AI Search: the measurement blindness angle

Your analytics dashboard is lying to you, and it isn’t its fault.

GA4 was built for a click economy. AI search is quietly dismantling that economy, and the measurement stack can’t see it happening.

Here’s the mechanism.

When a buyer reads about you inside ChatGPT or Perplexity and then types your name into a browser, that visit usually arrives with no referrer. GA4 files it under “direct” traffic. Industry estimates suggest only 30 to 40 percent of AI-driven visits show up correctly, with the rest misclassified as direct, organic or unassigned.

The consequence is more than a tracking annoyance. You end up under-crediting the content that actually shaped the decision and over-crediting “brand strength” you can’t explain. Worse, the buyers your competitors are winning inside AI conversations never appear in your data at all. Underperformance shows up with no visible cause, and your budget defence gets harder every quarter.

This is why “our numbers look fine” is no longer reassuring. The numbers were designed to miss exactly the shift that matters most.

If your direct traffic has climbed year on year with no campaign to explain it, that is not a quirk. It may be the clearest signal you have that AI is already mediating your buyers’ research.

What has your direct traffic done over the last twelve months?

Read the full article on my LinkedIn page.

Link Outreach Services Purposes and Advantages

SEO link building is an investment that can pay off big time in the long run. It’s cost-effective, repeatable, and personalized. But it can also be tedious if you don’t know where to start. Link outreach services can help you build the right link profiles for your business.

Link Outreach Services are a great way to get quality links for your website. However, they are time-consuming and expensive. Luckily, several companies out there will do the outreach for you. Keep reading for tips and strategies to help you make the most of your outreach efforts.

Link building is a Strategy to Get Links from Other Quality Websites

Link building is gaining links to your website from other websites. It is important for search engine optimization. Google measures backlinks as one of the most important factors in ranking a page. For example, a page that ranks on the first page of Google has an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than a page that ranks at the bottom.

The process of link building involves acquiring hyperlinks from quality websites. Links signal to Google that a website is an authoritative source and has high-quality content. While Google’s algorithms are complex, backlinks are still important in its search rankings. This is because sites with more links earn better rankings.

It’s a Time-Intensive Part of SEO

Link outreach is a key part of SEO strategy. It involves building relationships with websites and blogs to generate links. Link building is not about building a big list of contacts. Instead, the key is to target prospects that offer value in return for a link. This can be a product or service or even your personality.

Link outreach requires creativity and imagination. Standing out from the crowd in an online environment full of competitors is important. You may even want to consider unconventional methods to achieve your goals.

SEO Link Building is a Long-Term Investment

Link building is a crucial element of SEO and is an effective way to raise your domain authority. A higher domain authority means higher rankings, which in turn means more traffic. Not only that, but effective link building can also generate traffic through other channels, such as referral traffic. If you create strong links with high-quality publishers, you can expect to receive separate referral traffic on top of the traffic that you receive from search engines.

Link building can also help your business achieve its goals by promoting brand awareness. You can begin by building links with niche sources and build your way up to high-authority sites, such as Forbes or the Huffington Post. The goal is to create a consistent flow of referral traffic to your website, increasing the likelihood of conversions. This means more direct revenue for you.

It’s Cost-Effective

Link outreach services are a great way to generate links for your website. They work by exposing your website to more audiences and increasing your relevance. They also can generate more traffic and potential revenue for your website. As a result, you will be able to reach a larger audience and receive more links to your site in a shorter amount of time.

You can find several link outreach services that are cost-effective and easy to use. It offers four packages that you can choose from. The Standard package provides keyword alerts for one keyword, the Advanced package provides three keyword alerts, and the Premium package provides unlimited keyword alerts and support.

It’s Personal

Link outreach services can be a powerful tool to boost your website’s visibility. This process involves building relationships with various sources and creating engaging content. This strategy takes time, but it is very effective for gaining links. In addition to outreach, it can also be useful to your digital PR campaign.

Link-building outreach is all about quality rather than quantity. Targeting prospects that provide real value to your company is essential. Your outreach should explain exactly what you can offer them in return for a link.

It’s Repeatable

Link outreach services can help you improve your content’s visibility on the web and generate backlinks. Backlinks improve the visibility of your content on search engines. They are also helpful for promoting your site to the press. However, link building requires organization. A simple spreadsheet can help beginners and intermediate link builders, but this method becomes cumbersome when you have several campaigns to manage. Link outreach services can help you avoid this issue and increase the efficiency of your outreach efforts.

Link outreach services can help you attract your target audience with crowd marketing, which involves contacting bloggers and site owners to leave a review about your product or service. Commenting on blogs and websites improves your brand’s image and attracts new clients. In addition, this method is affordable and safe. The goal of outreach is to gain backlinks and establish an agreement with the blogger or site owner.

It’s Automated

The outreach process is one of the most effective ways to build links and generate referral traffic. Automation can automate up to 90% of the process, allowing for better productivity and more time for other tasks. Outreach software automates finding and checking websites for link opportunities, sending messages to website owners, and more. To begin using outreach software, you must activate a license and set up the program.

Link-building outreach is typically done manually at the beginning stages, but as the pipeline grows and the amount of content increases, the process becomes more complicated. Automating the process can help you save time and effort by eliminating the guesswork. In addition, it can help you get a better quality of link traffic.

SEO copywriting, keyword check

Website copy testing for SEO

I hired a copywriter to do the website home page – but how will I know if what they wrote WORKS?

Great question – I got this from a customer who did not hire me… but had the savvy to ask the right question. It looks nice but is the website home page copy doing its job? Bringing inbound traffic, showing up in SEO, right keywords and key phrases.

Testing web copy

After the copy has been published on your website leave it in place for a week so that the search engine spiders can crawl the site and index it fully.
Then do a test to see how you are performing.

Natural Search Copywriting

I will show you how to find out if what they wrote is showing up in natural search with the right keywords.
[Getting Google to show your website when someone searches online is a sign of GREAT copywriting.]
Go to this website, put in your URL and look at the results.  This client has 17 keywords and 0 visitor traffic. (It’s a new website so I’m not concerned about traffic volumes right now).
  1. Are these the right keywords for [your business]?
  2. Check the visitor traffic from New Zealand (it defaults to USA)
  3. What keywords are you showing up for? Do they look sort-of right?
  4. Check the search difficulty (right hand column) the lower the number the easier it is for you to compete for it

What next?

Your copywriters job is complete if the keywords match your business products and services – the type of search phrases you would expect someone to use when looking for a business like yours.

Now hand over to the marketing team – they will work out how to get website visitor numbers UP, how to start conversations with prospective customers and how to get customers to return and buy from you over and over again. [Inbound marketing; outbound marketing; loyalty repeat customer marketing; testimonials.]

Website traffic and Key word count

SEO copywriting, keyword check

image SEO

Image credits and SEO

As content creators we all understand the power of strong images to support our written content.

I believe that creators should be paid, credited and be a part of the content team. But I got scammed recently – here’s the detail so you don’t get caught by the same trick.

I was concerned when I got the message – and so I went to check my source code for the article. The images below show what I found on their website and on mine for the article they referenced.

You can do a reverse image lookup search – this way you can find out where the image has also been used. [I did this recently for a beautiful rowing picture of a crew with a whale below them – but needless to say people are still sharing it saying it’s not photoshopped!]

Image Scam Message

My name is Casey and I represent Writix company.
Due to our records, you had used one of our pictures in your article https://creativeagencysecrets.com/anatomy-of-effective-cold-direct-mail/
Here is a link to our article with this picture https://writix.co.uk/blog/plan-an-assignment
I understand that probably you have found it on a web, but it would be great if you give a credit to https://writix.co.uk

Thank you in advance.

Regards,
Casey

OhNoYoudon’t

Casey

Lovely to hear from you but the image you refer to is from Unsplash. When used with appropriate credits (which I do) they have nothing to do with Writix as you did not originate the photo image.
And so I’d refer back to your employers quickly before the Unsplash creator sues them for not crediting use of the image correctly.

Rebecca Caroe Quora profile

Using Wikipedia and Quora for marketing

I recently got asked about whether Wikipedia is good for marketing. It’s a high traffic website from where backlinks could be valuable.

If you do create Wikipedia entries be aware that there are rules about businesses on the platform.

The recent history of Marketing on Wikipedia

A lot of PR agencies got publicly burned while trying to promote their clients there.
Which led to Wikipedia publishing this.
And check out the PR institute rules in the UK which followed.

Basically, don’t expect this to be an amazing source of new business.

However, I have an other option to offer you which may work.

Quora expert profile

5 Quora tips for marketing

Answering questions around your topic of expertise and interest and inspiration is definitely somewhere you can shine. It’s not open source, so nobody can edit your submissions and you can get upvoted and become an “expert” on the platform quite quickly.

The key is to start in an established niche where you are confident.
Here are 5 easy tips on writing Quora replies with a marketing slant.

  1. Read all the other answers first and upvote / or reference good parts which you agree with
  2. Then add your own slant which is hopefully something not already mentioned
  3. Find something in your own published content which could be linked from your answer and which adds more detail. This is key because a skim reader won’t follow the link, but someone who is really interested will click to follow and land on your site. So you filter out the tyre kickers quickly.
  4. If you haven’t already got something you can use from your own content write it now. Write it on your website / blog, publish it, and link it inside your Quora answer before you hit save in Quora.
  5. Use the GA campaign link tool so you can identify traffic from that article link.
  6. All Quora links are nofollow but real people will click on them – so they give you customers instead of immediate SERP rank juice.
  7. Tick the box to follow the answers and get alerted when someone else joins the thread so you can come back in later if you need.

Now what’s stopping you?

 

Oh, and if you came here from Manaaki – welcome. You’re following exactly the technique I recommend for use on Quora.

And you can use this technique on other forums relevant to your niche. I have three which send me traffic and build my profile as an expert in new business development.

spam SEO linkback example

Getting linkbacks for SEO

<Rant warning begins>

Do you regularly check your website links?

I found comments in my site back end today which made me spit tacks.

And so I wrote to the business who was linked from the commenter.

Do you know your SEO agency are making spammy comments on blogs in order to get you linkbacks? It doesn’t work and gives you a bad name.

So don’t do it.

AI written comment is spam

 

Using bots for marketing

And another thing – using AI to write comments creates inhuman weirdness.

Read the text in the image above. This is clearly not written by a human; not written by a human who speaks English as a second language.

This is a bot.

AI comment spam

Writing comments on blogs can be a nice way to get linkbacks – but most popular sites now set all comments to be [nofollow] links and so it’s not very beneficial. Clearly some agencies have decided that cutting costs by using artificial intelligence tools is worthwhile.

I am not against experimentation. BUT check the outputs match your expectations.

The comments on my site just scream LOW QUALITY SPAM.

Who seriously thinks that bots can make good marketers for B2B is just plain WRONG.

 

<Rant over>

Marketing after lockdown ends

Post-lockdown marketing is not going to be anything like we did before.  There are new constraints and new opportunities – it’s up to us to start to find what these are new.

Start preparing for Level 3 marketing

  • One accounting firm offered to open their ‘little black book’ to source helpful contacts among their clients
  • Neil Patel has written a Global SEO technical article 
  • Find helpful topics using AnswerThePublic.com
  • Check for early signs about consumer sentiment post-lockdown.  The new normal will not be the same, must as we might have liked to move back to what went before.

 

SEO for online retail

I’m doing quick updates on daily topics.  Let me know what is helpful for you.

Business rules for ERP

A challenge for a retail website selling B2B. Where and how to update SEO – should it be in ERP or should it be on the site? How to set rules?

 

Digital Strategy and your Website

For all in-house marketing managers, I’m running some training hosted by CCH Learning during February.  I first ran this course three years ago and it remains the most popular I’ve ever done with them.  Digital Strategy and Your Website.

Update your professional website

Business websites cannot be static “set-and-forget” marketing assets. Recent changes to search and social algorithms affect your business. Learn how to work your website hard so that it pays back the investment to the business, brings in new enquiries and showcases the firm’s expertise and key staff.

This is a practical training webinar which will show you how to test your website’s effectiveness and give you a checklist of what you can do to improve key metrics.

Further, a business website MUST be the central hub for all your marketing activity.  It needs close integration with other key marketing technologies which I’ll be teaching on this course.

Invest in your marketing skills

Get yourself onto this course – the investment is a modest NZ$215 + GST and I know you’ll be glad you came.

My reviews from all the courses I have given reflect the client testimonials I get from direct clients.