Episode Details

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