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Most operators care about risk, revenue, and not…
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Ben Austin شارك ذلكSeeing a lot of "I replaced my SEO team with Claude/ChatGPT, comment BLUEPRINT for my system" posts lately. So I commented on a few. Not because I'm planning to fire my team, but because I wanted to see what people are passing off as a credible replacement for actual SEO talent. The verdict? Total rubbish. Every blueprint was the same. A generic GPT wrapper, a few prompts strung together, a workflow that produces volume but zero strategic thinking. No competitive analysis. No regulated industry nuance. No grasp of E-E-A-T, link equity, or how Google actually evaluates a site in 2026. Just AI-generated content firehosed into a CMS. AI is brilliant as an assistant. We use it daily across our agency. It accelerates research, drafts at scale, frees senior people to think rather than type. But replace an SEO team? Not now. Not in five years. Possibly not ever. SEO is judgment work. Reading a SERP and understanding why a competitor is winning. Spotting a technical issue suppressing a whole section. Earning links no AI can prompt into existence. It's the bit that lives between the data points. Harsh truth: if your plan is to let AI do the lot, you'll come unstuck. You'll lose rankings, visibility, and credibility. And if this is your approach, you probably didn't have much SEO credibility to lose in the first place. The teams that win the next five years aren't replacing humans with AI. They're using AI to make their humans ten times more effective. If you're rebuilding after a budget SEO experiment went sideways, drop me a message. #SEO #DigitalMarketing #AI #GEO #AEO #LLMVisibility #RegulatedIndustries
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Ben Austin شارك ذلكGoogle just confirmed what every SEO in a regulated sector has been quietly panicking about. One year into AI Mode: → Queries doubling every quarter → Average AI Mode search is 3x longer than traditional → 1 in 6 US searches now uses voice or images → Planning queries up 80% faster than overall growth If you operate in iGaming, finance, legal, healthcare, crypto or insurance, your traffic model just broke. Users no longer type "best online casino UK". They ask, "I had an accident at work six months ago and my employer is ignoring me, what are my options?" One query collapses three funnel stages into one AI answer. The user never sees positions four to ten. In YMYL sectors where trust signals, licensing and E-E-A-T already make visibility brutal, the new game is whether the model cites you at all. The brands winning are doing three things: Restructuring content around the questions real users ask AI, not keywords from legacy tools. Building entity authority across the wider web through digital PR, Reddit, Wikipedia and structured data so models recognise them as the trusted source. Tracking LLM visibility as its own KPI. If you can't see how often you appear in ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Mode answers, you're flying blind. Two ways we can help: DM me for a free LLM visibility audit across iGaming, finance, legal or healthcare. Or book 30 minutes: https://lnkd.in/e2hFipiQ Source: https://lnkd.in/dAqiV4GC #SEO #LLMVisibility #AIMode #iGamingMarketing #FintechMarketing #LegalMarketing #RegulatedIndustries #GEO
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Ben Austin شارك ذلك14 years ago today, Daisy Cleaverly walked into Absolute. Back then we were a handful of people, no Dubai office, none of the regulated-sector specialism we're known for now. Daisy has been there for every version of this business. She's now our CFO, and the reason I can run a 20+ person agency without losing sleep over the numbers. The financial discipline, the forecasting, the commercial guardrails that keep us profitable in industries where margins get squeezed hard, that's her work. But Daisy isn't just the backbone of Absolute. Over the years she's also become one of mine and my wife's closest friends, and that means more than any job title ever could. I also have to thank her amazing husband Ryan. I know he hears about Absolute every single day, tolerates how embedded Daisy is in this business, and never once complains when she's flying out to Dubai for leadership meetings. None of what Daisy gives this company would be possible without him quietly holding the fort in the background. Genuine thank you, Ryan. 14 years in any business is rare. 14 years in a digital agency is almost unheard of. Thank you for everything Daisy. Here's to the next chapter. #TeamAbsolute #WorkAnniversary #AgencyLife
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Ben Austin شارك ذلكWant your brand cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews? Stop obsessing over your website. Off-page signals do most of the heavy lifting. After running AI visibility audits across regulated brands in iGaming, finance and legal, the pattern is consistent. LLMs cite what the web says about you, not what you say about yourself. Top off-page tips that actually move the needle: 1. Brand mentions in tier-one editorial. Digital PR is now an entity-association play, not a link-building one. Get your brand named alongside your category in Forbes, Reuters and trade press. 2. Reddit and Quora presence. Perplexity and ChatGPT lean on these heavily. No credible community footprint means you're invisible to a huge slice of AI retrieval. 3. Third-party reviews. G2, Trustpilot, Clutch, Capterra. Volume and recency both matter. Recent 5-star reviews beat a stockpile from 2022. 4. Structured entity sources. Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn. Inconsistent data fragments your entity in the LLM knowledge graph. 5. Podcasts and YouTube features. Transcripts get indexed. A founder doing 12 strong podcast appearances often outperforms 100 LinkedIn posts for AI visibility. 6. Citations from already-cited sources. Find the domains LLMs are pulling from for your target queries, then earn placement there. Reverse-engineer the citation graph. 7. Author entity authority. Founders need verifiable expertise off-site. Bylines, speaker slots, podcast appearances. Personal authority feeds brand authority. SEO was about ranking your pages. AI visibility is about being referenced credibly across the web. If you're not being cited in AI search, the answer is rarely "publish more content". It's "get talked about by the right sources". Free AI visibility audit for regulated brands this quarter. DM me or book in: https://lnkd.in/e2hFipiQ What's working for your AI visibility? Drop it below. #GEO #AIVisibility #LLMOptimisation #SEO #DigitalPR #iGaming #FintechMarketing #AISearch
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Ben Austin شارك ذلكHosting location is one of the most underrated SEO levers in iGaming, and most operators get it wrong. I see this constantly. Operators come to me asking why they can't crack page one in a target geo, convinced it's a content problem or a backlink problem. Then I run a quick check and their site is hosted six thousand miles from the market they're trying to win. You can't out-content a foundational geo-targeting mismatch. If you're targeting players in the Philippines, Brazil, or Ontario, but your site is sitting on a US or German server, you're already losing ground before a single page is indexed. Google uses server location as a geo-targeting signal. It's not the only one, and it's not the strongest, but in a vertical as competitive as ours, every signal counts. The stack matters in this order: ccTLD beats hreflang beats Search Console geo-targeting beats server location. But when you're running a .com with hreflang for fifteen markets, server location becomes a tiebreaker. And tiebreakers in iGaming SEO are the difference between page one and page three. A few things I'd push back on if you're planning a launch: Don't rely on a single global CDN and call it a day. Cloudflare or Akamai in front of a US origin still leaves your TTFB worse than a local host for users in Manila or São Paulo. Player UX and crawl efficiency both suffer. Match server location to your target jurisdiction wherever the licensing framework allows it. For PAGCOR-licensed operators targeting Filipino players, hosting inside the Philippines or at minimum within APAC is the obvious play. Same logic for Curaçao operators chasing LATAM, or MGA operators going after specific EU markets. Check your competitors. Run a quick lookup on the top three ranking domains for your priority keywords. If they're all hosted in-market and you're not, you've found a gap worth closing. The bigger point: technical SEO foundations in regulated industries get treated as an afterthought, then operators wonder why their content strategy isn't moving the needle. Hosting, schema, hreflang implementation, site architecture. Fix the foundations and the content does more work for you. If you're launching into a new geo in the next quarter, server location should be on the pre-launch checklist next to licensing and payments. Not after. If you're stuck ranking in a geo you're targeting and can't work out why, drop me a message. Happy to take a quick look and tell you straight whether hosting is the issue or something else is holding you back. #iGaming #iGamingSEO #TechnicalSEO #RegulatedMarkets #SEOStrategy #iGamingMarketing #SearchEngineOptimisation #DigitalMarketing
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Ben Austin شارك ذلكGoogle Analytics quietly dropped something this week that changes the GEO conversation overnight. There's now a dedicated AI Assistant channel in GA4. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, all of it, automatically classified. No custom filters. No UTM workarounds. No agency hand-waving about "estimated" LLM traffic. For iGaming operators, this is the moment the bluffing stops. I've been saying for over a year that LLM mentions are not the metric. Mentions don't fund player acquisition. Visits do. FTDs do. LTV does. And until now, nobody could properly tie AI visibility to any of those numbers in their own analytics. That's done. Pull the report, and you'll see exactly which assistants are sending players, how they convert, and what they're worth. Three things I'd bet on once operators start looking: The volume will be smaller than the hype suggests but the conversion rate will be significantly higher. A player arriving from ChatGPT has already filtered through a recommendation. They're not comparing 12 casinos in 12 tabs. They've made a decision. A lot of "LLM visibility" tools are about to look very thin. If your dashboard shows mentions climbing while GA4 shows no traffic, you've been buying a vanity metric. The gap between brands that took GEO seriously in 2025 and brands that didn't is about to show up in pounds and dollars, not pixels and citations. If you're running an operator, three things to do this week: Add the AI Assistant channel to your weekly trading reports. Treat it as its own acquisition line from day one, alongside organic, paid and affiliate. Segment FTD value, conversion rate and 30-day retention by AI source. If those players behave differently to organic, your CAC model needs rebuilding before your next media plan lands. Audit the gap between where you're mentioned and where traffic actually comes from. If Claude cites you but sends nothing, the problem isn't visibility. It's the click-through or the brand context around the mention. We've been building GEO measurement into client reporting at Absolute Digital Media for the last 18 months, including a full LLM visibility audit framework for iGaming operators. If you want a walkthrough of how we're tracking it end to end, drop me a message or book a call: https://lnkd.in/e2hFipiQ The agencies that can connect AI visibility to revenue are about to win a lot of business. The ones still selling mentions are about to have a difficult quarter. #iGaming #GEO #SEO #LLMVisibility #GoogleAnalytics #GA4 #AISearch #CasinoMarketing #iGamingMarketing #DigitalMarketing #SearchMarketing #AnswerEngineOptimisation
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Ben Austin شارك ذلكSunday, Dubai, and I've never been more certain about where this industry is heading. AI search isn't a threat. It's the biggest opportunity the agency world has had since the early days of Google. At Absolute Digital Media we made the call 18 months ago to stop treating LLM visibility as a side project and start building the agency around it. Brand tracking. Entity authority frameworks. Reddit and citation seeding as productised services. Proprietary tooling. A full GEO and LLMO offer sitting alongside traditional SEO, paid, link building, digital PR, and content. The results are doing the talking. Clients in iGaming, finance, legal, eCommerce, and crypto are showing up inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews for the queries that actually convert. Pipeline is the strongest it's been. The team is energised because they're working on the version of search that's being built, not the one that's being eroded. Here's the part I want other agency owners and in-house marketing leads to hear, because it's the conversation I keep having on calls. You don't need to panic. You need to move. The agencies and brands winning the next 24 months are the ones treating LLM visibility as a board-level priority, not a curiosity. The ones rewriting their measurement frameworks. The ones investing in citation strategy, entity building, and proprietary data assets. The ones who understand that organic traffic in 2026 looks nothing like organic traffic in 2022, and have stopped pretending otherwise. If you're still measuring success on blue link rankings alone, you're optimising for a world that's already gone. If you're still selling "SEO" without GEO, LLMO, and entity strategy baked in, your retainers are on borrowed time. If you're an in-house marketer waiting for someone to tell you AI search is real, this is the message. It's real. Your CEO will ask about it within 90 days. Be ready. This is the most exciting era I've operated through in 18 years of running Absolute Digital Media. The brands and agencies that lean in now will look back on this period the same way the early Google adopters did. Which side of that line do you want to be on? Tell me in the comments. Sunday is a good day to commit to Monday. #AISearch #GEO #LLMO #DigitalMarketing #SEO #AgencyLife #ThoughtLeadership #FounderJourney #iGaming #MarketingStrategy
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Ben Austin شارك ذلكReddit seeding is the most misunderstood channel in SEO right now. I've watched freelancers and agencies pile into Reddit over the last 18 months because they've finally clocked that Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT lean heavily on Reddit threads for citations. The problem is most of them are doing it in a way that will get their clients banned, ignored, or worse, mocked publicly. Here's what I see going wrong: Posting from week-old accounts with zero karma into subreddits with strict community rules. Mods spot this within minutes. The account gets nuked, the brand gets called out, and the subreddit becomes hostile territory for that client forever. Dropping branded links straight into comments. Reddit is not a backlink farm. The second you post a tracked URL into r/CasinoGambling or r/PersonalFinance, you've signalled you don't understand the platform. Writing in agency voice. Reddit users can smell marketing copy from three threads away. If your seeded comment reads like a meta description, it's already failed. Treating every subreddit the same. The tone, posting cadence, and acceptable behaviour in r/SEO is nothing like r/Sportsbook, which is nothing like r/Bogleheads. Anyone running the same playbook across all of them is burning client money. Ignoring the longer game. The point of Reddit seeding in 2026 isn't a single thread ranking on Google. It's building a sustained presence across multiple aged accounts, in the right communities, so your client gets surfaced when an LLM is asked "what's the best X for Y." That takes months of authentic contribution before you earn the right to mention a brand. What actually works: Aged accounts with genuine posting history across unrelated subreddits, built over six to twelve months before any client work touches them. Native-tone comments that add value to the thread first and only reference a brand when it's contextually useful. Subreddit-specific strategy informed by reading six months of top posts before contributing. And measurement tied to LLM citation tracking and brand SERP defence, not just upvotes. We've been running this for regulated industry clients across iGaming, finance, and legal where the stakes are higher and the moderation is tighter. The accounts that get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity aren't the ones shouting loudest. They're the ones contributing consistently for long enough that the platform trusts them. If you're an agency or in-house team wrestling with this, or you want to see how we're approaching Reddit and LLM visibility for clients in regulated verticals, book a call: https://lnkd.in/e2hFipiQ #SEO #DigitalMarketing #LLMSEO #GenerativeEngineOptimisation #RedditMarketing #BrandSERP #iGamingMarketing #ContentStrategy #AIVisibility #SearchMarketing
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Ben Austin شارك ذلكEvery week I get the same question from an iGaming operator looking at a backlink report. "Why doesn't this site rank for casino keywords?" Because if it did, you wouldn't want a link from it. The iGaming SEO industry is still running on a 2018 evaluation framework, and it's costing operators real money in two ways. They're either paying for the wrong links, or they're rejecting the right ones. Here's what actually matters when you're auditing a backlink profile for an online casino in 2026. What to measure: The trust signal of the linking entity. Is this a real publication with a real editorial history, or a site that exists to sell links. Google can tell the difference and so can you if you spend 30 seconds on the homepage. The editorial context of the page the link sits on. Is the content genuinely about something, or is it a 600-word blob written to host an outbound link. The diversity of your overall profile. Varied anchor text, varied domain types, varied geographies, varied DR. Profiles that look curated are the ones that get hit in updates. Movement on your target keywords and ranking shifts on the pages you're pointing equity at. That's the only output metric that matters. What not to measure: Whether the linking site ranks for iGaming head terms. If every site linking to you ranks for "online casino UK", you've built the exact footprint Google's spam team is looking for. That pattern has taken down more link networks in the last five years than any other single factor. Referral traffic from the link. Editorial links in any vertical drive negligible referral, and that's true of every operator you're competing with. Pull their profiles and you'll see the same shape. Whether the link shows up in Ahrefs within 30 days. Ahrefs runs its own crawler on its own schedule. Google indexation and Ahrefs reporting are two different things, and conflating them leads to bad decisions. The operators winning in this sector aren't winning because their links rank for casino keywords. They're winning because their backlink profile looks like a real publisher's would if they happened to mention a brand. Messy, varied, contextually loose, and structurally clean. If your link audit is flagging "this site doesn't rank for our terms" as a quality issue, the audit framework is broken, not the links. If you want a proper review of your current backlink profile against what actually moves rankings in regulated search, drop me a message or book a call: https://lnkd.in/e2hFipiQ #iGamingSEO #LinkBuilding #CasinoSEO #SEO #DigitalMarketing #RegulatedMarkets #SearchEngineOptimisation
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Ben Austin تفاعل مع ذلكAbsolute Digital Media | Award-Winning SEO & Digital Marketing Agency | UK & Dubai
Absolute Digital Media | Award-Winning SEO & Digital Marketing Agency | UK & Dubai
Ben Austin تفاعل مع ذلكHappy birthday to our CEO Ben! Have a wonderful day! 🥳 Here's to another year of teeing up big wins (on and off the course) ⛳️🎂 #ATeam #SEOAgency #DigitalMarketingAgency #AgencyLife #GolfCake -
Ben Austin أضاف إعجابًا إلى ذلكBen Austin أضاف إعجابًا إلى ذلكAt Absolute Digital, we're building something special – and looking for top-notch Senior SEO Consultants to be part of that journey. Up to £60k salary and remote working ✅ Who we're looking for: 🙌 Hands-on SEO experience across technical, on-page and off-page 🤖 Genuinely curious about how AI is changing search, not just paying lip service to it 😄 Confident in front of senior client stakeholders 💷 Strong commercial instincts and an eye for retention and growth Want to know more? Email careers@absolute.digital or DM me for for more info.
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Ben Austin أضاف إعجابًا إلى ذلكBen Austin أضاف إعجابًا إلى ذلكExciting news for us at Fast Loan UK - we’re proud to have been shortlisted for the Alternative Lender of the Year category at the 2026 Credit Awards by Credit Strategy . This nomination is a reflection of the hard work, dedication, and customer-first mindset we bring every single day. In a rapidly evolving lending landscape, our mission has always been simple: provide fast, responsible, and accessible finance solutions that genuinely support customers when they need it most. A huge thank you to our customers, partners, and team who continue to place their trust in us. Congratulations to all the other finalists - we look forward to celebrating together at the awards. https://lnkd.in/evKxh6Mf #CreditAwards #AlternativeLending #FinTech #BusinessFinance #FastLoanUK #CustomerFirst #FinancialServices #Leadership
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Absolute Digital Media
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المنشورات
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15 Ecommerce SEO Experts Reveal Their Top Insights For A Successful 2023
Search Engine Journal
عرض المنشورSEO for ecommerce is changing - and it's changing fast. Understanding how to make your online store more successful is key to achieving a high turn over and even stronger ROI to keep up the longevity of your business and future proof your approach to search.
Join me as I explain my insights, tips and lessons learned over the last 14 years as the CEO of multi-award-winning digital marketing agency Absolute Digital Media as part of Search Engine Journal's ecommerce SEO deep dive alongside…SEO for ecommerce is changing - and it's changing fast. Understanding how to make your online store more successful is key to achieving a high turn over and even stronger ROI to keep up the longevity of your business and future proof your approach to search.
Join me as I explain my insights, tips and lessons learned over the last 14 years as the CEO of multi-award-winning digital marketing agency Absolute Digital Media as part of Search Engine Journal's ecommerce SEO deep dive alongside 14 other marketing experts. -
10 Ways Email Marketing Retains Customers
SEMrush
عرض المنشورWhen it comes to boosting business profits, the knee-jerk reaction for many of us is to pick up the phone and introduce ourselves to new potential customers. Our natural assumption being that this fresh blood is the perfect soundboard for our sales spiel without any complicated history or preconceptions of our brand.
In real life, though, the grass isn’t always greener. In fact, as you get a little closer, you’ll see that, much like AstroTurf, these customers take longer to secure and…When it comes to boosting business profits, the knee-jerk reaction for many of us is to pick up the phone and introduce ourselves to new potential customers. Our natural assumption being that this fresh blood is the perfect soundboard for our sales spiel without any complicated history or preconceptions of our brand.
In real life, though, the grass isn’t always greener. In fact, as you get a little closer, you’ll see that, much like AstroTurf, these customers take longer to secure and cost significantly more. With this in mind, showing your existing customers the care and attention they deserve is not only more cost-effective, it’s also a great way of shaping your reputation online.
Email marketing is a great way of achieving this. Here are 10 tips for retaining customers using this channel. -
Can Emojis Be Integrated Into Your Marketing Campaign?
SEMrush
عرض المنشورWhile you may have read the title of this blog post and thought “what a ridiculous idea,” the effect of millennials and Generation Z and how they use emojis could actually see a rise in emoji SEO – and this could be coming sooner than you might think. Can emojis be integrated into your marketing campaign? Quite simply, yes.
There are a number of things to suggest that Google is beginning to place more value on the emoji. Firstly, back in May 2016, Google re-allowed search by emoji, and…While you may have read the title of this blog post and thought “what a ridiculous idea,” the effect of millennials and Generation Z and how they use emojis could actually see a rise in emoji SEO – and this could be coming sooner than you might think. Can emojis be integrated into your marketing campaign? Quite simply, yes.
There are a number of things to suggest that Google is beginning to place more value on the emoji. Firstly, back in May 2016, Google re-allowed search by emoji, and Yelp, according to the Huffington Post, has been allowing emoji search since 2014, through its mobile app.
Google image search is another example of how emojis are slowly growing in importance, and with news that Google can also recognize emojis in any tweets that are sent to them, it is easy to see that the search engine is not only recognizing, but also rapidly indexing emojis. -
9 Simple Tips For Making An About Us Page That Works For Your Brand
Moz
عرض المنشورor too many online companies the About Us page is the elephant in the room, and often the most awkward thing to write. It's a shame because analytics often shows the page as one of the most frequented on any website. Imagine a ceremonial elephant adorned in his embellished head plate, raising you above your competitors. This could be your About Us page if you show it the care and attention it deserves.
At Absolute, we're looking to revamp our entire website over the coming months, and in…or too many online companies the About Us page is the elephant in the room, and often the most awkward thing to write. It's a shame because analytics often shows the page as one of the most frequented on any website. Imagine a ceremonial elephant adorned in his embellished head plate, raising you above your competitors. This could be your About Us page if you show it the care and attention it deserves.
At Absolute, we're looking to revamp our entire website over the coming months, and in particular we'll be focusing our attention on our about page. We recognize that our page is currently a little on the dull side and while we are researching the topic, I thought it would be great to share nine great, easily applicable techniques we picked up from some of our favorite About Us pages from around the web.
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