AI SEO & Business Automation Podcast

James Dooley: Best SEO strategies in 2026.

Today I'm joined with Charles Floate. Pleasure to have you.

Charles Floate: Thank you for having me.

James Dooley: With regards to search engine optimisation, there is a lot of change happening, especially with AI overviews, AI mode and people using ChatGPT a lot more.

From an SEO standpoint, what is working in today's algorithms?

Charles Floate: From a purely SEO standpoint, we are moving, since the March core update, into an algorithm state that is no longer meant to power the 10 blue links. It is meant to power the AI overviews on top of them.

We are moving away from an algorithm that was supposed to promote authorship, expertise and trustworthiness, and more towards an algorithm that pushes content that can match consensus, new information, verifiable information and factual information.

It is moving more towards consensus-led, trustworthy content than the signals behind it.

I do see, especially with the newest algorithm update as well, user engagement signals mattering less and the content underneath mattering more.

The links underneath are still going to power the ability to rank in the first place, though.

You still need the underlying root authority, link power and all of that, especially in YMYL niches, to get there in the first place.

But once you're in the top 10,000 results that Google is going to push into the top 100, especially the top 10, that is when the information, content, consensus and information gain start really mattering.

James Dooley: So you're saying that with regards to EEAT and user signals, they are factors within Google search.

On live search, they are using Google Search or Bing Search and that information, so it is an indirect ranking factor.

But it is not directly pulling that information through.

With regards to SEO strategies that are working, what are you doing differently?

A lot of people talk about topical authority on the website. A lot of people talk about link building, schema markup, technical SEO and making the website as fast as possible.

What do you focus on the most now?

You mentioned consensus, so I presume you mean not just your own website, but third-party corroboration on other articles repeating who you are, what you do and why you're brilliant.

Can you explain that a bit further?

I know what you're doing, and I think it is brilliant. It is not just ranking within Google, but now you have multiple properties ranking in Google, and that consensus building is getting into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.

Can you expand on what you mean by consensus?

Charles Floate: Consensus is basically what Google understands that topic to be and what it understands the user intent to be.

If you go to Google and search “buy hats”, then it is a very clear intent.

But if you're searching for information about a historical figure, it might be relevant to the time period they were active in. It might be relevant to a specific battle they were involved in, or you might be looking for something else.

So Google may need a more generic information source.

Consensus is first about what the user wants, then what all of the pages on the internet say about the topic the user is searching for.

Google will then try to build a map of that consensus and only push pages that match it.

That can be a bad thing for scientific journals and exploration because scientific consensus changes when new research comes out.

There might be 100,000 pages on the old consensus and only 10 on the new scientific consensus until it comes further forward.

I see Google making moves mainly to power AI overviews rather than traditional search at this stage.

When it comes to what I am doing, I start with the main website piece.

That will be a really in-depth, well-researched, consensus-based article.

From there, we create other pieces that we try to rank for the same queries on third-party websites, parasite pages, or whatever people want to call them.

Those pages reinforce what we are saying on the main page, especially where other pages might not have said it yet.

If you're trying to rank for “best CRM tools”, the consensus might currently be that HubSpot, Atlassian or someone else is number one.

If you're trying to say that your brand is actually number one, then you are not matching the consensus of all the other pages.

So we have to force pages into the index that match our consensus so we are allowed to rank number one at the top of Google.

James Dooley: With regards to the best SEO strategies, specifically for SEO now, and not just third-party work, how important is schema on your own website?

Charles Floate: If it matches consensus, then you should add it.

I have always gone by the idea that if five of the top 10 competitors have the same schema, then you should have that same schema.

If none of your competitors have any schema, then you do not want to be the odd one out adding schema to the site.

I do not think schema by itself has any more of a direct ranking signal than your body content does.

They are effectively the same thing. Schema is just structured.

With body content, Google is making an educated guess. With schema, you are specifically telling Google what that data means.

There is no increased ranking signal because of that. It is the same as body content, but structured in a way that Google can process and apply to your page more easily.

So it can mean more because it is easier to process, but is it a higher-level ranking signal? No. It is effectively the same.

James Dooley: What about topical authority or on-page SEO?

How important is NLP, semantic content and internal linking?

Do you build a semantic content network first, with a map of all the pages and how you will structure the pages and internal linking?

Is that key for SEO in 2026?

Charles Floate: 100% for your own website, yes.

Whenever we make a new website, we map out at least the core pages to make sure we have everything working that we need from day one.

If you're trying to rank for link building, your core pages might be “what is link building?”, “who invented link building?” and “why is link building important?”

All of those core questions and topics are directly connected to the main hub, which is the link building query.

We want to have all of those live on day one so Google can process, understand and topically assign our website a site focus score.

That is the exact thing from the Google algorithm.

The quicker you can get that site focus score, the easier it is for all of your new pages to rank for related queries as well.

James Dooley: So with site focus, you do not want topic dilution.

You do not want to go off-topic. You want to go very deep on the topic you're building around.

Let's talk about off-page and link building.

How important is powering up guest posts?

If you get a guest post on a decent DR site, but the page level is not that strong, how important are tier two backlinks to those guest posts?

Charles Floate: If the tier one page is not as strong as it could be, but it is on a very high-authority site, building tier two links can activate its true potential.

Especially with links that do not have their full potential activated, orphan links or links with no signals going to them, you want something that will allow that juice to flow over.

Google is often neutralising links now.

If you have a completely orphaned link, sometimes it does not matter if it is on a gigantic authority site. Google can still treat it as a neutral signal and you will not get any positive uplift.

But if you build one backlink to it, that could be enough to trigger a positive signal to move over.

If you can go from zero to 10, it is a gigantic increase because zero means nothing, and 10 is still enough score points to move over.

We have found that even with some of the most powerful domains in the world, building one or a handful of links to that page can massively increase the effectiveness of that backlink.

It is not just links for tier two.

A lot of people think tiered link building or tiered link boosting means you can only build links directly to your links.

You can build social signals directly to your links. You can do traffic. You can do all these things to power up and activate that link.

It is not just links to build up links.

James Dooley: What about viability?

A lot of people are talking about viability.

Some people are doing it by spending money. Dennis Yu talks about the dollar-a-day strategy.

He might share certain things on LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter or Facebook and spend a few dollars to boost them and get clicks through.

As you mentioned with tier twos, that almost activates the page to get actual clicks.

Some people are doing popunder ads through places like PropellerAds, sometimes through a t.co redirect on Twitter, and they might send 3,000 to 5,000 hits.

They trigger this virality campaign where Google seems to react quickly.

They get fast rankings, but those rankings only seem to last maybe 72 hours before dropping off, so they have to run it again.

How important do you think that is long term for rankings?

Charles Floate: Number one, a lot of people do not take into account the devices or browsers the ads are in.

If you're going to do that kind of strategy, especially for a new website, I would recommend it because you get user engagement signals that the domain and website does not already have.

But those user engagement signals need to be on Chrome.

They cannot be on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge or other browsers.

They need to be in Chrome because Google is pulling from CrUX, which is Chrome user experience signals.

So first, make sure your user engagement data is coming through Chrome.

Second, make sure they are not just random users who click through, wonder what the site is, then bounce back two seconds later.

They need to be targeted.

You need decent engagement rates, decent click-through rates and all those things for the signals to have an effect.

If every click has a two-second bounce, that could potentially be a negative.

So make sure you do it properly.

For new websites or certain niches, it can be a massive growth hack.

But again, user engagement signals do seem to be temporary.

Virality is always temporary. Nothing goes viral forever.

James Dooley: Anyone watching this, I hope you liked the episode on the best SEO strategies in 2026.

I dig deeper with Charles Floate on quite a few other topics, including LLM rankings, ChatGPT and how to rank specifically in Bing.

Make sure you check out the links in the description.

I hope you liked the episode on the best SEO strategies in 2026.