from the last few months. A coaching centre in Kanpur might call its course "medical entrance preparation". Parents type "neet coaching fees kanpur". Write down the exact phrases people use, spelling mistakes included.

Competitors' pages. Open the sites of three businesses that win the customers you want. Their menus, service pages and blog titles are topics they think are worth ranking for. You'll check later whether they're right.

Tim Soulo put the order bluntly: "you shouldn't start your content ideas from what you want to write about."^[2] He says his first year of good content at Ahrefs got little traffic because it ignored search demand. The growth in the stat card above came after the switch.

Read search intent from the results

Guide 1 covered the four types of intent: informational (learn), commercial (compare), transactional (do it now) and navigational (go to a known site). At this level you need more than the label. Google has already decided what kind of page answers a search, and the top 10 shows you its decision.

Ahrefs reads that decision as three things, often called the 3 Cs.^[4] Search the keyword on google.co.in in an incognito window and note each one:

• Content type: are the results blog posts, service pages, product or category pages, directory listings, videos or a map pack?
• Format: are they lists ("10 best..."), how-to steps, comparisons, a single page with prices?
• Angle: what do the titles promise? Fees, "near me", "for beginners", "2026", "without surgery"?

Try it with "neet coaching kanpur". If most results are institute pages and directory lists with fees, a blog post called "How to prepare for NEET" won't rank there, however good it is. It answers a different question. The page you need is a course page with fees, batch timings and past results.

Search volume is an estimate, not a count

Every volume you see is a model of the real number. Treat them as sizes (tiny, small, medium, big), not as facts.

• Keyword Planner is free, but you need a Google Ads account with billing details entered, and keywords with very low search volumes can't be found or forecast at all.^[5] Since 2016, accounts that spend little or nothing have often seen ranges like "1K–10K" instead of exact numbers. Google has never published the spend threshold.^[6]
• Google Trends shows interest on a scale of 0 to 100, relative to all searches in the place and time you choose. Very low-volume terms show as 0. It isn't a count of searches.^[7]
• Paid tools build their own estimates, so the same keyword can show quite different numbers in each.

For a local business, "no volume" in a tool doesn't mean no searches. "Root canal cost in Kidwai Nagar" may show nothing anywhere, and still bring two patients a month. If the phrase came from a real customer, it's worth a section on the right page even when the tools say zero.

Traffic potential beats search volume

A page that ranks well doesn't rank for one keyword. It ranks for dozens or hundreds of close variants: "dental implant cost", "implant price kanpur", "how much is one tooth implant" and so on. Judging a topic by one keyword's volume undersells it, and sometimes oversells it.

Ahrefs' framework judges a topic by its traffic potential: the estimated search traffic of the page that ranks first, across all the keywords it ranks for.^[4] Paid tools show this directly. Without one, you can still see the idea in your own data. In Search Console, open Performance, switch to the Pages tab, click one of your better pages, then go back to Queries. You'll usually find that one page is getting impressions for far more searches than the single keyword you wrote it for.

Difficulty: can you actually beat these pages?

Difficulty is how hard it would be to get into the top results. Ahrefs calls it ranking potential. It looks at the backlinks you'd need (what its Keyword Difficulty score estimates) and the authority of the ranking sites. Then it asks whether you can match the intent and beat the quality.^[4]

Two rules. First, compare difficulty only inside one tool. Each tool calculates its own score from its own data, so a 30 in one and a 30 in another don't mean the same thing. Second, look at the actual results before you trust the score. Ask:

• Who ranks? National brands, government sites and big directories are hard to move. Small local sites and old forum threads are not.
• Do the top pages have many sites linking to them? A paid tool shows this; the free MozBar extension shows Moz's Domain Authority at a glance (a Moz metric, not a Google one).
• Are the top pages actually good? Thin pages, old prices and no local detail mean you can beat them.
• Can you add what they can't? Your own photos, real prices, answers to the questions customers ask on calls.

Business potential: score every topic 0 to 3

This is the check most people skip, and the one that decides whether SEO turns into leads. Ahrefs scores every topic from 0 to 3 for how easily it can present its own product while covering the topic, and advises putting topics that score 2 or 3 first: 77% of its own blog posts score 2 or 3.^[9] The score is relative to your business: a topic that's a 3 for you might be a 1 for someone else.

Here's how we'd score topics for a dental clinic in Kanpur. Our reading of the scale: 3, the page can't be written without your service; 2, your service clearly helps; 1, you can only mention it in passing; 0, there's no honest way to bring it up.

The first two get pages. The third might become a short section on an emergency care page. The fourth we'd skip, even if it has the biggest volume of the four. Traffic that can't become a patient isn't worth the writing time.

Long-tail and question keywords

Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific searches. Each one is searched less, but the person searching knows what they want, and fewer strong pages compete for it. For a small or new site, this is where rankings start.

Three free places to find long-tail and question keywords:

• Google autocomplete. Type your seed and add each letter of the alphabet after it ("dental implant a", "dental implant b"...). Also try question words in front: how, why, which, what. Our free Keyword Suggestion Tool does the alphabet and the question words for you, grouped and downloadable.
• People also ask. Click a question and Google adds more below it. Three or four clicks give you a good list. Our free Question Finder lists the questions from autocomplete, grouped by question word and intent, and merges the ones you copy from the box.
• AnswerThePublic. Shows questions, comparisons and "near" phrases around a seed. A free account gives 3 searches a day. Paid plans start at $10 a month, or $5 a month billed yearly under a limited-time offer (prices shown in India on 16 October 2026; they vary by country).^[10]

Competitor keyword gap

A keyword gap is the list of searches your competitors rank for and you don't. Semrush's Keyword Gap and Ahrefs' Content Gap both compare several domains and list them for you; that's one of the main reasons to pay for a suite.

Without a paid tool, do it by hand. Open each competitor's sitemap (usually /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml), list their service pages and blog topics, and mark the ones you don't cover. Run each through the four checks, because competitors make bad choices too. For a perfume brand we work with, the first blog posts came from exactly this kind of list: the topics its competitors were already ranking for.

Seasonality and where in India people search

Google Trends is the tool for timing. Set the region to India and the period to the past 5 years. You'll see whether a search peaks every year: gift hampers before Diwali, banquet halls in wedding season, coaching before exam dates. Publish or update the page a month or two before the rise, so it has time to be crawled.

Trends also breaks interest down by state. Compare two phrasings, such as "chartered accountant" and "CA", and you'll see which one each state prefers. Chapter 3 goes further into how India searches.

Prompt research for AI assistants, briefly

Backlinko's 2026 SEO tutorial^[11] and Semrush's SEO basics guide^[12] now both include "prompt research": finding the questions people ask ChatGPT, Gemini and other assistants about your topic. Prompts tend to be longer and more conversational than searches.

The practical step is one you've already taken: collect the full questions customers ask on calls and WhatsApp, and answer them clearly on your pages. Google's own position is that optimising for its AI features "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."^[13] Guide 5 (chapter 8) covers prompt tracking properly.

Which tool when

Everything in this chapter can be done for free. Paid tools save time and add difficulty, traffic potential and gaps at scale.

If you do decide to pay, these were the entry prices on 16 October 2026, before tax. They change often, so check on the day. We get nothing for recommending any of them.

Your keyword sheet

Put everything in one sheet. Guide 1's sheet had four columns; at this level it needs nine. One row per keyword:

1. Keyword
2. Intent (informational, commercial, transactional, navigational)
3. What ranks (content type and format, from the results)
4. Volume range (from Keyword Planner or your paid tool)
5. Traffic potential (of the top page, if your tool shows it)
6. Difficulty (one tool only, and say which)
7. Business potential (0 to 3)
8. Target URL (an existing page, or "new")
9. Notes (seasonal peak, a customer's exact wording, the competitor who ranks)

Once a keyword has a page, our Word Counter & Keyword Density Checker shows whether your customers' words appear on it at all. Don't chase a density number; there isn't one.

If you'd rather have us build the keyword plan with you, that's part of our search engine optimization service. Otherwise, take your sheet to chapter 2: by the end of it, every keyword will have exactly one page.

Chapter 1 left you with a sheet of keywords. Now each one needs a home. Get this wrong in one direction and you end up with 40 thin pages fighting each other. Get it wrong in the other and one page tries to answer six different questions, and answers none of them well.

Why one page can rank for hundreds of keywords

Google doesn't match pages to keywords word for word. It works out what a search means and ranks pages that answer that need. So "dental implant cost kanpur", "implant price per tooth" and "how much does a tooth implant cost" are, for Google, close to one question. A good page on implant costs can rank for all of them. That's why chapter 1 judged topics by the traffic potential of the top page, not one keyword's volume.

The practical question is always the same: does this keyword need its own page, or is it a section of a page you already have? You don't have to guess. The results tell you.

Group keywords by what Google already shows

The free method is called SERP overlap. Search two keywords on google.co.in in an incognito window and compare the top 10 results. If many of the same URLs rank for both, Google treats them as one topic, and one page should target both. If the lists are mostly different, Google sees two different needs, and you need two pages.

A rule of thumb we use (tools set the line at 3 or 4): 4 or more shared URLs in the top 10 means one page; 0 to 2 means separate pages; 3 means look at intent and format before you decide. It's a starting point, not a law, and the signals in this table help with the close calls.

Doing this by hand for 300 keywords takes days. Paid suites group keywords for you: Semrush's Keyword Strategy Builder^[18] and the "Clusters by Parent Topic" tab in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer^[19] both cluster keyword lists, though the feature names keep changing. Search Console now groups similar queries too, in the "Queries leading to your site" card of its Insights report (since October 2025), though only for sites with a large volume of queries.^[20] For a small list, a spreadsheet and the method below are enough.

Build a topical map

Groups tell you which pages to make. A topical map tells you which pages you're missing. It's a list of every subtopic and question a topic covers, arranged so you can see how they connect.

Koray Tuğberk Gübür, an SEO consultant known for his work on topical authority, plans sites this way. He maps out every connected subtopic and question, matches headings to real queries and what ranks for them, and links the pages to each other by context, so that each link sits in a sentence about the page it points to. Then he publishes steadily, and he increased his publishing rate as the project went on.^[21]

For a small business, the topical map doesn't need to be huge. A Kanpur dental clinic might have 6 main services. Under each, list the questions patients ask before they book: cost, pain, recovery, alternatives, how long it lasts, who shouldn't have it. That's a topical map of 30 to 40 pages, and many clinic websites cover only a handful of them.

Hub and spoke: how the pages link

Each group of pages becomes a cluster. The hub is the broad page; the spokes are the pages on subtopics. For the clinic:

• Hub: dental implants in Kanpur (what they are, who they suit, prices in brief, book a consultation)
• Spokes: dental implant cost, the implant procedure step by step, recovery after an implant, implants vs bridges vs dentures

The hub links to every spoke. Every spoke links back to the hub, and to other spokes where a reader would actually want to go next: the recovery page naturally links to the cost page, less naturally to the dentures comparison. Mike King of iPullRank gives the same advice for AI search, where answers are built from passages on many related pages: build clusters of linked, related pages.^[22] Chapter 8 covers anchor text and how many links to add.

The keyword-to-URL map

Once the groups are done, add one more column to your sheet, or keep a separate tab: the URL, its one primary keyword, its intent, and its secondary keywords. One primary keyword and one intent per URL. If you ever find yourself writing the same primary keyword against two URLs, stop: you're about to create cannibalisation.

Check the map every time someone wants a new page. Most cannibalisation isn't planned. It happens when a blog post is written two years after the service page, by someone who didn't know it existed.

Spot cannibalisation in Search Console

Keyword cannibalisation is when two or more of your pages compete for the same search, so Google keeps switching between them and neither ranks as well as one strong page would. Google says duplicate content isn't a violation of its spam policies and isn't something that will cause a manual action.^[23] It just wastes your effort.

To find it:

1. Open Search Console, Performance, and set the date range to the last 3 months.
2. Click + Add filter, choose Query, and enter the keyword.^[24]
3. Open the Pages tab. If more than one of your URLs is listed with real impressions, open the date chart for each.
4. The sign of a problem is two URLs taking turns: one shows for a few weeks, then the other, and the average position for the query keeps moving.

Two URLs for one query isn't always a problem. If your home page and your implants page both show for your clinic's name, that's normal. If both pages sit in the top 3 together, you're taking two spots, and you leave it alone. Act when two pages split the impressions and neither holds a good position.

Our Free Website Audit flags duplicate titles, which is often the first hint that two pages were written for the same search.

Fixing it

Pick the winner first: usually the page with more links, more clicks, or the better match for the intent. Then choose one of these:

• Merge and redirect. Move anything useful from the weaker page into the winner, then 301 redirect the weaker URL to it. Google calls a redirect a strong signal for which URL to show,^[25] and with a permanent redirect (301 or 308) Google takes the target as the URL that should become canonical.^[26] It is usually the cleanest fix.
• Re-target. If both pages are worth keeping, change the weaker one to a different keyword and intent. A blog post on "dental implant cost" can become "is a dental implant worth it at 60?", and send readers to the cost page.
• Point internal links at the winner. Change menu links, related-post links and in-text links that use the keyword so they all point at one URL.
• Canonical tag. If both URLs have to stay live (a print version, a filtered product page), add a canonical on the weaker one pointing at the winner. Google lists rel="canonical" as a strong signal, not a command, and asks you to keep your signals consistent: redirects, canonicals, sitemaps and internal links should all name the same URL.^[25] Guide 3 covers canonicals in depth.

After a merge, check two things. The old URL should return a 301 to the right address, not a 302 or a chain of redirects. And the winner should declare itself as canonical, not the old URL.

Then give it time. Watch the query in Search Console over the next two to three months, comparing clicks and position with the same length of time before the change.

Don't make a page for every variant

One strong page per group, linked into a cluster, beats ten thin pages that say the same thing in different words. If you'd like help planning the clusters and writing the pages, that's what our content marketing service does. Otherwise, chapter 3 adds one more layer to your keyword sheet: the different ways people in India type the same search.

Most keyword guides are written for people who search in one language. Your customers don't. The same person might type in English at work, switch to Hindi letters to search for a recipe, and speak a question into their phone in Hinglish on the way home. Every one of those is a keyword, and most Indian sites only research the first.

Three ways to type one search

Take any need and you'll usually find it searched in three forms: English, a native script such as Devanagari, and a mixed form where Hindi words are typed in English letters (often called Hinglish). Here are four examples.

Search each form of your own main keyword and compare the top 10, the way chapter 2 compared keywords. Treat each form as its own keyword with its own results, and expect different pages to rank for each. Then put all three forms in your keyword sheet, with intent and business potential for each.

How to find the forms your customers use

• Autocomplete in Hindi. Add a Hindi keyboard to your phone or computer and type your service into Google in Devanagari. Then type it again in Hinglish. Note the suggestions for both.
• Search Console. Your own queries already include any Hindi-script and Hinglish searches you show up for. Filter for them with a regular expression (steps below).
• Google Trends by state. Compare an English phrase with its Hinglish or Hindi form, set to India, and look at the state breakdown. It shows where each form is used more, and when it peaks.^[7]
• Keyword Planner. Its targeting settings include a language.^[28] Try your Hindi-script keywords there for volume ranges, but expect gaps for low-volume phrases.^[5]

When a native-script page pays off

That doesn't mean every business needs a Hindi site. We'd write a native-script page when three things are true:

• Search Console or Keyword Planner shows real Hindi-script searches for something you sell.
• The pages ranking for those searches are weak: thin, machine-translated or off-topic.
• You can serve those customers in their language, on calls and on WhatsApp, not just on the page.

Hinglish searches are different. People typing "dant ka doctor kanpur" can usually read an English page, so a clear English page with the Hinglish phrase in a heading or an FAQ is often enough. We'd test that first, before building a whole Hindi section.

Voice and Indian languages

The 270% figure is old and grew from a small base. What's newer is Google's own push into Indian languages. It added Hindi to AI Mode in September 2025.^[33] In October 2025 it added Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, and launched Search Live, its voice and camera search, in India.^[31]

Google has published no separate guidance for voice search. Spoken questions bring up the same kinds of results as typed ones: web pages, local results and AI answers. In our view, voice changes the wording, not the method: a spoken search is more likely to be a full question, and the question research from chapter 1 covers it. A clear answer near the top of the page and a complete Business Profile do the rest.

Translate with an editor, not in bulk

Machine translation makes a hundred Hindi pages in an afternoon. That's the problem. Google's scaled content abuse policy covers pages made mainly to manipulate rankings "no matter how it's created", and its examples include content scraped and then translated or reworded without adding value.^[27] Bulk-translated pages that nobody checked sit close to that line, and they read badly to the people you're trying to reach.

Google publishes its own SEO Starter Guide in Hindi too (last updated 18 December 2025 at the time of writing).^[34]

Once a page has Hindi text, our Word Counter & Keyword Density Checker counts its words and repeated phrases before you publish, in Hindi script as well as English.

If you run English and Hindi versions of a page

When the same page exists in English and Hindi, tell Google they're versions of each other with hreflang. The codes use a language and, optionally, a region, such as en-IN and hi-IN; a region on its own isn't valid. Each version has to list itself and every other version, and if two pages don't point to each other, Google ignores those tags. And Google doesn't use hreflang or the lang attribute to work out what language a page is in; it reads the text.^[35] Guide 3 covers the setup step by step.

Add your Hindi and Hinglish keywords to the sheet now, each with its own row. Chapter 4 turns those rows into briefs for pages that match what each search wants.

Here's the order that works. Read the results page. Decide what the page is for. Collect the questions. Write the brief. Only then does anyone write. It sounds slow, but a brief takes about 30 minutes, and rewriting a page that missed the intent takes days.

Read the results page before you plan anything

Search your main keyword on google.co.in in an incognito window, set to the city you care about if it's a local search. Then read the first page the way a writer would, and note four things.

• Type. Are the top results blog posts, product pages, category pages, service pages or videos? If Google shows ten clinic service pages for "knee replacement surgery Lucknow", your blog post won't get in.
• Format. Step-by-step guides, lists, comparisons, calculators, a single direct answer?
• Angle. What hook do the titles share: cheapest, fastest, for beginners, in 2026, near you?
• What else is on the page. An AI Overview at the top, a "People also ask" box, a map with three businesses, videos, shopping results.

AI Overviews show up mostly on informational searches. In Semrush's study of 200,000 US keywords, 80% of desktop AI Overviews appeared on informational keywords, and fewer than 3% on transactional ones.^[36] Pew Research Center found AI summaries on 60% of searches phrased as questions, against 18% of all searches, in its March 2025 study of 900 US adults.^[37] Both are US data, but the pattern is a fair warning: if your keyword is a question, expect an AI answer above you, and plan a page that gives people a reason to click past it.

To see how the top pages word their titles and descriptions, run their addresses through our Meta Tag Analyzer and paste the results into your brief.

Cover the basics, then add what's missing

Once you know what ranks, list what every top page covers. Those are the basics: leave one out and the reader goes back to Google. But a page that only repeats the basics has no reason to rank above the pages it copied.

The extra part is what Backlinko's tutorial calls information gain: something useful the reader won't find in the other results.^[11] Google makes the same point in its guide to generative AI features. It asks for unique, "non-commodity" content and contrasts a generic "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers" with "Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line".^[13] Anyone can write the tips. Only someone who bought that house can write the second.

For a small Indian business the gain is usually sitting in the office already. A coaching institute in Kanpur knows its real fee bands and what parents ask at the counter. A physiotherapy clinic in Lucknow knows which exercises patients get wrong at home. A D2C skincare brand knows the three questions that fill its support inbox every week. Put that on the page and you have something the top ten don't.

Collect the questions people actually ask

Questions become your subheadings and your must-answer list. Pull them from four places.

1. "People also ask". Open a few questions; each one you open loads more. Copy the ones that fit your page's intent.
2. Autocomplete. Type the keyword followed by "how", "why", "cost", "vs" and note the suggestions. Our free Question Finder does this with 24 question openers and turns the ticked questions into the brief's heading list.
3. Search Console. If the page already exists, open Performance, filter by the page, and read the Queries tab. These are searches Google already connects with you. The table shows up to 1,000 rows.^[39]
4. Your own conversations. Sales calls, WhatsApp chats, the front desk, reviews. Customers phrase things in ways no tool shows you.

AnswerThePublic shows the questions around a keyword as a visual wheel, with 3 free searches a day once you create a free account.^[10] We'd still start with the free Google sources and your own inbox; they're closer to what your customers say.

The brief, field by field

Here's the template. It fits on one page, and every field answers a question the writer would otherwise guess at.

Here's a filled-in brief for a made-up Kanpur coaching institute, so you can see the level of detail.

Write answer-first

Under each main heading, answer the heading's question in 40 to 60 words. Then give the detail, the steps, the exceptions. A reader who only wants the answer gets it in five seconds; a reader who wants more keeps going.

This helps in three places. People scan, so a clear first sentence keeps them. A short, direct answer is easy for Google to show as a snippet. And AI answers quote passages, not whole pages. Aleyda Solis's AI search checklist asks for direct, short answers near the top, and passages that make sense on their own.^[40] Mike King gives similar advice: clear sections with descriptive headings, and specific, data-backed statements in plain subject-verb-object sentences.^[22]

One caution. Google's own guide lists "chunking" content and rewriting it just for AI among the things you can ignore for Google Search.^[13] So write answer-first because it's better for the reader, not because you're cutting the page into pieces for a machine. Guide 5, chapter 4, goes deeper on writing passages that get cited.

How long should the page be?

As long as the intent needs, and no longer. Google says so directly. Its helpful content page asks whether you're writing to a particular word count because you've heard Google prefers one, and answers: "(No, we don't.)"^[41]

The studies agree. Backlinko's analysis of 11.8 million Google results found the average first-page result had 1,447 words, with no direct link between length and position.^[42] In Cyrus Shepard's 50-site study at Zyppy, word count didn't separate sites that gained in Google updates from sites that lost; the winners averaged 2,623 words and the losers 3,619.^[43] Both are correlations, and Zyppy's sample is small. Neither says "write more".

So the word range in the brief is a sanity check. If the top results are 800-word answers and your draft is 4,000 words, you've probably drifted off intent. If they're detailed guides and yours is 300 words, you've probably skipped questions.

Content score tools: good checklists, bad targets

Tools like Surfer, Clearscope and Frase compare your draft with the pages that rank and give it a score or grade, mostly on terms used, length and headings. They're handy for spotting a subtopic you forgot. The danger is writing for the score. Our view: these scores push you towards matching terms, and a draft can score high while saying nothing new. In a 2019 podcast, Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs, said his team didn't use on-page SEO scoring tools at all.^[2]

Prices as seen on each vendor's pricing page on 16 October 2026, in US dollars, before tax:

Our honest take: if you're writing briefs for your own business, "People also ask", autocomplete, Search Console and an AI assistant for a first outline (checked by you) cover most of it for free. Pay for Frase or Clearscope when you're briefing several writers every month. Until we build our own question finder and brief generator, Frase is what we'd point you to for briefs.

Keyword stuffing still backfires

Repeating your keyword to look relevant is a named spam policy at Google: filling a page with keywords or numbers out of context to manipulate rankings.^[27] It doesn't help in AI answers either. In the GEO study by researchers from Princeton and IIT Delhi, keyword stuffing cut a page's share of a simulated AI answer by 8.7%, while adding quotes, statistics and cited sources raised it.^[47] It was mostly a lab test with one AI model (a check on Perplexity found the same), but it points the same way as Google's policy.

A brief gets the page right on day one. Chapter 5 covers the part that makes readers and Google trust it: experience, authorship and how to use AI in writing without getting burned. If you'd rather hand the writing over, have a look at our content marketing service.

This chapter is about the difference between a page that answers a search and a page people believe. Chapter 4 got the structure right. Now the substance: who wrote it, what they actually know, and how much of it a machine wrote.

People-first or search-engine-first?

Google's page on helpful content gives site owners a set of self-assessment questions, grouped under content and quality, expertise, page experience, and whether the content is made for people first.^[41] It also lists warning signs of content made for search engines first. One of them is aimed straight at an old SEO habit: are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard Google prefers one? Google's answer: "(No, we don't.)"

In plain words, we'd boil the list down to four questions you can ask about any page before you publish it:

1. Would we make this page if Google didn't exist, because our customers need it?
2. Does it show something we know first-hand, or is it a rewrite of what already ranks?
3. Will the reader leave able to do the thing, or will they go back to Google?
4. Is it obvious who wrote it, and why they're worth listening to?

If the honest answer to the first question is no, the page is search-engine-first. A Lucknow dental clinic writing "best dentist in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore" pages to catch traffic it can't serve is the classic case.

E-E-A-T, explained properly

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It comes from Google's guidelines for its search quality raters, the people who check result quality. The first E, experience, was added on 15 December 2022.^[48]

Two lines from Google matter more than the acronym. First: "Of these aspects, trust is most important." Second: E-E-A-T "itself isn't a specific ranking factor", but Google uses a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T, and gives that more weight on "Your Money or Your Life" topics such as health, money and safety.^[41] The SEO Starter Guide is blunter. Under things not to focus on, it lists thinking E-E-A-T is a ranking factor: "No, it's not."^[23]

So there's no E-E-A-T score to raise. There are signals that a trustworthy page tends to have, and a clinic, a CA firm or a coaching institute has most of them already. They're just not on the website.

Who, how and why

Google asks you to make three things clear about your content.^[41]

• Who made it. A byline where readers expect one, linking to an author page that says who the person is and why they know this topic.
• How it was made. For a product review, how you tested. If automation or AI played a big part, say so where a reader would reasonably wonder.
• Why it exists. Mainly to help people. If the honest reason is "to rank", see the first section again.

For a small business, "who" is often the owner or the practitioner. Put their name, qualifications and a photo on the page. We'd trust a dermatology clinic's skin-care article signed by the doctor, with her registration number, far more than one signed "Admin". So will your patients.

Show experience on the page

Experience is the easiest E to show and the hardest to fake. Use your own photos instead of stock. Give the numbers from your own work: how many patients asked this, what the fee really is, how long delivery to Kanpur actually takes. Describe what went wrong as well as what went right.

Marie Haynes looked at four sites that did well in Google's December 2025 core update.^[49] A medical e-commerce store had improved its customer service and brought in medical authors. An affiliate site that already bought the products it reviewed started showing it, with its own detailed photos and video, and noindexed YMYL pages outside its expertise. A YMYL store fixed navigation, checkout and its About page, and published timely content that earned links and mentions. A city guide added its own video, photos and first-hand advice. She gives no traffic figures, and the city guide only partly recovered, but the pattern is clear: real experience and real trust, not SEO tweaks.

Trust shows up in where people click, too. Kevin Indig's usability study of Google's AI Overviews found that people asking low-stakes questions often stopped at the AI answer. People searching about finance and health behaved differently: they clicked through to sources they already knew and trusted.^[50] It's a small study: 70 people doing eight search tasks. It still matches what you'd expect: on serious topics, people want a name they recognise.

Here's what that looks like on one page. The clinic is made up; the changes are the kind any clinic can make in an afternoon.

E-E-A-T comes from other people too

You can't declare yourself trustworthy. Lily Ray has argued that E-E-A-T depends on how others see the brand: other companies and brands, reviewers and users.^[51] Haynes made a similar observation in her four cases, where brand trust and customer service seemed to feed into recovery.

That means reviews on your Business Profile, mentions in local news, links from associations and partners, and a consistent name, address and phone number everywhere. Chapters 9 and 10 cover how to earn these.

Chapter 9 tells how a sports platform we worked with earned links and mentions this way: by adding sourced statistics that other sites wanted to cite.

AI-assisted content: what Google actually says

Google's position has three parts, and you need all three.

AI use is allowed. In February 2023 Google wrote: "Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines."^[52] The same post said giving AI an author byline "is probably not the best way" to tell readers how content was made. A note on how the page was made does the job better.

Mass-produced pages are spam. Scaled content abuse means making many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, "no matter how it's created". Google's examples include AI-generated pages that add no value and keyword pages that make little sense to a reader.^[27] A coaching site with 500 AI-written "best coaching in [city]" pages for cities it doesn't teach in fits that description.

Everything AI writes needs a human check. On 1 October 2026 Google updated its guide to using generative AI content. It now explains that generative models "don't retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data", and that the output can contain hallucinations.^[8]

Merchant Center goes further for shops: AI-generated product titles and descriptions have to be labelled, and AI-generated images need a metadata tag saying so.^[8] If you run a D2C store with AI-written product copy, check your feed settings.

What happened to sites that scaled AI content

Lily Ray tracked more than 220 sites publicly named as customers of AI content platforms, using Ahrefs traffic estimates, checked against Sistrix visibility data, up to May 2026.^[53]

These are traffic estimates from third-party tools, and they show a pattern, not a proven cause. The typical shape she describes is fast growth in published pages for 6 to 12 months, a traffic peak a few months later, then a drop within a year that wipes out most of the gains.

How to use AI without getting burned

ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are good at the boring parts: brainstorming topic ideas, drafting outlines, suggesting title options, writing a first draft of schema code or alt text, writing spreadsheet formulas and regex for Search Console filters. They're bad at facts. They invent search volumes, statistics, quotes and sources that sound right. Perplexity shows its sources, which helps, but you still have to open them.

Your E-E-A-T checklist

Go through this on your five most important pages:

• A named author with a byline, linking to an author page with qualifications and a photo
• A reviewer for health, money or legal topics, named on the page
• Sources linked for every number, with dates
• A real "last updated" date that changes only when the content does (Chapter 6)
• Your own photos, data or cases somewhere on the page
• An About page with the people, the address and the registration details
• A contact page with a phone number that someone answers
• HTTPS working on every page

HTTPS is one of the aspects of page experience Google lists, and a basic sign of trust.^[54] Our free website audit checks the rest of your site's basics in one go.

Next, Chapter 6: what to do when a page that used to bring traffic starts losing it.

Most sites that have published for a few years have more to gain from fixing old pages than from writing new ones. The old page already has links, history and a place in Google's index. It just stopped being the best answer.

Spot the pages that are decaying

Search Console is the tool for this, and it's free. The Performance report keeps 16 months of data, so you can compare the last three months with the same three months a year ago.^[56] Comparing with the same months last year matters: a Diwali gifting page in Kanpur will always look worse in February than in October.

That last check is important. A page that dropped from position 3 to position 9 has a decay problem. A page that held position 3 while impressions halved has a demand problem, and rewriting it won't bring back searches people stopped making. And if the drop lines up with a Google core update, wait: Google's own advice is to wait at least a full week after the update finishes before comparing.^[57]

Refresh, merge or remove?

Not every decaying page should be rewritten. Decide first.

A 301 tells Google the page has moved for good and that the new URL is the one to show.^[26] For pages that are truly gone, Google's crawl documentation says to return 404 or 410.^[59] But treat removal as the last step. In its guidance on core updates, Google says plainly that "Deleting content is a last resort".^[57] After a traffic drop it's tempting to delete half the blog. The better move is usually to fix the pages that deserve it and merge the rest.

After a merge or a removal, run the old URLs through our HTTP Status Checker to confirm they return the 301 or 410 you meant. If you noindexed a page, check the tag is really there with the Noindex Tag Checker.

How Ahrefs refreshes its own blog

Ahrefs' approach is worth copying because it's simple. Tim Soulo has described how the team rewrites its competitive articles from scratch every 6 to 12 months, on the same URL so the page keeps its backlinks. Then they promote the new version again: email, social media, retargeting ads and a notice inside their product.^[2] Their content strategy article adds a quarterly review of what they've published.^[4]

You probably don't need a full rewrite every year. But two habits transfer to any business: keep the URL, and tell people when the page is new again. A refreshed fee guide is worth a WhatsApp broadcast to past enquiries.

Dates and freshness: don't fake it

Changing the date on a page without changing the page is a trick Google calls out. Its helpful content guidance warns against changing dates to make pages seem fresh when the content hasn't substantially changed.^[41] Your sitemap's lastmod date works the same way: Google uses it only if it's consistently and verifiably accurate.^[60]

There's even a hint that fake freshness can hurt. In Cyrus Shepard's 50-site study, sites that gained in Google updates tended to show older dates on their pages.^[43] It's a correlation from a small sample, so don't read it as "old dates rank better". Read it as "a new date on old content doesn't help".

Real freshness does count in some places. Ahrefs looked at about 17 million citations and found that AI assistants cite pages that are, on average, about 26% fresher than the pages in Google's organic results: 1,064 days old against 1,432.^[61] That's a vendor study showing a correlation, but it's one more reason to update the facts, not just the date.

The refresh checklist

Work through this for each page on your list:

1. Search the main query again and re-read the results page. Has the intent or format changed since you wrote it? (Chapter 4)
2. Update every fact, price, fee, law and statistic, with the source and its date.
3. Replace old screenshots and photos with current ones.
4. Add the questions and subtopics that newer top results cover and you don't.
5. Cut what's no longer true or no longer useful.
6. Rewrite the title and description if the page's angle changed.
7. Fix broken outbound links and add links to your newer related pages.
8. Add links to this page from two or three of your stronger pages.
9. Update the visible "last updated" date and the dateModified in your Article markup, since the content really changed.
10. Add a Search Console annotation, and check the page again in 6 to 8 weeks.

Our free tools don't yet include a broken link checker. Until they do, Screaming Frog's free version or Ahrefs Webmaster Tools will find broken links on a small site.

Tools that track decay for you

Search Console is enough for most small sites. If you publish a lot, two paid tools track decay automatically. All in One SEO's Elite plan, the WordPress plugin, adds content decay tracking along with Search Console metrics, at $299.50 for the first year and $599 after that.^[62] Clearscope tracks your content inventory and flags decay, from $129 a month.^[45] Both prices as seen on 16 October 2026.

Pick your three biggest losers from the list and refresh one this week. Chapter 11 shows how to measure whether it worked, and Guide 3 covers what to do when a whole site drops after a core update.

5:36

0:00 The CTR gap on a real account0:31 Step 1: pick the page0:50 Step 2: the title Google shows1:16 Step 3: our Meta Tag Analyzer1:33 Step 4: rewrite the title2:10 The meta description, like a small ad2:39 AI drafts, checked by hand3:01 Step 5: headings and answers3:48 Step 6: images4:15 The social card (og:image)4:42 FAQ schema in 20265:01 What gets the click, and step 7

0:005:36

1/12

Starts with · 0:00The CTR gap on a real account

On Page SEO for Beginners: Fix a 1.5% CTR with Better Titles and Descriptions

All 12 chapters

1. 0:00The CTR gap on a real account
2. 0:31Step 1: pick the page
3. 0:50Step 2: the title Google shows
4. 1:16Step 3: our Meta Tag Analyzer
5. 1:33Step 4: rewrite the title
6. 2:10The meta description, like a small ad
7. 2:39AI drafts, checked by hand
8. 3:01Step 5: headings and answers
9. 3:48Step 6: images
10. 4:15The social card (og:image)
11. 4:42FAQ schema in 2026
12. 5:01What gets the click, and step 7

YouTube

Guide 1 covered the basics: one topic per page, a unique title, a short URL, alt text. This chapter is the next layer. It's about the details that decide whether a page that ranks also gets the click, and about what changed in Google's results in 2026.

We'll use one running example, made up for this chapter: the root canal treatment page of a dental clinic in Gomti Nagar, Lucknow.

Titles beyond the basics

Google calls the clickable headline in its results the title link. It mostly comes from your title tag, and it's one of the clearest hints you give Google about what the page is for. Length rules get most of the attention. Three other things matter more: what comes first, whether Google keeps your title at all, and how it's written.

His reading of the leaked documents is that early text counts most. So the clinic's title should start with the treatment, "Root Canal Treatment in Lucknow, Single Visit | Smile Dental", and not with "Smile Dental | Welcome to Our Clinic".

Next, Google doesn't always use your title. Its title link documentation lists when it's more likely to use other text, such as a heading from the page. The issues it lists include titles that are half-empty, out of date, inaccurate or full of repeated boilerplate, and its best practices also warn against stuffing keywords.^[64] If a page has plenty of impressions in Search Console but few clicks, search for its main query and look at the title Google actually shows. A rewritten title is often a sign that yours didn't describe the page well.

Then there's style. Cyrus Shepard of Zyppy compared 50 sites that won or lost in recent Google updates. Losing sites tended to have more adjectives in their titles (a correlation of -0.420) and more numbers (-0.297).^[43] It's a small sample and a correlation, so it doesn't prove that "17 Amazing Tips" hurts a page. Take it as a nudge towards titles that describe the page plainly, not titles written as bait.

If an AI tool drafts your titles, read every one before it goes live. Google's generative AI guidance, updated in October 2026, says it is "critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing", and that this also applies to title elements, meta descriptions, structured data and image alt text.^[8] A smooth title that promises "same-day appointments" when the clinic doesn't offer them is a trust problem, whoever wrote it.

Meta descriptions: write for the click

Google said in 2009 that "we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking."^[65] The description's job is the click, not the ranking. And Google doesn't promise to show it: it often builds the snippet from text on the page that fits the search better.^[23]

One newer detail to read up on: in April 2026 Google added a section about "Read more" deep links to its snippet documentation.^[66] Google lists three things that help: keep each section's text visible on the page without a click (not hidden in tabs or expandable sections), don't use JavaScript to force the scroll position when the page loads, and don't strip the #section part from the URL on load.^[67]

Headings as an outline

Google is relaxed about heading order. Its Starter Guide says "it doesn't matter if you're using them out of order."^[23] Readers aren't relaxed about it, though. They use headings to jump to their part of the page. And AI search systems pull passages, not whole pages, so a heading that says what the next paragraph answers makes that passage easier to find and quote.^[40]

A quick test: read only your H1 and H2s, top to bottom. Would they work as a table of contents? Here's the clinic page as an outline:

• H1: Root canal treatment in Lucknow
• H2: Does a root canal hurt?
• H2: How many visits it takes
• H2: Root canal cost, and what changes it
• H2: After the treatment: what to eat and what to avoid
• H2: Book an appointment in Gomti Nagar

One clear H1 per page is a good habit. Subheadings that are questions work well when people really ask them that way; you'll find those questions in Search Console and in the People also ask box. To see the outline of any live page, paste its address into our free Heading Structure Checker: it lists the H1 to H6 headings in order and flags a missing or extra H1, skipped levels and empty or repeated headings.

Keyword placement without stuffing

Put the main phrase where it belongs naturally: the title, the H1, the first paragraph, and one subheading if it fits. Then write the way your patients or customers talk. A Lucknow patient might search "root canal", "RCT treatment" or "root canal cost"; use the words that fit each section, and don't force every variant into every paragraph.

Don't aim for a keyword density percentage. Filling a page with keywords out of context to manipulate rankings is keyword stuffing, one of Google's named spam practices.^[27] Our Word Counter & Keyword Density Checker is most useful the other way round: it catches a phrase you've repeated twenty times without noticing.

Length works the same way. Google's Starter Guide says "there's no magical word count target, minimum or maximum, though you probably want to have at least one word".^[23] Write until the patient's questions are answered, then stop. If two of your pages keep swapping places for the same phrase, that's a cannibalisation problem; chapter 2 shows how to fix it.

Images: alt text, names, weight and size

Alt text describes an image for people who can't see it, and for Google. Write what's in the picture: "Dentist showing a patient her X-ray on a screen", not "best dentist lucknow root canal treatment". When an image is a link, Google uses its alt text as the link's anchor text.^[68] And if an AI tool wrote your alt text, the October 2026 guidance applies to it as well: check it by hand.^[8]

For every image that matters on the page:

• Name the file in words, with hyphens: root-canal-xray-screen.webp, not IMG_2041.jpg.
• Save photos in a modern format such as WebP, and compress them before upload. Our free Image Compressor does it in your browser, 50 at a time, and resizes them to the width they're shown at.
• Resize to the size it's shown at. A 4,000-pixel phone photo shown 800 pixels wide is wasted weight.
• Set width and height in the HTML so the layout doesn't jump while the image loads. That jump is what CLS measures, and Google asks for a CLS score below 0.1.^[69]
• Write the alt text last, looking at the image.

Image weight is usually the quickest speed fix you can make without a developer. The perfume brand in Guide 1 is a good example: its WordPress site was so slow that Google struggled to crawl and index it, and optimising the images was one of the three fixes we made with their developer, alongside a lighter theme and a caching plugin. Check your own pages with our Website Speed Test or Google's PageSpeed Insights; Guide 3 covers speed properly.

Images also decide how your page looks elsewhere. Google's documentation says it uses schema.org markup and the og:image tag when choosing a page's preferred image (a change logged in March 2026).^[66] So pick that image on purpose. The section on social previews below shows the tag.

Featured snippets, AI answers and fewer clicks

A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google sometimes shows above the normal results, quoted from one page. On many searches that top spot now goes to an AI Overview instead. Either way, the click maths has changed, and this chart shows how much.

Read the shape, not the exact figures. CTR studies disagree a lot: Backlinko's 2019 study of about 4 million results put position one at 27.6%,^[71] while First Page Sage's 2026 figure across all searches is 7.1%. The sample, the year and above all whether an AI answer is on the page explain the gap. What every study agrees on is the steep drop after the top three, and the much lower clicks when an AI answer sits on top.

Here's what that looks like on a real account. On a client site we work on, Search Console showed 703 clicks from 48.3K impressions between April and August 2026: an average CTR of 1.5% at an average position of 9.7. Daily impressions roughly doubled over that time, from about 250 to about 520. Plenty of people see the site; a small share click. That gap is where better titles and descriptions pay off.

You can't force a featured snippet or an AI citation. Google's featured snippet page says you can't mark a page as one; its systems decide.^[72] But you can write in the shape they quote:

• Put a direct answer of 40 to 60 words right under the heading that asks the question.
• Use a numbered list for steps and a table for comparisons (cost by treatment, timings by branch).
• Keep each section able to stand on its own, so a quoted passage still makes sense.

Aleyda Solis's AI search checklist gives the same advice: short, direct answers first, and passages that make sense alone.^[40] It's also simply easier to read.

Rich results that are gone

A good FAQ section on the page is still useful to readers, and it's a natural home for those 40 to 60-word answers. Chapter 8 explains which structured data is still worth adding and what it does and doesn't do.

Open Graph and social previews

When someone shares your page on WhatsApp, LinkedIn or Facebook, the preview card is built from Open Graph tags in the page's head. Three of them do most of the work, and LinkedIn also asks for og:url:^[74]

<meta property="og:title" content="Root Canal Treatment in Lucknow, Single Visit">
<meta property="og:description" content="Digital X-rays, fees shown upfront, evening slots in Gomti Nagar.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.in/images/root-canal-clinic.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.in/root-canal-treatment">

The og:image matters twice now, because Google also reads it when picking your preferred image. Use a real photo of the place or the result, not your logo on a white square. Make it a JPG or PNG at least 1200 by 627 pixels, the size LinkedIn asks for.^[74] If you use a WordPress SEO plugin, look in its social settings for these fields. Our free Social Preview Checker draws the WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Facebook and X cards from your tags, checks the image against each platform's rules and says why a card is small or empty; the Meta Tag Analyzer shows the tags beside the Google preview.

Fix one page in 20 minutes

To check many pages at once, the free version of Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 URLs and lists missing and duplicate titles and descriptions,^[75] and our free Image Alt Text Checker lists every image on a page with its alt text and a fix. Our Free Website Audit flags missing alt text and title problems too. On WordPress, Yoast SEO (10 million+ active installations),^[76] Rank Math (4 million+)^[77] and All in One SEO (2 million+)^[78] all give you fields for the title and description. Use the one your site already runs.

The on-page checklist

Do the checklist on your five pages with the most impressions first. That's where a better title pays back fastest. Then move on to chapter 8 and link those pages together properly.

These two jobs sit together because both are about helping Google understand your site, and both are cheap. Internal links cost you an hour with your own pages. Structured data, on most sites, is a plugin setting. Neither needs anyone else's permission, which makes them the easiest wins in this guide.

How Google uses your internal links

Google finds most pages by following links, and it reads the link's words to understand the page at the other end. Its documentation is specific about what works:^[68]

• Google reliably follows only normal <a href> links. A "Read more" built from a script on a span or a button may never be followed.
• Anchor text should be descriptive and fairly short. "Root canal treatment" tells Google something; "click here" tells it nothing.
• Don't stuff keywords into anchors or chain lots of links together in one sentence.
• For an image used as a link, Google uses the image's alt text as the anchor text.
• Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.

Followed:  <a href="/root-canal-treatment">root canal treatment</a>
Risky:     <span onclick="go('/root-canal-treatment')">Read more</span>

Our Hyperlink Generator builds a correct link with the anchor text and any rel value you need, if you're editing HTML by hand.

What the data says about internal links

The biggest public study we know of is Cyrus Shepard's at Zyppy: 23 million internal links across about 1,800 sites.^[79]

Treat these as correlations, as the study does. Important pages tend to get more links because they're important, so the arrow can point both ways. Still, the pattern is useful: pages with almost no internal links do worse, and there's a sensible upper limit.

Anchor text: an expert who changed his mind

Shepard's original 2022 study found that more variety in anchor text went with more traffic. Since 2024 the page has carried a note that high anchor variety may hurt some sites.^[79] That fits his other study of sites that won and lost in Google updates, where varied internal anchors went with losing (a correlation of -0.337).^[43]

We like that he published the change instead of quietly editing the page. The practical takeaway: give each important page one main descriptive anchor and use it, or something close to it, most of the time. Let natural variation happen in sentences. Don't rotate ten versions of the keyword on purpose.

Build the plan: hubs, breadcrumbs, related links and your strongest pages

Say you run a JEE coaching institute in Kanpur. You have a hub page, "JEE coaching in Kanpur", and a dozen posts around it: cutoffs, timetables, fees, how to choose a batch. Here's how the links should run:

• Hub to spokes: the hub links to every post in its topic (chapter 2 explains clusters).
• Spokes back to the hub, with the hub's main anchor, and to one or two sibling posts where it helps the reader.
• Breadcrumbs at the top of each post (Home › JEE coaching › JEE Main cutoff), which link every level and can carry Breadcrumb markup too.
• Related posts picked by hand for your key pages. Automatic "related" widgets can link by date or tag, not by what the reader needs next.
• Your strongest pages to the ones on page 2. This is the one most sites skip.

Your strongest pages are the ones with the most clicks (Search Console, Performance) and the most links from other sites. Search Console's Links report shows which sites link to you,^[80] and which of your pages are linked most, both from outside and from inside your site.

Orphan pages and broken internal links

An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. Google may still find it through your sitemap, but you've told it the page doesn't matter, and visitors can't reach it at all. Old landing pages, campaign pages and posts dropped from a menu after a redesign are the usual orphans.

To find them, compare two lists. Crawl your site from the home page, so you get every page reachable by links. Then take every URL in your sitemap, or Search Console's list of indexed pages. Anything in the second list and not in the first is an orphan. For the crawl, Screaming Frog's free version handles up to 500 URLs,^[75] and Ahrefs Free gives verified sites a Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project a month.^[81] Then link each orphan you want to keep from a relevant page, or redirect or remove the ones you don't.

Broken internal links point to pages that return a 404. The same crawl lists them. Fix the link so it points straight at the live page. Don't just lean on a redirect: every redirect adds a hop, and Google's crawl budget guide advises against long redirect chains.^[59] Our HTTP Status Checker takes up to 10 URLs at a time and shows every redirect hop, so you can confirm what each one really returns. Our free Broken Link Checker finds them in the first place: every dead link and every internal link that redirects, with the page and anchor text.

Structured data: labels for your page

Structured data is code that describes a page in a fixed vocabulary, schema.org, so a machine doesn't have to guess. It says: this page is a local business, here is its address and opening hours; or this is a product, here is its price. It comes in three formats, JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata.^[82] JSON-LD is the easiest to add and read, because it sits in one block instead of being woven through your HTML.

Google's search gallery listed 25 features that structured data can make a page eligible for when we checked in October 2026, including Article, Breadcrumb, Event, Job posting, Local business, Organization, Product, Review snippet and Video.^[83] Most Indian business sites need only a few of them:

Here's a trimmed example for our made-up Lucknow clinic. Dentist is a more specific kind of LocalBusiness, and Google asks for the most specific type that fits.^[84] Chapter 10 goes further with local markup.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Dentist",
  "name": "Smile Dental",
  "url": "https://example.in/",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "12 Vibhuti Khand, Gomti Nagar",
    "addressLocality": "Lucknow",
    "postalCode": "226010",
    "addressCountry": "IN"
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"],
    "opens": "10:00",
    "closes": "21:00"
  }]
}
</script>

Every value in it must be on the page too: the same name, address and hours a visitor can read.

What structured data doesn't do

It doesn't lift rankings by itself. Backlinko's ranking factors study of 11.8 million results found no correlation between schema and position, even though 72.6% of page-one results used it.^[42] When Google phased out seven rich result types in 2025, it said: "This update won't affect how pages are ranked."^[85] Rich results and rankings are separate things.

It isn't a key to AI answers either. Google's AI features page says there's "no special schema.org structured data that you need to add" to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode,^[86] and its 2026 guide to generative AI search lists over-focusing on structured data among the things you can ignore.^[13]

So treat schema as two things: eligibility for the rich results that still exist, and a clear, machine-readable statement of facts you already show. That's worth an hour of setup. It isn't worth a monthly retainer.

What was removed, and the new review rule

Google has been trimming rich results for three years. If a plugin or an agency still offers you the types below, ask what they expect it to do.

The review rule matters most for D2C brands and clinics that collect testimonials. Clinics should also know that when a business controls the reviews about itself, its own LocalBusiness pages can't get review stars at all.^[87] If you gave customers a discount or a gift for a review, say so; and never mark up reviews you wrote yourself.

Test before and after you publish

Use two free tests, because they answer different questions. Google's Rich Results Test takes a URL or a pasted snippet and shows which Google rich results the page is eligible for, with errors and warnings. For a URL test the page has to be reachable from the internet (you can paste code instead), and the test runs as a smartphone by default.^[82] It only knows Google's supported types. For whether your markup is valid schema.org at all, use the Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org, or ours, which fetches a page or takes pasted code. After launch, Search Console's rich result reports flag errors across the whole site.^[88]

When I taught SEO, my students were already doing client work, and most of the local business sites they handled ran on WordPress. If yours does, let a plugin do the markup. Rank Math's free version includes schema and breadcrumbs,^[77] and Yoast's free version outputs a schema graph and breadcrumbs, though for address and opening-hours markup Yoast points you to its separate Local SEO plugin.^[76] Fill in the business details in the plugin settings, then run both tests. For a type your plugin doesn't cover, our free Schema Markup Generator writes the JSON-LD with Google's required and recommended fields marked, and can load the block your plugin already outputs so you edit one field instead of adding a second.

Next, links from other sites. Chapter 9 covers how to earn them without breaking Google's rules.

If you run a website in India, you've probably had the message: a bundle of "high DA backlinks" for a few thousand rupees, delivered in a week. This chapter explains why to say no to those, and what works instead. The honest version takes longer. It also doesn't disappear in the next spam update.

Do links still matter?

Yes, though not as simply as the link sellers say. Backlinko's ranking factors study of 11.8 million Google results found the page in position one had about 3.8 times more backlinks than the pages in positions two to ten, and that top results tend to have more linking domains too.^[42] That's a correlation. Pages that rank first also tend to be older, better known and more useful, which earns them links anyway.

The correlations in these studies are also modest. Semrush's 2024 ranking factors study, of 16,298 keywords, put the correlation between its own domain Authority Score and position at 0.21, which is weak.^[89] Google's Starter Guide describes PageRank, its link-based signal, as "just one of those" many signals it uses.^[23]

In the same interview he adds that links matter somewhat less than they did a few years earlier. You may also have read that links are no longer a top-three ranking factor. Google's Gary Illyes said that at a conference in September 2023, as Search Engine Land reported, while adding that links are still important.^[90] Google hasn't put it in writing, so treat it as a remark, not a rule.

What Google calls link spam

Google's spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site mainly to manipulate rankings.^[27] The page lists the forms it means, and most of the offers in your inbox are on it.

Google finds this with automated systems and with "human review that can result in a manual action".^[27] Since April 2026 it also says it may use spam reports from users to take manual action.^[66] And since its December 2022 link spam update, its SpamBrain system is used to neutralise unnatural links,^[91] so a bought link may simply count for nothing. You've paid for links that do nothing at best, and invited a penalty at worst. Guide 3 covers manual actions and recovery.

Sponsored, ugc and nofollow: label the links you don't vouch for

Paid links aren't banned. Paid links that pass ranking credit are. Google's answer is a rel attribute on the link:^[92]

<a href="https://example.in/gift-box" rel="sponsored">Diwali gift box</a>

Values can be combined, and nofollow is still accepted for paid links. Since 2019 Google treats all three as hints rather than strict orders for ranking, and "For crawling and indexing purposes, nofollow will become a hint as of March 1, 2020."^[93] Our Hyperlink Generator adds the right rel value for you.

Earned links and bought links, side by side

Here's how the common tactics compare. Effort and risk are our judgement; the risk column follows Google's spam policy.

Business listings on Justdial, IndiaMART or Google Business Profile are citations, not link building. They matter for local search, and chapter 10 covers them.

Linkable assets: give people a reason to cite you

The links worth having come from people who needed to point their readers somewhere. Give them that somewhere. A linkable asset is a page others cite because it has something they can't easily get elsewhere:

• Your own data. A Kanpur coaching institute's year-by-year table of JEE cutoffs with official sources, or a Delhi clinic's anonymised look at what patients ask before a procedure.
• A free tool. A fee calculator, an eligibility checker, a size chart that converts Indian and international sizes.
• A template. An invoice format for freelancers, a wedding budget sheet, a school admission checklist.

There's some recent evidence for this. Cyrus Shepard's 2026 study of more than 400 sites that won or lost Google traffic over a year found that sites with proprietary assets, such as their own data, products or software, were more likely to be winners: 92.9% of winners had them, against 57.1% of losers (a correlation of 0.357).^[94] It's a correlation, but it fits the story below.

The Skyscraper Technique, then and now

Brian Dean's Skyscraper Technique is the best-known outreach method: find a popular piece on your topic, make a clearly better one, then email the people who link to the weaker versions. In his original campaign he reported 17 links from 160 emails.^[95] Those are his own figures.

It still works, with changes. Ahrefs revisited it in 2023. Their advice: don't send Dean's original email template, because people have seen it too often. Group your prospects by why they linked, and write each pitch for that reason. And add real value, not just more words or a newer date. They also note that a little-known brand gets fewer links from the same effort.^[96]

In practice "better" means something a linking writer can use: a current table where theirs is out of date, a source they can check, a clear diagram. Not 4,000 words where 1,500 would do.

Digital PR, including Hindi media

Digital PR is pitching journalists a story or a dataset they'll want to report, and getting a link or a mention when they do. It works best with a real finding, a clear number and a local angle. "We looked at 2,000 appointment requests and here's when Lucknow patients book" is a story. "Smile Dental launches new website" isn't.

Don't stop at English media. Techmagnate's Hindi SEO work for Bajaj Finserv used PR on Hindi news sites and links from vernacular sites, alongside new Hindi pages, and the agency reports a 270% rise in vernacular organic traffic over six months in 2019 and 2020.^[29] That's the agency's own claim. Still, if your customers read Hindi or regional news, pitch there too, in their language. Chapter 3 covers how India searches in Hindi and mixed languages.

Guest posts done right

Guest posting isn't spam. Paying for a guest post with a followed, keyword-stuffed link is, and Google names exactly that in its policy.^[27] The safe version is simple:

• Write for that site's readers, on a topic they care about, as well as you'd write for your own site.
• Don't pay for the link. If money changes hands, the link gets rel="sponsored".
• Use a natural anchor: your brand name, your name in the author bio, or a link to a page that adds to the article.
• Skip sites that publish anyone's article on any topic for a fee. Publishing third-party content mainly to ride a host site's rankings is what Google's site reputation abuse policy targets.^[27]

A useful test: would you still write the post if the link were nofollow? If the audience is worth reaching, yes. If not, it was only ever about the link.

Broken link building

Pages on other sites die all the time, and the links pointing to them stay. If you have a page that does the dead page's job, you're offering the linking site a fix, not a favour.

Unlinked mentions

Sometimes a site already writes about you and just doesn't link. A local news site mentions your clinic, a blogger reviews your product, a college lists you as a recruiter. Those are the easiest links you'll ever ask for, because the writer already chose you.

Search Google for your brand name in quotes and exclude your own site (for example "Smile Dental Lucknow" -site:example.in), and set up an alert for your brand so new mentions come to you. When you find one, write to the author, thank them, and ask whether they'd link the name to your site, or to the page that matches what they wrote about. Correct any wrong details in the same email; that's often the part they're most glad to hear.

Brand mentions matter for AI answers too

Links aren't the only thing other sites give you. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands to see what goes with being mentioned in Google's AI Overviews. Mentions of the brand on other websites had the strongest relationship; backlinks had one of the weakest.

Louise Linehan, who wrote the study, sums it up: AI visibility depends on how widely your brand shows up across the web, well beyond your own site.^[97] Mike King's advice after the 2024 leak points the same way: aim for more variety in who links to you, and for quality and relevance over volume.^[63]

So count unlinked mentions as wins, not near misses. Before you chase AI mentions, make sure AI search bots can reach your site at all; our AI Crawler Checker shows which ones your robots.txt lets in. Guide 5 covers brand mentions and AI answers in depth.

Communities: Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn and YouTube

AI answers lean heavily on community sites. Profound analysed about 680 million citations. In Google's AI Overviews the most-cited domains were Reddit, YouTube, Quora and LinkedIn (2.2%, 1.9%, 1.5% and 1.3% of all citations), and Reddit led in Perplexity at 6.6%.^[99] These shares change month to month, and they come from a vendor, but other studies point the same way.

Take part the way a person would. Answer questions in your field under your real name, link to your page only when it answers the question better than a reply can, and expect those links to carry ugc or nofollow. Forum comments with optimised links are on Google's link spam list. What you're after here is being known and recommended, not the link.

The outreach email

Here's a template you can adapt, for the coaching institute example. Change every bracket.

Where to see your links, and what to spend

Start free. Search Console's Links report shows which sites link to you and which pages they link to.^[80] Ahrefs Free covers your own verified sites, showing up to 1,000 backlinks,^[81] and Bing Webmaster Tools has a free backlinks report that can show competitors' links too.^[100] For a fuller view of competitors' links, most people use a paid tool:

Whatever tool you use, don't chase its score. Domain Authority and Domain Rating are the vendors' own metrics, not Google's. The free Moz and Ahrefs authority checkers are fine for a quick look until we build our own.

On budget, Kevin Indig and Amanda Johnson suggest giving off-site distribution and community work its own budget line with a named owner, and putting about 5% of the marketing budget (up to 10% in some cases) into community.^[104] For a small business that might mean one linkable asset a quarter, one PR pitch a month and a monthly hour for unlinked mentions and broken links. If you'd rather hand that to someone, it's part of our SEO service. Next, chapter 10 takes this offline: local SEO, reviews and Indian business listings.

Guide 1 got you a Business Profile. This chapter is about what decides whether it shows up, and what to do every week so it keeps showing up. Most of it is free. All of it takes discipline more than skill.

5:44

0:00 Not in the map pack0:12 How Google ranks local results0:30 No paid local ranking0:47 Who can have a profile0:58 Steps 1-2: claim it with a business account1:25 Steps 3-4: name and category1:57 Steps 5-6: address and verification2:32 Step 7: fill every field3:06 Reviews: the 68% survey3:28 What breaks Google's review policy3:52 Review link and QR code4:11 Reply to every review4:29 One name, address and phone everywhere4:56 Is it working? Performance5:18 You're done when...

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How to Rank on Google Maps: Google Business Profile Setup, Step by Step (2026)

All 15 chapters

1. 0:00Not in the map pack
2. 0:12How Google ranks local results
3. 0:30No paid local ranking
4. 0:47Who can have a profile
5. 0:58Steps 1-2: claim it with a business account
6. 1:25Steps 3-4: name and category
7. 1:57Steps 5-6: address and verification
8. 2:32Step 7: fill every field
9. 3:06Reviews: the 68% survey
10. 3:28What breaks Google's review policy
11. 3:52Review link and QR code
12. 4:11Reply to every review
13. 4:29One name, address and phone everywhere
14. 4:56Is it working? Performance
15. 5:18You're done when...

YouTube

How Google picks the businesses in the local pack

Google says local results are based mainly on three things.^[105]

• Relevance: how well your profile matches what the person searched. Complete, detailed information helps here.
• Distance: how far your business is from the person searching. If they don't share their location, Google works from what it knows about where they are.
• Prominence: how well-known the business is. Google says this takes in how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have, and that more reviews and positive ratings can help.

You can't change distance, short of moving. So the work is all relevance and prominence. Google also says plainly that there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Anyone selling "guaranteed map pack" places is selling something Google says doesn't exist.

Set up and verify the profile properly

A Business Profile is free. To have one, your business has to make in-person contact with customers, either at your address or by going to them.^[106] A purely online store doesn't qualify. Verification is how Google confirms you're real, and Google picks which methods you're offered: phone or text, email, a live video call, a postcard or a recorded video.^[107]

Complete the profile, then keep it current

Google's own list of what helps is short: verify, keep your information complete and accurate (address, hours, category and attributes), reply to reviews, add photos and videos, and add in-store products if you run a shop in an eligible country.^[105] Here's how we'd work through it.

Business Profiles also have posts for offers, events and updates. We'd treat them as a way to keep the listing fresh for people reading it, not as a ranking trick; Google's local ranking page doesn't mention them.

Reviews: get them, reply to them, never buy them

Reviews feed prominence, and they decide a lot of clicks on their own. BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found these numbers.^[108] They are US figures from a vendor survey; we found no comparable survey for India.

How to ask. Google gives every profile a review link and a QR code; you make them from the profile on a computer: open Read reviews, then Get more reviews.^[109] Google suggests putting them on receipts, thank-you emails and a printed card in the shop.^[109] In India, add WhatsApp: most clinics, coaching centres and shops already message customers there, so a short follow-up the same day works better than a request a week later.

How to reply. Google's advice is to keep replies professional, polite and short, not to turn them into sales pitches, and for a bad review to reply promptly, use the reviewer's name and apologise where it's due.^[110] We'd add: reply to every review, good or bad, with something specific to it rather than the same thank-you each time, and never argue in public. The person reading your reply is the next customer, not the angry one.

The first four items on the "don't" list are against Google's Maps content policy: paid reviews, incentives such as payment, discounts or free goods, conflict-of-interest reviews, selectively asking for positive reviews and staff targets.^[111] The last goes against Google's advice on replies.^[110] Google removes such reviews and can restrict the profile.

NAP: one name, one address, one phone

NAP stands for name, address and phone. Google, Bing and AI assistants see your business described on many sites, and when the details match they can be confident it's the same business. When your website says "Shop 4, Swaroop Nagar", Justdial says "Swaroop Nagar Market" and an old IndiaMART listing has a number you stopped using in 2022, that confidence goes, and so do some customers.

1. Write the master version once: legal or signboard name, full address in one format (with PIN code) and one main phone number.
2. Put it on your website, in the footer or contact page, as text, not inside an image.
3. Copy it exactly into Google, Bing Places, Justdial, IndiaMART, Sulekha and any industry directory.
4. Search your old phone numbers and old addresses once a year and fix any listing that still shows them.

Indian citations: Justdial, IndiaMART, Sulekha

A citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone on another site. In India the big three directories are also places where customers search directly, so a listing can bring calls on its own, whatever it does for Google.

Our view: list on the ones that fit your business, with the exact NAP, real photos and correct categories, and judge any paid plan by the calls and leads it brings, not by SEO promises. We haven't checked whether these directories pass ranking credit through their links, so don't buy a plan for that. And don't confuse this with the "submit to 500 directories" packages; low-quality directory links are on Google's link spam list (chapter 9).

Beyond Google: Bing Places and Apple Business

Bing Places is Bing's version of the Business Profile^[115], and Apple Business (called Apple Business Connect until April 2026)^[116] does the same job for Apple Maps.^[117] Both are free: Bing Places can import your details from your Google profile,^[118] and Apple Business is open to businesses in India.^[119] Neither will bring the calls Google does, but setting them up once your Google profile is done is an hour well spent, and it's one more place where your details are right. Use the same master NAP.

Location and service-area pages

Your website still matters for local search. The profile links to it, and Google reads it to judge relevance. Give each real location its own page: the address and map, hours, the team who work there, photos of that branch, the services it offers and directions from landmarks people know ("opposite Z Square Mall").

Speed matters here too. When I taught SEO, my students were already doing client work, and most of the local business sites they handled ran on WordPress with shared hosting. The problem they met most often was a slow site. A location page that takes ten seconds on a phone loses the call to the clinic that loads in two.

Check each location page's title and description before it goes live. The title should name the service and the place ("Physiotherapy clinic in Swaroop Nagar, Kanpur | [Clinic name]").

LocalBusiness schema

Local business is one of the structured data types Google supports for rich results.^[83] Add LocalBusiness markup (or a more specific type, such as Dentist) on each location page with the same name, address, phone, hours and coordinates as the profile. Chapter 8 covers how to write it and the rule that matters most: markup must match what's visible on the page.

Our free Schema Markup Generator writes the LocalBusiness block with the address, hours and map coordinates, and keeps the rating fields off your own business; test the result before it goes live.

Local search and AI answers

People now ask AI tools for local recommendations too. In the same BrightLocal survey, 45% of US consumers said they use ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% in 2025.^[108] Google's advice for its own AI features includes keeping your Business Profile and Merchant Center information up to date.^[38] There's no separate trick: the same accurate profile, consistent NAP and genuine reviews feed both. Guide 5 covers AI visibility in depth.

Measure what the profile brings

Open your profile and click Performance. For a verified profile, Google shows calls (taps on the call button), direction requests, website clicks, profile views and the searches people used to find you.^[120] The searches list updates at the start of each month and can take up to five days to show.^[120]

Write down calls and direction requests every month, next to the number of reviews and your average rating. Those four numbers tell a shop owner more than any ranking report. The website clicks you'll see in GA4 as well, if you added UTM tags to the website link (chapter 11).

Before you start, run a baseline check of the website itself, so you know whether a slow or broken site is holding the profile back.

If you'd rather have someone do the local work with you, our SEO service covers Business Profiles, citations and location pages; you can get a quote in a couple of minutes. Next, chapter 11: measuring all of this in Search Console and GA4.

It's easy to build an SEO report that opens with a ranking table, ends with a traffic graph and never answers the client's real question: did it bring us business? This chapter sets up the numbers so that question comes first.

5:54

0:00 Traffic up, phone quiet0:15 Three tools, three questions0:42 Step 1: GA4 data retention1:07 Step 2: link Search Console1:28 Step 3: key events1:53 Step 4: UTM tags2:22 Outcomes first2:46 Behaviour: branded queries3:01 Exposure: 16 months3:22 Three Search Console traps3:43 Reading a real client report4:11 AI numbers in proportion4:48 One page, leads first5:03 Build it once in Data Studio5:22 Done when, and Guide 3

0:005:54

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Starts with · 0:00Traffic up, phone quiet

Monthly SEO Report from Search Console and GA4: One Page, Leads First (2026)

All 15 chapters

1. 0:00Traffic up, phone quiet
2. 0:15Three tools, three questions
3. 0:42Step 1: GA4 data retention
4. 1:07Step 2: link Search Console
5. 1:28Step 3: key events
6. 1:53Step 4: UTM tags
7. 2:22Outcomes first
8. 2:46Behaviour: branded queries
9. 3:01Exposure: 16 months
10. 3:22Three Search Console traps
11. 3:43Reading a real client report
12. 4:11AI numbers in proportion
13. 4:48One page, leads first
14. 5:03Build it once in Data Studio
15. 5:22Done when, and Guide 3

YouTube

Three tools, three different questions

Their numbers will never match each other. Search Console counts clicks on Google, GA4 counts sessions that loaded its tag (after consent), and a tracker checks one location and device. That's fine. Use each for its own question and stop trying to reconcile them.

The Search Console Performance report

Open Performance, then Search results. You get four numbers: clicks, impressions, average CTR (clicks divided by impressions) and average position. The default view is the last three months.^[121] Change it to 16 months, the most Search Console keeps,^[56] and compare with the same period a year earlier so festival seasons and exam months don't fool you.

Three things trip people up.

• Average position isn't your rank. It's an average across every search you appeared for, including the ones where you were on page four. One page can sit at 3 for its main keyword and still show an average of 18.
• The report shows and exports at most 1,000 rows.^[122] For more queries or pages, use the API, which gives up to 25,000 rows per request.^[123]
• Some queries are hidden. Google leaves out anonymised queries, so the query rows won't add up to the total clicks.^[122]

Here's what a real report looks like. This is a client site, name hidden, over five months.

How we read it: 703 clicks from 48,300 impressions is a CTR of about 1.5%. An average position of 9.7 means many of those impressions come from the bottom of page one or from page two, where few people click. The line that matters is impressions, which roughly doubled from about 250 to about 520 a day. Google is showing the site for more searches. The next job is to find the queries sitting at positions 5 to 15 with plenty of impressions, and improve those pages (titles and descriptions in chapter 7, refreshes in chapter 6), because that's where clicks come from fastest.

Newer Search Console features worth switching on

Google added several things to the Performance report in the last year. Four of them change how you work.

1. Branded queries filter. Splits searches for your brand name from everything else. Available to all eligible sites since 11 March 2026.^[3] Non-branded clicks are the honest measure of SEO; branded clicks mostly measure how well-known the business already is.
2. Custom annotations. Add a note of up to 120 characters to the chart: "New titles on service pages", "Site moved to new host".^[58] Six months later you'll know why the line moved.
3. Weekly and monthly views. Smooths out the daily noise in the chart.^[124]
4. Query groups. In Insights, for sites with lots of queries, Google uses AI to group similar queries together, which makes it easier to see topics instead of a thousand separate phrasings.^[20]

In September 2026 Google also added a web multimodal search type, for searches made with Lens, Circle to Search and image uploads.^[125] If you sell products people photograph, look at it.

AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search Console

Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted inside the normal Performance report, under the "Web" search type, mixed in with blue links.^[86] You can't filter them out there.

Since June 2026 there's also a separate Search Generative AI report. It shows impressions only, meaning how often your URLs appeared in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, broken down by page and country, and by device for Search. It doesn't show clicks or queries. It reached all sites worldwide on 31 August 2026.^[126] Use it to see which pages AI answers draw on, not to judge traffic.

To guess which queries came from AI Mode, Glenn Gabe published a method in August 2026.^[127] In short:

1. Export queries with their landing pages through the Search Analytics API (he uses Analytics Edge), so you get past the 1,000-row limit.
2. Put the export in a spreadsheet.
3. Give it to an AI assistant and ask it to flag queries that look like AI Mode prompts: long conversational questions, follow-ups and short replies, and to explain each pick.
4. Check the list by hand. Expect noise from rank-tracking tools.
5. Look at clicks on the flagged queries. He found few or none on many of them.

Before you read any AI numbers, make sure the AI search crawlers can reach you at all. Blocking OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot, for example, keeps you out of ChatGPT search answers.^[128]

GA4: the setup that matters

GA4 has hundreds of settings. For SEO, five matter.

1. Data retention. A standard GA4 property can keep event and user-level data for 2 or 14 months,^[129] and new properties start at 2.^[130] The setting doesn't touch the standard reports, but it limits explorations and funnel reports, which is where you'll dig into organic visitors. Change it on day one.

2. Organic search channel. In Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition, the "Organic Search" row is your SEO traffic. Add landing page as a secondary dimension to see which pages bring it.

3. Key events. GA4 calls the actions that matter to your business key events: you track an interaction as an event, then mark it as a key event.^[132] For most Indian small businesses those are form submissions, taps on the phone number and taps on the WhatsApp button. Mark them, or your report can only ever say "traffic".

4. AI referrals. Since May 2026, GA4 puts visits from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot in their own AI Assistant channel in Traffic acquisition.^[133] Clicks from Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode still count as Organic Search. If an AI tool you care about still shows under Referral (check perplexity.ai), filter session source for it.

5. UTM tags on your own links. Covered below.

Keep the AI numbers in proportion. SE Ranking's 2026 study of 101,574 sites found AI referrals made up 0.32% of all site traffic, against 42.75% from organic search.^[134] It's a vendor study, but the gap is too big to argue with.

Bing Webmaster Tools: AI citations

Bing has gone further than Google on AI reporting. Its AI Performance report, launched in public preview in February 2026, shows how often your pages are cited as sources in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and partner services: total citations, average cited pages, the "grounding queries" behind them and citations by page.^[135] In June 2026 Bing added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare.^[136] It's free, and if you set up Bing in Guide 1 it's already waiting for you.

Rank tracking: when it's worth paying for

Search Console's average position is free, but it's an average. A rank tracker checks where you stand for a fixed list of keywords, in a set city and on a set device, every day or week. It's worth paying for when you have a short list of money keywords ("ivf centre lucknow", "school uniform manufacturer") and a client or boss who wants to see them move.

Don't build your own by scraping Google. Google's spam policies list sending automated queries to Google without permission, scraping results for rank checks included, as machine-generated traffic.^[27] Use a reputable tracker and let it worry about that.

Prices seen on 16 October 2026; they change often. We'd start with Rank Math if you're on WordPress and only need a few dozen keywords, and move to SE Ranking when you're reporting for several clients.

UTM tags for links you control

Google Business Profile, newsletters, Instagram bio links and WhatsApp broadcasts all send visitors to your SEO pages. Without tags, GA4 files many of them under the wrong channel. Add UTM parameters, at least utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, which Google says you should always use.^[138] For the website link on your Business Profile, for example:

https://yourclinic.in/swaroop-nagar/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-listing

GA4 still counts these visits as Organic Search, but they now show up as their own row when you view session campaign, and you can count the calls and forms they bring. Until we have a UTM builder of our own, Google's free Campaign URL Builder makes the links for you.^[138] Don't add UTM tags to internal links between your own pages. Tags are meant for links from outside your site, and on internal links they can replace where the visitor really came from.

What to report, and in what order

Traffic targets built on last year's clicks are getting harder to hit. SparkToro found that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 on the same Similarweb data.^[139] Some of your work will pay off in searches where nobody clicks, or in AI answers that send no visit.

Kevin Indig and Amanda Johnson's answer, in the October 2026 Growth Memo, is to report three kinds of signal together: an exposure metric, a behaviour signal and a business outcome.^[104] In practice that means visibility, mentions and citations (exposure); branded searches and direct visits (behaviour); and leads, sales and pipeline (outcomes).

We'd flip the order for a small business owner: outcomes first, because that's what they're paying for, then behaviour, then exposure as the explanation.

One page is enough for most clients. Put the outcome numbers at the top with last month and the same month last year beside them, then one line on what changed and why, then the rest.

Build the report once, in Data Studio

Google's free reporting tool, Looker Studio, has been called Data Studio again since April 2026,^[140] and it has connectors for Search Console and GA4.^[141] Build the one-page layout above once, set the date to "last month" compared with the previous period, and it updates itself. Paid options such as AgencyAnalytics, the SE Ranking Agency Pack or Ahrefs Report Builder ($99 a month add-on)^[15] make sense when you report for many clients and want white-label PDFs.

Before the first report, take a baseline of the site, so later months have something honest to compare with.

If you'd like us to set up the tracking and send the monthly report for you, see our SEO service or get a quote. Then take the 10-question quiz below to check what stuck from this guide.

Test yourself

Ten questions on the whole guide. Pick an answer, check it, and see your score at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Sources