I didn’t expect the Search Engine Journal to read my emails and my notes.
When you care deeply about your clients, others will notice.
It came to me as a really good surprise to see that the biggest spot in the Search Engine Journal publication when it came to LLMs txt and SEO was dedicated to showing me as a founder who does NOT deceive clients in this AI hype.
There’s a tool that deceives users by telling them that not having LLMs txt will have negative impact on SEO. (-SEMrush)
And another one that tries to hype up their feature and give people false hope. Just so they can keep them activated longer. (-RankMath)
And then, there’s that one tool where its makers tell you the truth, so you can really do your best online! (yes, our own Squirrly SEO)
You might remember my message to you (I think it was last week). I told you about the Squirrly SEO update that brings that txt file.
Source: Search Engine Journal
You can see it there, on the page. My exact words (well, part of them). Because I care about you enough to let you know the truth.
There’s a bit more about me and Squirrly SEO inside the full article.
Roger Montti is the author and the one who brings this important piece of news to your attention — so that you can protect yourself against lies from the SEO industry.
I was happy to see it, because Roger is one of the few people I still read today. He also tests many new things just like I do, so it’s good for me to see if my findings can be confirmed by someone else who is knowledgeable.
If you read the whole thing, you will see why he sides with me on this and why he thinks I’m doing the right thing.
We’ve made many important updates this year to Squirrly SEO, as can be seen here.
I did the right thing, letting you know how I feel about the feature and giving you my honest advice.
To me, all of you are headliners! All of you have that potential (to make it to page 1), not just my Headliner VIPs from my Growth Program.
I could have hyped it up, to obtain benefits.
I’ve done unpopular things before. I don’t need all of you to “like me”. I need you to be successful. Otherwise, why the hell am I doing this?
For me, it’s 100% important that I guide you towards success.
I’ve been doing SEO for clients since 2009. NOT 2019… actual 2009. A lot has changed. And that’s why I love it. That’s why we keep working with many clients in many different industries and engineering their launches to make a huge splash online!
Even if sometimes I say something that I know won’t be popular, I’ve got to say it.
Sometimes, it may hurt our business temporarily (makes me a bad CEO)… but … in my experience many clients come right back to me, because they realize I’m the one who told them the truth and was reliable.
This is why I fight so hard — so YOU don’t get deceived, so YOUR site can headline, so YOU win in 90 days (and of course you can continue with us for as long as you need, to keep compounding the results).
We’ve had a Summer group for my new Growth Program, where I took existing clients from the content agency and also from RankJumps v1… I presented to them what we plan to do (which we are doing right now) and got them to become the first VIP headliners.
For one of these clients, I had to present to 3 of their directors why their SEO and traffic were failing before joining my program. I had to, because I was compelled to.
They didn’t know about it, so I could have chosen “easy mode”.
We have a longer history with them (I’ll tell you more soon), so for me it was personal. One of the directors had been doing SEO the wrong way and changing pages that have worked for them on auto-pilot for years by that time.
The pages started looking and feeling similar to one another.
The content became “wrong”. It needed to be re-callibrated, because Google and other AI tools thought the main keyword of the page was something different than the intended one.
And that’s WHY they lost all those rankings!
Now, I could have completely ignored everything and just said “good job”. I could have done other improvements on the site to get them more sales and focus more on social media. I would have avoided all conflict.
And I know it would have worked.
But that would have meant their business wouldn’t reach its full potential with my Growth Program. It would’ve meant that I am not giving it my all.
So: what do you think I did?
I risked the whole thing and showed them all the screw-ups one of them made and that I need them to understand that action needs to be taken asap so we can fix all those pages (pages were integrated in some campaigns, so this needed clearing before work was done, not to affect other aspects of the company).
You’re not going to get a fake smile from me and a nice nod. You’re gonna get growth — or I’m out!
That’s why Search Engine Journal quoted me.
That’s why giants like Microsoft, BBC, and Neil Patel trusted me and my systems.
And now, I’m giving 10 businesses the same backstage pass into my Growth Program, so I can make them tomorrow’s headliners.
I have only 10 spots open for this edition of my Growth Program. If you want to be the next Headliner that makes it big with SEO, social media, email marketing — or whatever else we need to do to get that phone ringing… hop in now.
