E1136: Charles Floate has been doing SEO for years, across everything from brand-new sites to companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on backlinks.
In this episode, Charles lays out how he approaches SEO from A to Z: starting a site, building authority, finding keywords, structuring pages, getting links, becoming a topical authority, scaling what works, and changing the strategy as a site gets bigger.
We get into:
- Charles' "zero to 100" strategy for launching a brand-new site
- How he uses entity stacking, citations, directories, social profiles, and reference sites to establish a new brand
- How many backlinks he would build to a 10-page site vs. a 1,000-page site
- Why backlink velocity has to match the size of the site
- What actually makes a backlink valuable
- Why a backlink that never gets indexed may provide no value
- Why Charles doesn't force-index every backlink
- How to find your real SEO competitors instead of just your business competitors
- How to reverse engineer competitors' backlink profiles
- Why Charles looks for referring domains shared across multiple ranking competitors
- How smaller companies can beat larger competitors by doing better link due diligence
- Why he usually targets long-tail, higher-intent keywords before the biggest keyword in a niche
- How he knows when a site has reached topical authority
- How topical authority changes the economics of publishing new pages
- How Charles thinks about page-level relevance
- The weight-loss site that lost most of its revenue after expanding into gardening and composting content
- How to expand into adjacent topics without destroying your existing topical focus
- How Charles would structure categories, URLs, navigation, and core site pages
- His process for building topical maps
- How he uses ranking competitors to expand one keyword set into hundreds of related queries
- How SEO changes between a new site, a growing site, and an enterprise site
- Why enterprise SEO is often easier to rank but harder to execute
- When keyword cannibalization becomes a serious problem
- How Charles approaches "crawled, currently not indexed" pages
- Why refreshing existing content can outperform constantly publishing new content
- How optimizing for traditional Google results differs from optimizing for ChatGPT, Claude, and AI Overviews
- Semantic triples and how machines understand relationships between entities
- Brand mentions, citations, consensus, and AI visibility
- Charles' experiment getting an AI Overview to recognize his SEO awards site
- Parasite SEO and satellite microsites for taking more positions in long-tail SERPs
- What Charles considers the most important ranking factor in traditional Google search
- How user engagement signals matter after you start ranking
- How hidden keyword stuffing in schema and source code can over-optimize a page
- What SEO tactics Charles thinks Google is likely to go after next
This is Charles Floate's SEO process from a site with zero authority and zero rankings all the way through large-scale and enterprise SEO.
⭐️ Charles Floate on 𝕏 - https://x.com/Charles_SEO
⭐️ Charles Floate on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesfloate/
⭐️ Charles Floate on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@CharlesFloate
⭐️ Charles Floate on Facebook - https://facebook.com/thecharlesfloate
⭐️ Charles Floate's community - https://seo.stream
💎 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 SEO Playbook Kickoff
00:40 Meet Charles Floate
01:24 Authority And Links
02:44 Zero To 100 Launch
06:56 Social Profiles Activity
07:48 What Makes A Good Link
10:27 Backlink Indexing Reality
12:24 Reverse Engineer Competitors
18:55 Buying Links And Due Diligence
23:21 Competitor Link Overlap
26:38 Relevance And Topical Focus
31:46 AI SEO And Semantics
35:43 Generic vs Topical Authority
36:43 HubSpot Traffic Drop
38:49 Refresh Content Strategy
40:55 Pivoting Beyond Weight Loss
45:00 Building Topic Bridges
47:50 Site Structure Basics
51:19 Keyword Research Framework
55:52 Topical Maps Explained
57:00 Enterprise vs Small SEO
01:01:10 Indexing Issues Fixes
01:03:55 Content Overlap ROI
01:07:44 CRO Beyond Rankings
01:09:32 Sell Outcomes Not SEO
01:10:43 Auditing Traffic Drops
01:13:42 Common Decline Causes
01:16:20 Quality Score Explained
01:19:16 AI SEO Opportunity
01:22:49 Training Data Tactics
01:25:39 Gaming AI Overviews
01:29:42 Parasite SEO Plays
01:30:48 Ranking Factors Today
01:33:49 Future Updates Focus
01:35:46 Information Gain Framework
01:37:40 Episode Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#searchengineoptimization #seo #linkbuilding #seopodcast