I've run content marketing and SEO teams for 17 years. I pulled real SEO and content questions from the internet and answered them on camera. Here's what I said, cleaned up for reading.

Do backlinks actually matter?

Getting backlinks is not fun. It's probably the biggest grind in this business. You dig through the internet for the right contact, send email after email, make phone calls, negotiate, confirm the link, and then try to measure whether it did anything.

But it works. No matter how much Google says not to worry about it, getting other websites to put a contextual, relevant link to your pages is one of the biggest correlations I've seen with improved SEO performance.

10 or 15 years ago I'd have said 10% of SEO impact comes from your own site (the content and technical changes) and 90% comes from who links to you, how many, how often, and about what. That ratio has shifted. Today I'd call it closer to 60/40 in favor of links.

Link building should look a lot more like PR now. Getting talked about in credible press outlets. Not blogger link exchanges, directory links, or the growth hacks from the early 2000s. Good link building is good PR and good brand building.

One more thing. As AI takes up more of the search results, we're seeing the links we build for clients affect how large language models mention those clients. The models ingest every page they can and synthesize a summary. The more people talk about your content and your company, the more material those models have. We've seen a correlation between the links we drive and how often clients show up in brand mentions, citations, and AI Overviews.

How important is internal linking?

Internal links are the links on your own website: your navigation, your sitemap, the links between your pages. They're incredibly important. Make sure Google can crawl them, and use them to say clearly which pages matter so they get found.

How long should a blog post be?

It doesn't matter. Word count is irrelevant. A post needs to be as long as it takes to make its argument or deliver what the headline promised.

I've seen posts under 100 words work because they answered a basic question. I've also published giant ebooks as blog posts because that's what it took to compete on the topic. Stop worrying about word count. Make sure the post delivers enough value to earn the click.

1 author bio or 20?

There's no right answer on the number. What matters is that you have them. Author bios have become more important as Google and large language models look for credibility signals. Use a real person with real subject matter expertise, and link the bio to their other author pages and social profiles.

What should I avoid when hiring an SEO agency?

There's an agency model I'd call churn and burn, and it's particularly bad in SEO. During the sales process they bring in their heaviest hitter, the expert who has solved every problem you can imagine. Then that person never works on your account.

In the first month or 2 they set up keyword tracking and reporting, run a tech audit, and hand you a lot of information. After that, execution stops and everything becomes maintenance. You keep paying a monthly fee because you don't know what SEO should look like. Eventually someone realizes you're getting rankings and no revenue, and you fire them. They're fine with that, because they sign new clients faster than they lose old ones.

This hits small businesses hardest: restaurants, plumbers, and contractors on small retainers. These days I tell people straight up: if you're paying less than $5,000 a month for SEO, you're probably not competitive, and you run the risk that your agency isn't doing the work.

Is SEO just snake oil?

I've heard this my entire career, and I built a lot of that career trying to prove it wrong.

It's complicated. Some people practicing SEO aren't doing anything of value, and that poisons the whole industry. The good SEOs, the ones in the grind making meaningful changes, have a serious impact on a business's bottom line. I've seen entire companies grow off the back of a good SEO program.

I started as a copywriter and stumbled into a community of people building niche sites for passive income. That's where a lot of SEO started, and a lot of the early industry overpromised and underdelivered. I built my own sites and they worked, but only well enough to make a few thousand dollars a month in ad revenue. So I moved into consulting and agencies, working with bigger and bigger brands.

I kept hearing the same thing: we don't believe this channel works. Around 2013 or 2014 I decided to prove them wrong. I went in-house at a small startup and led SEO and content for about 6 years. I built a content and creative team around the practices I'd been preaching. It made the company millions of dollars in revenue every year and brought in millions of potential customers every month.

If you still think modern SEO is snake oil, look at how much big companies spend on it year after year. They wouldn't keep spending billions on something that doesn't work. It takes time, and it takes practitioners who know what they're doing and can push change through your organization: on the website, in PR, and in the product. It's not snake oil. It's hard.

Have a marketing question? Send it to me on LinkedIn and I'll try to answer it.