SEO Podcasts | The SEO Audit Show & Guest Appearances

In the inaugural episode of the SEO Audit Show, Daniel covers the link landscape post-spam updates - what still works, what to avoid, and how to think about velocity, anchor distribution and link quality in 2024+.

We also dive into the rise of ChatGPT and LLMs in the SEO stack - from drafting briefs and structured content outlines to query intent clustering and audit acceleration. Where AI helps, and where it absolutely shouldn't replace human judgement.

Steve Toth - one of the most-read SEO writers in the industry via his SEO Notebook newsletter - joins Daniel to talk shop. The conversation spans content quality signals, technical SEO priorities, indexation challenges and the way major Google updates have reshaped client expectations.

Both speakers share frameworks they actually use in client work - how they prioritise across a long backlog of audit findings, where they push back on agency-side templates, and how they brief content teams to consistently produce work that ranks.

This long-form interview pulls apart technical SEO with SEO veteran Daniel Foley Carter (SEO Stacker / Assertive / SEO Audits IO). The conversation cuts through the noise on what really moves the needle technically vs. the metrics that get over-emphasised - including a frank take on Core Web Vitals, page speed, and the time/budget that should (and shouldn't) be spent chasing them.

Daniel walks through where beginners should actually start with technical SEO, how to think about Google indexing in 2025, and how to set up canonicals properly - including the nuances for eCommerce product variations where canonical configuration is one of the most commonly botched areas. The session also covers Google's AI Overviews, the Helpful Content Update fallout, and what to prioritise on-site to remain visible as AI-driven search continues to mature.

Chapters: 00:00 Welcome to the Technical SEO Masterclass · 00:37 Demystifying technical SEO - essential vs. overhyped · 01:16 The real impact of page speed and Core Web Vitals on SEO · 04:31 Technical SEO for beginners: where to start · 29:30 eCommerce SEO - canonical tags and product variations · 35:08 The future of SEO - Helpful Content Update and AI Overviews · 40:59 Closing thoughts and how to connect.

In this Search With Sean episode, Daniel is joined again by Sean to dig into how AI is reshaping SEO tooling and traditional search workflows. The conversation looks ahead to what search becomes as generative answers, AI Overviews and LLM-driven discovery take a larger share of intent.

Daniel shares insights on the role of AI across content creation, technical SEO and link analysis - and why the SEO fundamentals (intent, authority, content quality) still matter even more in an AI-saturated environment. He walks through how SEO Stack uses AI to enhance data analysis, surface trends faster and track the SEO impact of changes at scale.

Topics covered include the shift from traditional to generative search, the challenges of optimising for AI-driven results, how SEO Stack uses AI for decision-making, the importance of brand-building and quality content in a changing landscape, and how AI can power SEO experiments, query-count analysis and conversion tracking.

Real Talk With Sean is the new panel-format show on Search With Sean, where industry experts join Sean for unfiltered discussions on the hottest topics in SEO and digital marketing. Honest opinions, bold insights, no holds barred.

In this episode Sean is joined by Natalia Witczyk (CEO, Mosquita Digital), Daniel Foley Carter (Director, Assertive & SEO Stack), John Hutson (Head of SEO, Ink Digital) and Ashley Liddell (Co-founder, Deviation). The panel covers the current state of Google, the evolving search market, what changes 2025 may bring, and a close look at the SEO job market - what's required to enter the field and thrive in today's competitive landscape.

Chapters include: Google's mission and how it drifted from early simplicity to ad-heavy results, suppression and geopolitics in search results, Reddit's UGC-driven dominance post-HCU, the paradigm shift to answer-first surfaces (AIOs, LLMs, short-form), market-share data biases, who grows search share in 2025, the role of indie engines (Brave, You.com, Qwant), Wikipedia's trust and editor dynamics, and a deep dive on careers in SEO - whether it's still worth it and which skills matter most in 2025+.

On the SEO Video Show, Daniel discusses ranking for the term "SEO consultant", URL case-sensitivity and consistent lowercase-with-dashes URL hygiene, and the practical SEO-and-accessibility overlap (including the navigation-without-a-mouse exercise from a recent Authoritas Tea Time SEO segment).

The conversation also covers two contrasting approaches to entities SEO (Jason Barnard and Dixon Jones), keyword pioneering (Itamar Blauer's framework for surfacing keywords that don't show search volume in tools), and a tip from the B2B trenches: using Gartner reports to anchor industry naming conventions for category SEO.

Daniel brings over 20 years of SEO experience - starting at Odyssey UK in the early 2000s, working through Big Mouth Media, Accord and Intelligent Positioning, then launching Assertive Media in 2007. His client list includes easyCruise, Ladbrokes, Qantas, Holidaycottages.co.uk, DirectSki, SKY, Virgin Holidays, SCI MX, UAE Bank, SQS, BNP Paribas Cardif and Mariner Solutions. He takes businesses from £1M-£10M turnover and grows them into £100M+/year. Tens of thousands of SEOs follow Daniel on LinkedIn and he ranks #1 in the UK for "SEO consultant".