I previously worked at a marketing agency as an SEO Strategist, where I managed writers, developers, and SEO assistants. I took a career break last year and I'm now returning as a solo freelancer.

I've just finished a discovery call with a potential client. They liked my proposal, and our closing call is tomorrow.

The engagement is a monthly SEO retainer (strategy, Local SEO, technical SEO, reporting, content planning, etc.).

My question is about the first invoice.

From what I've researched, charging the first month 100% upfront seems to be standard practice for retainers. However, since this is our first engagement and we're still building trust, I'm wondering if it would be smarter to do 50% upfront and 50% at the end of the first month, then move to 100% upfront for future months.

My thinking is that it reduces the client's perceived risk without significantly increasing mine.

For those of you who run SEO or consulting retainers:

• What payment structure do you use for new clients?
• How would you price a scope like this?
• If your scope is different, I'd still love to hear what your retainer includes and how you structure your pricing so I can compare it against mine.

Every day I see someone selling a GEO course, GEO framework, GEO checklist, GEO audit, GEO consulting package meanwhile half the industry can't even agree on what GEO actually is am I the only one who thinks the number of GEO experts grew faster than the number of people with actual GEO results?

How do you guys manage setting up your clients' businesses on sites like Crunchbase, product reviews, etc.

Since these sites send confirmations to the client's phone number and email, syncing that with the client to get the codes isn't usually too easy.

I am looking for tips on whether everyone is managing listings on sites where client contact details and verification are needed.

I'm facing an issue with several important pages on my website that recently disappeared from Google Search results (around the 6th–7th of this month). What's confusing is that Google Search Console still shows these pages as indexed, with no coverage or indexing errors, yet they don't appear in Google SERPs at all.

The strange part is that these same pages are still visible and performing normally on other search engines, so this seems to be specific to Google's search systems rather than a general indexing issue.

Here's what I've already checked:

• Requested indexing for the affected pages
• Updated and resubmitted the XML sitemap
• Verified there are no noindex tags or directives
• Checked robots.txt and other crawl-related settings
• Reviewed canonical tags and other technical SEO elements
• Looked for any website-side implementation issues and tested possible fixes

Despite all of this, the pages remain indexed in GSC but don't appear in Google Search.

Has anyone experienced something similar recently? If so:

• What ended up being the root cause?
• Are there any Google-specific quality or ranking signals that could cause indexed pages to disappear from SERPs?
• Are there any additional technical or SEO checks I should perform beyond what's already listed?

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has dealt with this or has ideas on what else I should investigate.

I have a Google Merchant Center account with Shopify website connected, Got the product feed for online products but when I'm trying to go for Local Store product feed Google is unable to verify the feed, because i don't have a POS system.

What can be the best solution for this ? I have 70+ products with 100+ versions.

Hey everyone, I’ve been using PageSpeed Insights to measure my site's performance.

How reliable do you actually find PSI for real-user performance? And what alternatives or additional tools do you rely on for auditing page speed and Core Web Vitals?

Hi guys, I need your input.

Around 2 months ago, I launched my website in the dutch car niche. It scrapes car listings from the internet ( of the dutch car market ) and aggregates them into pricing pages per car + model + year. I started out with roughly 400-1000 pages, and it organically grew to 10k pages for both dutch and english translated pages ( so in total around 20k pages ).

I am running a programmatic seo setup where my db entries are the datasources of the templated pages. Each page page simply answers one single question ( with some extra information ) "what is the current market price of this car?" thats it.

The thing is: my amount of indexed pages keep on increasing, but the organic impressions fell completely flat after june 15 and haven't recovered since.
- impression on launch 25 may: 1
- impression on June 2: 73
- impressions on june 15: 444
- average impressions after june 15: 25

now one thing to mention: i did happen to have a viral reddit launch post which really bumped up the numbers temporarily to 1800 on a single day, dropping back to 417 two days later. That drop back to normal was at june 14.

What is going wrong here? Is my site marked as spam, or is this a result of simply me having a new domain?

Im not sure if I can share my website so you guys can check it out. Google Search console image in the comments.

Running www.fbkpower.com (UL-certified EV charging station manufacturer, B2B). Google Search Console shows growing impressions but CTR is ~0.3%. Clicks: single digits/day.

What I suspect:

Domain authority near zero (~1 yr old, almost no backlinks — submitted to B2B directories but it's early)

Competing with ChargePoint, ABB, Delta etc. for commercial EV keywords

Maybe titles still not compelling enough in SERP despite being technically correct

Is there a diagnostic step I'm missing to figure out whether it's a ranking-position issue vs. a CTR/creative issue, or is this just the waiting game for a new B2B domain?

Would appreciate any fresh eyes. Happy to share more data.

so i'm doing seo for my site, picking low kd keywords, building pages around them, and then just... waiting. waiting to rank, waiting to see if it lands in the click zone. and something it takes too long to see results and it's something we cannot control. and something things get tricky. i'm starting from 0 basically.

sometimes it just doesn't happen and we need to start again. my actual question is how do you undo this stuff properly, like how do i deindex those pages, build new ones, and move on without messing things up.

also low key worried that if i keep testing and rebuilding the same query over and over it starts looking like search manipulation? i mostly work off PAA for these low kd keywords btw.

so a few things i'm trying to figure out:

• am i doing something wrong
• do i actually need to remove/deindex the old pages and keep only the new ones, or is that overkill
• should i be more strategic/systemic about this instead of doing it

would really appreciate any advice from people who've actually run this process at scale, feels like i'm just guessing right now

We've noticed something strange with our site. Twice now we've been hit by what looks like spam backlinks (hundreds of low-quality .store domains, autogenerated names, etc.). After submitting a disavow file, we saw a very noticeable recovery in traffic almost immediately.

Whether that's coincidence or not, it made us realize we need a better way to monitor backlinks and overall SEO.

What tools do you actually recommend nowadays for:

-Monitoring new backlinks and possible spam attacks
-Keyword research
-General SEO management

Ahrefs seems to be the gold standard, but it's currently outside our budget. Is SEMrush a good alternative, or are there other tools you'd recommend that offer the best value for money?

I am in Lead Gen and going to use content as a way to get incremental traffic.

I am qualified to write about the niche, but, I don’t want the articles to show up when someone googles my name.

Since it is a YMYL niche I’m wondering if the strategy of having “editorial staff” as the author and it linked to a page about our staff, which only lists the credentials, but doesn’t state a specific person /name or include a link to a professional site (e.g LinkedIn)?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been doing some deep research on internal linking and PageRank distribution, and I wanted to get your thoughts on a strategy I'm looking to implement.

As far as I know, Google’s "First Link Priority" rule means that if you have multiple links on Page A pointing to Page B, Google will pass PageRank through all of them, but it will only process and attribute the Anchor Text of the very first link it encounters in the HTML.

Here is the thinkg: on my homepage, I have a "Go to Services" button right in the Hero section (which is great for UX/CRO but has a terrible generic anchor text). Later down the page, inside a contextual FAQ section, I have a highly optimized contextual link.

If First Link Priority is strictly applied, Google is ignoring my optimized FAQ anchor text and only associating my services page with "Go to Services", right?

To bypass this, I’m thinking about using Link Obfuscation for the conversion buttons. Essentially, turning the Hero button (and other secondary CTAs) into <span> or <button> elements with a data-link attribute triggered by JavaScript on click, so they remain fully functional for users but invisible as traditional <a> tags to Google's crawler.

This way, the only HTML link Google sees pointing to my services page is the highly contextual one inside the FAQ.

Am I missing something here? Does this strategy still hold up, or has Google's rendering became smart enough to bypass this type of JS obfuscation and consolidate them anyway?

Would love to hear your thoughts or if anyone has run tests on this recently!

Thanks for reading!

BTW, does Google interpret /services and /services#headache as the same?

What's your workflow for finding and optimizing content for query fanout? Do you just search in Perplexity or GPT, note down the queries, and use them naturally in your content? Or is that the wrong approach and there's a better way in your opinion? Whats everyone using and what have you found to be an efficient approach for this? Appreciate the discussion

PS: I have posted this in other SEO communities too, just to get more perspectives. Not here to spam.

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

I stood up a new domain for a browser game recently. It's Three.js/WebGL, so the "page" a user sees is essentially one <canvas> plus a JS bundle. Almost nothing a crawler traditionally chews on. It turned into a clean test of a question I keep having with people: for JS-heavy apps where the meaningful content renders to canvas or post-load DOM, how much are you actually trusting Googlebot's render pipeline in 2026 vs shipping a real server-side HTML shell?

No link, nothing to sell, I'm after how other people are handling this class of site.

What I shipped at launch (the shell, not the app):

• A static, edge-served HTML document with genuine descriptive copy, one semantic H1 matched to intent, and the game mounting into it, so there's real text and structure in the initial response rather than an empty root div
• JSON-LD (VideoGame), canonical, correct OG/Twitter
• sitemap + clean robots, submitted, URL manually queued
• Sub-second LCP from edge, no CMP, nothing render-blocking

Observation: indexed quickly and settled at the top of its primary term within about two days, page one for a couple of variants after.

The two things I actually want practitioner input on:

1. The render-trust line for canvas/JS apps. My working approach is to never rely on Google rendering the meaningful content, and instead put everything that needs to rank into the static HTML shell, treating the WebGL app as decoration Google can ignore. Is that still the right default, or are you comfortable letting the render pass do more now than you were two years ago? Anyone seen canvas-derived or heavily-hydrated content actually get indexed and rank without a pre-rendered equivalent?
2. Indexation latency. The manual submission clearly drove the speed, not the rank. Separately, new-URL indexation feels compressed to me over the last few months vs the 2023-24 crawl-budget period. Matching your data or small-sample noise?

Confounds I'm not hiding: exact-match term, low competition, n=1, and I can't isolate which lever moved what. Not claiming a method, claiming an observation about JS-app indexability and asking whether it holds for you.

Happy to drop the exact shell markup and schema in the comments if anyone's wrestling with a canvas or SPA that won't index.

I used the SEMrush free trial, but I still haven’t received any email with a Lifetime offer. I’ve seen people mention they eventually got one.
Is there any way to trigger it? Did you let the trial expire, wait a few days, stop using the account, or do something else?
I’d really appreciate any advice.

My e-commerce store's homepage used to rank position 1–3 for several major head terms in our industry. It peaked around September 2024 but since then, has steadily declined. Today, the homepage doesn't rank in the top 3 for any competitive keyword besides our exact brand name. Homepage traffic is down roughly 80% over the last 18 months.

Our category pages are fine: They have taken a slight dip but have mostly held up, still ranking at positions 1, 2 & 3 for competitive, transactional keywords.

Competitor homepages are still ranking: The top spots for the head terms we lost are still occupied by our competitors' homepages. This tells me it is not a global search intent shift by Google. They still want to rank homepages; they just don't want to rank mine.

I’ve worked with a few different SEOs since the decline. They all promised they could regain the rankings, but none have delivered, and honestly, no one has given me a convincing explanation as to why the homepage specifically has dropped from the rankings while other pages on my site have been fine.

I know it’s tough without seeing the URL, but if you were auditing a site where only the homepage had dropped where would you look?

Hi all, I hope you are all well.

I have a question regarding the queries that Google Search Console appears for my site. I see that it displays some, that I don't target for.But if search for them in google it will display my page in the search results for that query in e.g. the second page.

For example "Skroutz API" .

Of course this does not happen for all the queries, but I think it is normal.

My question is, should I try to change the content of the pages and the blog posts to target these queries (put it in titles if I can and at the start of a paragraph), and if I do that will I have a chance to appear in the first page for that queries?

Thank you in advance.

I want to track the search terms from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc., just like Google Search console, can anyone help me with this.
Thanks in advance.

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

A single landing page won't rank for its primary target keyword, even though it's well written, properly optimized, indexed, regularly crawled, and recognized by Google as the correct page. After updates it may briefly appear in the SERPs, then disappears again within days, while the rest of the website continues to rank normally for many other keywords. Has anyone experienced this kind of issue or found the underlying cause?

I migrated my website and everything is already done: All old URLs are 301 redirected to the new URLs. All internal links have been updated to the new URLs. There are no internal links pointing to the old URLs anymore.

XML sitemap only contains the new URLs.

Despite this, Google Search Console is still crawling the old URLs and the number of Page with redirect errors keeps reducing. But they are now coming in Redirect error. I'm also seeing more Crawled but currently not indexed pages.

Has anyone experienced this recently? Is this just a Google Search Console reporting delay or is there something else I should check?

Because the last valuation is iust finished and my errors has increased not decreased

And I am working to reducing it from January but not progress is coming.

Hi everyone,
Looking for some advice on a bizarre conversion issue. My site's daily orders have been fluctuating heavily and trending downward since June 15th.
Here is what I’ve already ruled out:
**Traffic:** GSC shows steady impressions and clicks. No noticeable drops or algorithm hits.
**Technical/Server:** Server logs are clean. No downtime, and site speed/loading is normal.
**Checkout Flow:** I did a couple of test orders, and the payment gateway seems to be working fine.
If traffic is identical but buying behavior completely shifted overnight, what else should I be auditing? Could it be a tracking issue, a specific browser/device bug, or are others seeing a seasonal mid-June slump? Appreciate any insights!

Context: The brand I'm working with hired an SEO agency to help grow authority.

Now, from what I understand, SEO = organic link building, which means we shouldn't be paying for links. Somehow, this 3rd-party agency is only bringing in paid links ($25, $50, sometimes $150/link) depending on what they and the webmaster they reached out to agreed on.

The agency also tried to provide content suggestions, but they're more tangent topics to what the brand actually provides. From what I understand, Google wants depth on topical authority and rewards it better than breadth/chasing keywords. I've read that Hubspot lost a lot of traffic with the recent updates because they had a lot of breadth-driven campaigns (among other things, of course).

I'm big on giving marketers/SEO an ample budget, but I think there's a need to rethink their efforts if it looks like we're bleeding money. How would you move about this?

Addendum: If it's okay that we also do some paid links, what is a good ratio of paid and unpaid? And am I asking the right questions here?

Thanks crowd,

jr. seo in training