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I recently sat down with a group of digital marketers to discuss 2027 SEO/AEO efforts, and I asked how many of them had a formal plan for their SEO efforts over the past year. Not a single hand went up. I was completely surprised by that response, as the opposite of a plan is either winging it by just coming up with things to do or taking direction from someone else in the org who actually has a plan.

Planning is one of the most essential functions in any business because a plan drives hiring, budgeting, messaging, and every other aspect that makes a business successful, or not. Teams, employees, and even agencies that don’t build their own plans end up following someone else’s. The best way to ensure your priorities are considered- because your priorities and passions drive your happiness and success in a role- is to build a plan.

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Planning is essential

While some organizations' structures might not let you drive the plan, not having one guarantees you won't own it. I've seen many companies budget for and develop SEO plans (and now AEO) for a team that isn't in the room, but it's impossible to make the case to join that room without something new to add to the conversation. That is a plan.

In the closing quarter of the year, when many businesses plan the next year, now is the best time to develop and present your SEO plans for 2027.

• Want more headcount on your team in 2027? Now is when you ask.

• Want to buy a new enterprise tool? Q4 is when it gets allocated.

• Want to increase your learning and development budget so you can register as an early bird for conferences? Ask for it before the books close.

Budgets close before the year does

In my experience, most SEO budget requests get denied because they aren't made during the formal planning cycle. If you show up in February of next year and ask for a new employee just to manage AI visibility (spoiler alert: you probably don’t need one), they'll almost certainly reject it because there isn’t a spare $150K sitting around waiting to be spent. If the business decides it’s a priority, then they would have to pull it from something else, which most likely has a team that doesn’t want to give it up. They will fight to keep it.

If that same request were made right now, it would have a much higher chance of success because the CFO and budget committees are dividing up the spend pool, and those funds don’t need to be pulled from anywhere. These requests get easier later in the year once, hopefully, a company beats its annual projections and has more unallocated budget, or other teams haven’t used all their funds as planned to date. But why wait? Use this time now to think through next year and get your wishes granted.

ROI forecasts are required

While many teams I have met have very thin budget requests, if they have any at all, most are missing the critical component of a good budget request: the outcome. Many teams, not just SEO teams, march into a budget planning session with a wish list without saying what they will return to the company. The objective of a plan is to get the holders of a budget to make investments, not to give grants. For that to happen, the request has to include an ROI.

ROI is one of those things that SEO teams have had the hardest time ever getting right, and for most of the past two decades it didn’t matter because even without a clear line of sight from search to conversion, it was plainly obvious that the revenue earned in aggregate by channels that were considered to be search was orders of magnitude larger than the spend on the channel.

That changed over the last three years, when traffic suddenly started shifting away from organic channels because of the triple whammy of Google algorithm updates, AI Overviews, and AI chatbots. I still believe organic channels are as profitable as ever if you use more proxies (see this post), but for a leadership team that has not been sold, it definitely looks dire.

The answer to this is to build a logical ROI plan. I am a big fan of using TAM as a forecasting method because it doesn’t require a perfect line of sight to conversion; it maps the journey and forecasts success without needing attribution. This lets you fund other marketing channels without a perfect last-click model.

Also, now is the time to adjust your reporting to show the impact of AI traffic using proxies, so you can more easily defend your efforts next year. You will be in quite the bind if you budget and plan based on TAM but then still get measured on last click.

What the plan needs to say

A plan is not a forty-slide deck full of keyword volumes and competitor screenshots; that’s how you lose your audience. What works is a short, three- to five-page document that says what you will build, what it will cost, when you will do the work (broken down by quarter), and what the business should expect to see at the end of each quarter.

(I am building a tool that generates presentations for roadmap planning; see more information at the bottom of this email.)

Planning for the whole year, not just quarters, matters because you might put in the effort in Q1, but the results don’t show up until Q4. SEO/AEO are not instant successes. You need to make clear that these aren’t open-ended investments, but they are also not performance marketing type of efforts where the results happen in the same quarter. Being held to a schedule feels risky, but it is what makes this an investment, not a gift. If you are the CMO on the receiving end of one of these plans, use this checklist for an SEO plan: a cost, a date, and an outcome for every bet, or send it back.

Don’t overshoot

Pick three or four bets and stop there. Every extra initiative does the opposite of what you intend. It dilutes your focus and makes the plan harder to sell. Say you propose rebuilding a product category and expect it to drive a specific number of qualified leads by the end of the year; that plan can be clearly judged on its merits, while a list of ideas can’t.

Your goal isn’t to solve everything; you want to complete these initiatives, and you need more than budget to get others to support you. This plan forces a conversation with the teams you depend on. SEO plans fail more often from missing engineering time than from bad strategy, because the in-house SEO owns the outcome but has no authority over the engineers and product managers who control the inputs.

The plan is your promotion case

A plan is your promotion case for this coming promotion cycle, but even if you aren’t so fortunate, it becomes your record for the next one. You get a chance to show leadership by developing a plan, managing toward it, and then meeting it. The person who walks into planning season with an outline of what will happen is the person who gets asked what they would do with more people, a larger scope, or a seat at the leadership table.

You may not need a plan for your boss; I hope you do, but if you don’t, you should still have an outline of what you hope to get done in 2027 and work towards that goal. SEO and its AI byproducts are important enough that you shouldn’t just be winging it.

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*Citations are the new links. Let’s not repeat the mistakes.*

We’ve spent 20 years learning what happens when link building becomes a race to the bottom. Yet somehow, we’re watching the same thing happen with AI citations. Automated Reddit posts, low-quality listicles, and placements on websites nobody actually reads.

The funny thing is, we have no shortage of tools telling us where brands are missing citations. But who’s actually getting them? SEO points to PR, PR points to the agency, and the agency points back to the client. Everyone agrees it’s important. Nobody owns it.

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Before you start

You’ll need a Google account with access to the Search Console property you want to track, and Editor access to Google Drive to upload a file. Nothing here requires a paid Google Workspace plan. The whole thing runs on a free Google account.

Step 1: Convert the file to Google Sheets

Upload the Brand_Search_Trends_Tracker.xlsx (linked below) to Google Drive. Double-click it, then in the preview screen, choose Open with > Google Sheets. This creates an editable Sheets copy. Apps Script, which powers the automated Search Console pull, only runs inside native Google Sheets, not inside an Excel file sitting in Drive unconverted.

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Foundation Marketing and Ahrefs.

• Paid subscribers can download this Python crawler, which calculates the click depth of your pages, and check out this post for my roadmap template.

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Much of SEO has changed with the introduction of AI, and link building has not survived the transition unscathed either. I believe most of what passed for link building over the last decade was already obsolete before AI-assisted search showed up. A lot of link building was built around manufacturing signals rather than earning them, and over the last decade, Google has significantly improved its ability to detect and ignore these sorts of links.

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Free for Ahrefs users while in beta.

Regardless, the discipline of link building done properly is still very much alive, and I will write a future post on what that actually looks like today, but that is a different argument for a different week. What I want to go deep on right now is the category of links that are the easiest to acquire and carry an outsized impact on everything else you are trying to do in SEO: internal linking.

What are internal links?

Internal links are internal references to pages within your site. Writers insert them to get people to read more content, but search engines understand them with the same algorithms they use to understand external links to your site. Instead of building authority from other sites, they build topical authority within a site. They are significantly easier to manipulate and obtain than external links.

Nobody has to negotiate a rate with an outreach agency working off a spreadsheet of domains and hope the receiver on the other end actually responds. You already own every one of these links, and most companies are sitting on far more unused authority than they realize.

Technical SEO has diminishing value in improving a site’s traffic because even a site with terrible structure can do well as the underlying AI in the algorithms will unwind bad best practices. Internal linking is the exception. I have never worked with a large website that couldn’t benefit from better internal linking.

Two reasons internal linking matters

1. The PageRank logic: every page is weighted by every page linking into it, and those votes are then logarithmically counted to pass authority to a new page. Therefore, a link from your homepage carries more weight than a link buried eight pages deep.

2. Internal links are how content gets discovered in the first place, by crawlers and now by AI systems trying to understand what your site knows. A page with zero internal links pointing to it is an orphan, and orphaned pages are functionally dead even when they're indexed, because nothing on your own site vouches for them. If nothing on your own site vouches for a page, don't expect an AI answer engine to go find it and vouch for it either. A page can be indexed and functionally invisible at the same time.
   
   Click depth is critical because a page that takes five clicks from the homepage to will be crawled far less frequently than one that is closer to the homepage. My opinion is that any important pages should live three clicks or fewer from the homepage.

How to fix internal linking

Generally, new content constantly links back to old content because you reference the foundational piece, you cite the earlier post, you build on what already exists. The reverse almost never happens. Old content doesn’t get updated to link forward into new content, because that requires someone to remember the old page exists and go do the work. Therefore, authority flows backward in time, while everything published this year sits there starving for the links that would actually help it rank or get cited.

Treat every page as a candidate for cross-linking. This must be built into the publishing workflow to update old pages, or ideally build dynamic logic that automatically inserts links into older pages on a schedule so there’s less manual work to do.

Context doesn’t matter as much as you think

Too many teams aim for context in internal links, which isn’t necessarily bad, but it misses the whole magical point of these links: driving more discovery. Focusing only on contextual relevance creates a biased feedback loop because your most popular topic already has the most content.

Popular links to popular. Niche stays niche forever, because the internal linking logic never gives it a shot.

To fix it, break it on purpose by ignoring context. Inject randomness into the linking logic, and I mean structurally engineered randomness. You can have dynamic logic on a page that inserts new content in a link box, but your logic must link to random pages.

This is obviously not the best editorial link strategy when a page about pricing suddenly links to a product launch blog post from eighteen months ago, but it will work. This needs to be truly random, so every page has a chance to be exposed to internal links.

A massive (millions of pages) site I worked on that did this saw crawl, indexation, and most importantly, traffic improve dramatically within weeks. Pages that had sat flat for over a year with zero internal links pointing to them got crawled again within days of turning on random link injection, and a meaningful chunk of them doubled organic traffic shortly after, without a single word of the content changing.

Server-side only

Ideally, any logic you use to build these links happens on the server because otherwise your links could be invisible to search engines. If your site runs on any JavaScript framework that renders links client-side after the page loads, it’s highly possible that these links will be invisible to crawlers and AI systems. Minimize this risk by making the links render server-side.

How you know it’s working

Once your new link algorithms are in place, pull crawl stats from any log analysis tool and run a crawl to compare your orphan page count before and after. If traffic to old pages starts moving without anyone touching the content itself, you can chalk this up to your linking efforts. Internal linking is the one thing in SEO that you can never invest too much in, so if you are looking for some low-hanging fruit, go pick this one.

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Well, it’s usually not you. We analyzed 57 million citations across 50 brands: only 2.2% of citations on early-stage buyer queries pointed to brand-owned domains.

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Email me with questions or problems accessing the script.

Getting this running takes about five minutes on any machine with Python installed, and there’s no real “deployment” required since it’s a script you run once and let finish, not a service that sits on a server.

First, confirm Python 3 is installed by running python3 --version in a terminal. Anything 3.7 or newer works fine.

Next, install the two libraries the script depends on:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

If that fails with a permissions error, add --user to the end of the command, or set up a virtual environment first with python3 -m venv venv followed by source venv/bin/activate on Mac or Linux, or venv\Scripts\activate on Windows, then run the pip install again inside that environment.

Save the script file somewhere accessible, then run it against the site in question:

python3 click_depth_crawler.py https://yoursite.com

That’s the whole deployment. It runs locally on whatever machine you launch it from, whether that’s a laptop or a server you SSH into, and it reaches out to the target site over normal HTTP requests the same way a browser would, so there’s nothing to install on the site’s side and no code to add to the site itself.

A few flags matter depending on the size of the site. For anything with more than a couple thousand pages, raise the ceiling before running: python3 click_depth_crawler.py https://yoursite.com --max-pages 10000. If the crawl feels too slow, the delay between requests can be lowered with --delay 0.1, though pushing it too aggressively risks tripping rate limiting or bot protection on the target site, so raise it in small increments rather than dropping straight to zero. Output lands in a file called click_depth.csv in whatever folder the script was run from, unless a different name is specified with --output filename.csv.

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Semrush

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