Blair MacGregor
@blairmacgregor
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Independent search analyst. I help people navigate the SEO landscape in a post-AI world. 15+ year marketer. Long-suffering #isles fan.
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Joined November 2009
I added 20+ expert reviewers to 4 different sites in some of the most competitive verticals in SEO. One site saw a 400%+ increase in traffic in the year after they were incorporated on the site. The other? A 79% increase. And both sites are still doing pretty well, all things considered. Want to know how it was done? I wrote a 5000+ word guide that outlines everything I know about 3rd-party expert outreach after doing it for the last 4 years in the financial, health and legal spaces. (But I'll argue it's worth doing whether you're YMYL or not!) You'll learn: -Why it matters -The impact it can have on a site -Where best to find experts for your site Since I'm sure there will be doubters (completely understandable!), the usual SEO disclaimers apply: -Like any case study, this is correlative. -With multiple tests, campaigns happening simultaneously (as well as external factors), it's impossible to isolate any one element as a "silver bullet." Including this one. But based on what I know was happening internally, I have confidence that this was an outsized contributor to the results you see here. -YMMV based on your industry Enjoy! I hope you find this valuable. 🙏And I'd encourage you to consider this as one tool in your arsenal to help cultivate and grow E-E-A-T on your own site. Any questions, feedback or errors? Hit me up in the replies here. cc: @lilyraynyc @Marie_Haynes @glenngabe @aleyda @Kevin_Indig @CyrusShepard @brodieseo @nichepursuits @tonythill
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The PublicSchoolReviews case study is interesting because it wasn't a site that had just started blitzscaling pSEO content out of nowhere. They've been aggregating publicly accessible information like that for a long time. Suddenly they can't rank for these branded school terms.
Check out my latest article on @sistrix - an analysis of the greatest losers of SEO visibility in Google's US results throughout 2024:
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@LifestyleBender Right. It might be better for products that people buy more on specs, like PCs/laptops etc. Or individual car models/trims.
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@MarkHansen Same. Worked yesterday, broken today.
Yep, I just tried to replicate this again, and I'm seeing the same thing: blank citations now appear where they functioned correctly yesterday. Honestly crazy how this was able to be deployed out in the wild in this condition. cc: @searchliaison
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Yep, I just tried to replicate this again, and I'm seeing the same thing: blank citations now appear where they functioned correctly yesterday. Honestly crazy how this was able to be deployed out in the wild in this condition. cc: @searchliaison
This is taking product comparisons to a new level in AIOs... but it's sort of broken on my end. I tested in labs and outside and the citations don't trigger, I see blank citations, etc. Maybe this one isn't ready for primetime yet, but it's a HUGE heads-up for publishers comparing products. Wow.
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@garethaboyd CRO efforts in the immediate term to claw back revenue, improve brand/trust while the SERPs are in flux, which hopefully 🤞🏻 translate into visibility gains. That sums up a lot of what I’m telling publishers/sites like this. Stuff you can control vs stuff you can’t.
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(In all seriousness, this site is extremely not good and the fact that it's growing like a weed for all manner of queries is mildly horrifying; although I have seen other sites do the gated answer stuff, namely those legal question sites/directories)
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Google wants (or says they want) to reward writers & publishers with domain expertise who know their subject inside out. E-E-A-T! At the same time, journalism itself is getting squeezed; the ones that remain are spreading themselves thinner, working multiple beats. Seems bad!
State of Digital PR Report (2025) - by @buzzstream & @VincetheNero
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@louisnicholls_ @dennishegstad @beehiiv Thanks for sharing. Like OP, I've been getting subbed to these random Beehiv lists in the same way. This makes sense.
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Senior executives: "Our company is well-positioned to respond effectively to AI-driven changes in Search and user behavior" SEO consultants and the people at those companies actually doing the work:
Based on a survey of 300 director-level or higher marketing leaders -> Marketing leaders on how prepared they are for AI search, which platforms they think of as non-Google search engines, if they are adjusting their search strategies, how they are measuring AI search, and more. via @SEO on @botify
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Pharma marketers:
When everyone is worried about DeepSeek but you work for a company that’s still stuck in 2005.
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The way I pitch E-E-A-T now: -CRO play (short-term) to improve conversion/$ from existing traffic -Organic visibility improvements (hopefully) in the long-term Far easier to sell to decision-makers that way than finding yourself in pointless "iS iT a RaNkInG fAcToR"? debates.
No. Because EEAT is not directly about Rankings. It's the GQRG - not a list of ranking factors. There are some overlaps (predominantly Links), but the majority is a mish-mash of stuff that G sees on pages/sites that users tend to like ... ... that they don't tend to bounce back to SERPs from. (So most of the crap you see bandied about as EEAT Ranking advice, falls into the SERP User Behaviour bucket - and bunch of indirect features - that may or may not hold influence.) And people fail to grasp the complexity of "knowledge". How is G meant to gauge that what X wrote is more profound than Y, or that Z's version is more realistic, or that the 123 page is simply a mashup from 15 different sources ? G has to take small steps, that are fast/cheap. It really doesn't do a shed ton of parsing or lookups etc. Bare minimum to get fairly good results. And lots of those little process, in series/chains. That's it.
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@gaganghotra_ Probably toeing the line in terms of "content written for search engines." If these pages didn't offer anything unique re: information gain, they'd be problematic. But these are all very real potential customer personas for Wix as a CMS, especially based on their positioning.
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Everyone knows about the graveyard of completed-but-not-executed-on audits at the enterprise level, and sure, in some cases, the quality of the recommendations is sometimes just bad/clearly spit out of a tool. More often though, in my experience, the 47 bosses, bosses' bosses and bosses' bosses' bosses needed to sign off on *one thing* lead to a stagnation within the system and all of the people involved (rightly or wrongly) giving up out of fatigue.
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Google rep: Now that it's been a little over 18 months since we buried UA forever, how do you feel about GA4? Me:
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