The Edward Show

E1115: Endre Olsvik Elvestad built a large SEO program around SignLab, a sign-language learning company. Its websites offered searchable sign language videos across multiple countries.
Then Google AI Overviews appeared.
SignLab lost about 50% of its Google clicks. High-intent traffic and app downloads fell even harder. Google could show the answer directly in search by displaying SignLab's videos, leaving users with no reason to visit the website.
In this episode, Endre explains what happened, why the original programmatic SEO strategy stopped producing the same results, and how the company rebuilt organic acquisition across Google, YouTube, and AI search.
We cover:
- How AI Overviews reduced clicks while rankings and impressions often stayed stable
- Why losing website visits caused a much larger drop in app downloads
- How SignLab moved thousands of sign language videos from self-hosting to YouTube
- The upload limits, verification issues, and automation challenges involved
- Why YouTube became an important search engine for sign language queries
- Why YouTube improved visibility without fully replacing website conversions
- The difference between top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel traffic
- Which queries produced the most app downloads after the decline
- Why "Does Duolingo have ASL?" became a strong bottom-of-funnel topic
- How the team shifted from individual sign queries to broader communication problems
- Why traditional SEO fundamentals still mattered after AI Overviews
- How SignLab manages separate SEO strategies across multiple countries and domains
- Why direct translation was not enough for international SEO
- How AI agents help with research, outlines, writing, review, publishing, and updates
- Why content must reflect the culture, search behavior, and needs of each country
- How customer reviews can feed new topics into an automated SEO workflow
- What useful, specific, reviewed AI-generated content looks like
- Which tactics were less useful, including gray-hat LLM tactics and expensive monitoring tools
- The few actions that drove most of the recovery
This case study is for anyone dealing with declining organic clicks, zero-click search, AI Overviews, programmatic SEO, international SEO, YouTube SEO, or AI-assisted content production.
SignLab did not recover by finding a shortcut. It recovered by changing its content, expanding into YouTube, targeting queries closer to conversion, and applying solid SEO practices across every market.
⭐️ Endre Olsvik Elvestad on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/endreelvestad/ 
⭐️ Endre Olsvik Elvestad's company, SignLab - https://www.signlab.co/ 
⭐️ David Quaid on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid/ 
⭐️ Will Qu on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-qu/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Traffic Cut in Half
00:27 Sign Language SEO Model
01:37 AI Overviews Steal Videos
05:25 App Downloads Collapse
07:19 Working With David
09:44 Recovery Strategy Shift
15:24 YouTube Migration Plan
16:08 Upload Limits and Workflow
18:41 Verification to Scale Uploads
20:52 Titles Format and Editing
25:25 Replacing Embeds and SERP Impact
26:59 Why It Felt Unfair
32:31 YouTube Beats AI Answers
34:38 SEO Reset With Experts
36:16 What Good Content Means
38:21 Middle vs Bottom Funnel
42:00 Links And Topical Authority
44:06 Agentic Multilingual Publishing
46:25 Avoiding AI Translation Traps
51:12 Automated Content Feedback Loops
57:12 What Actually Drove Recovery
59:15 LLM Visibility And Community
01:01:40 Lessons And Closing
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #programmaticseo #digitalmarketing

1113: Five websites once dominated Google search, bringing in millions and millions of clicks every month. Then their rankings collapsed.
We break down five major SEO declines from the last few years, explain what caused them, and show why one site was able to recover while the others continued to struggle.
These examples cover some of the most common SEO mistakes companies are still making today, including scaled AI content, aggressive self-promotion in top-of-funnel content, weak search intent alignment, topical overreach, poor user experience, and an overdependence on informational traffic.
You'll learn what happened to:
- AInvest
- WPBeginner
- ClickUp
- HubSpot
- HouseFresh
AInvest scaled AI-generated finance content and briefly grew from roughly 270,000 monthly Google clicks to 9.5 million. After Google's spam updates, that traffic fell to fewer than 8,000 monthly clicks.
WPBeginner went from being one of the largest WordPress resource sites to losing nearly all of its organic search visibility. Its decline shows what can happen when informational content becomes overloaded with promotion, slow introductions, thin answers, and poor user experience.
ClickUp's blog fell from approximately 1.19 million monthly organic visitors to around 28,000. Many of its pages were built around ClickUp's conversion funnel rather than the searcher's actual intent. When rankings started falling, the company added thousands of additional templated pages instead of addressing the underlying problems.
HubSpot lost millions of monthly Google clicks after publishing across too many unrelated topics. Its content ranked for searches involving career advice, quotes, emojis, technical instructions, business ideas, and other subjects far outside its core expertise. HubSpot survived because its business was not dependent on blog traffic alone.
HouseFresh is the recovery story.
After being hit by Google's helpful content update, HouseFresh fell from around 50,000 monthly clicks to approximately 1,000. Instead of abandoning the site, the team continued improving its reviews, navigation, design, brand visibility, and presence outside Google.
HouseFresh later recovered to approximately 275,000 monthly clicks, more than five times its traffic before the original decline.
You'll learn:
- Why scaled AI content can create serious long-term SEO risks
- Why search intent matters more than publishing volume
- How excessive self-promotion can weaken informational content
- Why adding more pages may make an SEO decline worse
- How topical authority affects rankings
- Why high traffic does not always lead to revenue
- How branded search, direct traffic, referrals, and other channels reduce dependence on Google
- Why product pages and commercial pages can be more resilient than broad informational content
- What HouseFresh did differently after losing nearly all of its traffic
- Which SEO practices companies should avoid moving forward
The main lessons:
- Match the searcher's intent
- Do not scale low-value AI pages
- Do not publish content simply to increase page count
- Stay within subjects where your business has real expertise
- Avoid forcing product promotion into informational articles
- Give people useful answers quickly
- Build branded search and direct traffic
- Earn backlinks that also generate referral and direct traffic
- Create useful commercial pages for searches with buying intent
- Continue improving the site when rankings decline
- Do not use Google as your only source of customers
⭐️ Google's War on Scaled AI Content: The Rise and Fall of AInvest - Ep 803 - https://youtu.be/RpgOKUO_SyI 
⭐️ Google Took WPBeginner From 2.6M Clicks to 27K - Here's Why - Ep 1082 - https://youtu.be/pUBiXeLrxf4 
⭐️ From 1.19M to 28K: ClickUp's SEO Collapse (And What It Teaches Us) - Ep 1038 - https://youtu.be/SDsxGF3KTcc 
⭐️ Writeup - HubSpot SEO collapse - https://thestacc.com/blog/hubspot-traffic-drop-analysis/ 
⭐️ Why HubSpot Lost 20M Clicks (and How They Plan to Recover) - Ep 820 - https://youtu.be/AqjXoBv-7nA 
⭐️ From 1,000 to 200,000 Clicks: The INSANE SEO Comeback of HouseFresh.com - Ep 832 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QewNJ2AgQxM 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Biggest SEO Collapses
00:38 First Crash
02:51 Second Downfall
04:57 Third Decimation
07:13 Fourth Overreach and Destruction
10:14 Why It Survived
12:41 The Major Comeback
14:42 SEO Lessons Recap
15:22 Wrapping
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #digitalmarketing #seopodcast

E1114: AI can search faster, pull data from dozens of sources, analyze entire websites, and complete hours of SEO research in minutes.
But AI still does not think.
Andrew Melnychuk-Oseen explains what large language models actually do, why their reasoning can look more intelligent than it is, and where AI agents commonly fail when used for SEO.
We discuss why AI-generated work often sounds convincing while completely missing search intent, how bad context compounds across prompts, and why automating SEO without expert review can quietly destroy a website.
Andrew also breaks down how he uses AI agents responsibly to collect data, run SEO audits, create reports, and handle narrow tasks without allowing the system to publish unchecked changes.
Topics covered:
- Why an LLM is a statistical model, not a human brain
- Why AI "thinking" is different from actual human judgment
- How ChatGPT and AI agents use search and query fan-out
- Why AI often produces average or surface-level SEO content
- How AI misunderstands bottom-of-funnel search intent
- Why correcting an AI can accidentally make its output worse
- What context poisoning is and how it affects future responses
- Why memory can introduce irrelevant or incorrect assumptions
- How hallucinated numbers can corrupt SEO analysis
- The risks of connecting AI to Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics
- Why automated title and content updates can create bad user signals
- How agencies can damage client websites by removing human supervision
- Why Google is equipped to identify large-scale AI spam
- Why mass AI publishing could lead to severe Google penalties
- How to keep prompts, instructions, and source information focused
- Which SEO tasks AI agents are actually good at
- How one SEO audit went from 16 hours to eight minutes
- Why that audit still required an hour of professional quality control
- How AI agents can run separate research tasks without overloading one context window
- Why retrieving and organizing information is often AI's greatest strength
- When it is faster to stop prompting and complete the work yourself
- Why experienced professionals should use AI as an assistant, not a replacement
- How smaller companies and solo operators may adopt AI faster than large organizations
- Why AI is more likely to change jobs than eliminate human work entirely
The main lesson is simple: AI can dramatically reduce the time required to gather and organize information, but it cannot replace the judgment required to make good SEO decisions.
Use AI to retrieve, summarize, format, and assist.
Do not let it think it is the SEO.
⭐️ Andrew Melnychuk-Oseen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amovfx/ 
⭐️ Saaga Solve - https://saagasolve.com/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Meet the Guest
01:06 From Games to Bitcoin
02:52 Crypto Hype Lessons
05:57 Agents Need Humans
08:07 LLMs Explained Simply
16:11 Search and Fan Out
19:55 Why LLMs Feel Smart
24:00 Spam and Google Purge
29:08 Dead Internet Incentives
32:18 Jobs and Upskilling
34:55 Common SEO Failures
37:47 Context Hygiene Tips
43:36 How He Uses Agents
47:00 When AI Slows You Down
49:16 Model Choice Matters
51:25 AI Inside Organizations
53:42 16 Hour SEO Audit to 8 Minutes
57:40 Sales Agent Edge Cases
01:01:32 Are LLMs Topping Out
01:07:46 AI SEO for Non Natives
01:11:44 Recursive Hyper Agents
01:18:01 Automation Traps and Risks
01:27:21 Responsible Agent Workflow
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #aiseo #digitalmarketing

E1112: Medium is ranking strongly in Google again, and brands are using it to publish keyword-focused content, earn fast rankings, and appear in AI-generated search results.
I explain why Medium has returned as a useful parasite SEO platform, how companies are using it alongside LinkedIn and other social platforms, and what can go wrong when the strategy becomes too promotional.
You'll learn:
- What parasite SEO means and why high-authority platforms can rank quickly
- Why Medium's organic traffic and top-three keyword rankings have increased
- How Medium articles can rank within days of publication
- Why Medium content can also appear in AI Overviews and AI search tools
- How to optimize a Medium article's page title, URL slug, H1, meta description, opening sentence, and image alt text
- Why LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and X can support similar strategies
- How brands are creating separate author profiles and consultant-style identities to promote products
- Why some companies hire employees specifically to publish Medium and social content
- How brands balance general niche content with posts targeting commercial keywords
- Why publishing frequency and cross-platform distribution matter
- How Medium articles are repeatedly shared through social accounts using keyword-focused language
- Why this strategy works better in industries where customers are less familiar with SEO tactics
- Why excessive links and one-sided recommendations can make content look promotional
- How poor content can cause searchers to return to Google and choose another result
- Why Google can reduce visibility across an entire author profile
- Why brands should not depend on one third-party platform for long-term rankings
- What past platforms such as Yahoo Answers can teach us about temporary search visibility
- Why Medium may rank well today but lose visibility after a future algorithm change
Medium currently benefits from Google's preference for useful user-generated content, but that does not make every tactic safe or sustainable. The strongest content still needs to satisfy the searcher, answer the query clearly, and avoid misleading claims or undisclosed promotion.
This episode covers what brands are doing, not what every company should copy. The more aggressive versions of this strategy can create legal, reputational, and search-related risks.
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Medium Parasite SEO Returns
00:18 What Parasite SEO Means
00:45 Medium Traffic Surge Stats
01:30 Why Medium Ranks Fast
02:53 Tim Soulo Medium Playbook
04:05 Brands Running Stealth Parasite SEO
05:16 Posting Cadence Across Platforms
07:28 Why It Works and Where
08:58 Biggest Risks and Penalties
09:57 Platforms Change Over Time
10:50 Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#parasiteseo #searchengineoptimization #seo #blackhatseo

E1111: Red Bull ranks for far more than energy drink keywords.
It ranks for searches related to GTA V cheat codes, skateboarding, Formula 1, surfing, motocross, breakdancing, athletes, and many other topics across sports, gaming, and entertainment.
I break down how Red Bull built enough authority to rank across such a wide range of subjects - and why its success comes from much more than publishing SEO content.
Red Bull's search performance is closely connected to its broader marketing strategy. Its sponsorships, events, athlete partnerships, original content, and viral stunts generate backlinks, press coverage, branded searches, referral traffic, and repeated mentions across the web.
Topics covered:
- Why Red Bull ranks for GTA V cheat code keywords
- How much organic search traffic Red Bull receives
- How Red Bull's search visibility compares with Monster, Rockstar, and Celsius
- Why most of Red Bull's highest-ranking keywords are non-branded
- How Red Bull built authority across sports, gaming, and entertainment
- Why sponsorships can produce more value than a standard backlink campaign
- How events generate links, press coverage, brand mentions, and searches
- Why unlinked brand mentions may still support search visibility
- How Red Bull's viral stunts contribute to its long-term SEO performance
- Why Red Bull's SEO growth has been steadier than HubSpot's
- The difference between publishing unrelated content and building genuine topical relevance
- How experiential marketing can support SEO, AEO, and visibility in large language models
- Practical ways smaller businesses can apply the same principles
Red Bull's SEO numbers discussed in the episode include:
- Approximately 7.8 million organic clicks per month
- Rankings for approximately 1.6 million keywords
- A domain authority comparable to major publishing and software websites
- Roughly 84% of its top 10,000 keywords being non-branded
- Search visibility significantly greater than several competing energy drink brands
The main lesson is not that every company should copy Red Bull's budget or attempt a large-scale stunt.
The lesson is to invest in marketing activities that create several benefits at once.
A good sponsorship, event, partnership, interview, or original project can produce:
- Relevant backlinks
- Earned media coverage
- Branded searches
- Referral traffic
- Social media content
- Brand mentions
- Relationships within your industry
- Greater topical authority
- More reasons for people to search for and talk about your business
Ways businesses can apply this strategy:
- Sponsor events that are closely connected to your customers
- Negotiate for inclusion on event websites, newsletters, press pages, and social posts
- Sponsor creators whose audiences overlap with your target market
- Organize recurring meetups, tournaments, workshops, or challenges
- Partner with complementary businesses on shared events
- Publish dedicated pages for sponsorships, partners, athletes, creators, or organizations
- Interview industry experts, customers, and event organizers
- Turn events into videos, articles, short clips, and other useful content
- Create tools, resources, or other assets people have a reason to reference
- Test interest in stunt or campaign ideas before investing heavily in them
Red Bull did not build its search authority through SEO pages alone. It built a brand that is genuinely connected to the topics it ranks for.
That is what makes this case study useful for businesses of any size.
⭐️ HubSpot SEO collapse - https://thestacc.com/blog/hubspot-traffic-drop-analysis/ 
⭐️ The GaryVee podcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUnV-xaH32k 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Red Bull GTA SEO Surprise
00:40 Keyword Footprint Beyond Brand
01:23 Authority Versus Competitors
02:16 Steady Growth and Volatility
02:47 Sponsorships That Earn Links
04:14 Mentions Entities and Brand Search
05:25 HubSpot Traffic Drop Contrast
07:05 Analog Events Barbell Era
08:43 Red Bull Stunts and Examples
10:46 Action Plan for Your Brand
13:33 Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #seocasestudy #digitalmarketing