Welcome to the Smart SEO blog

Hi, I’m Ryan, the founder of Smart SEO. I built Smart SEO because most WordPress site owners I know fall into one of two camps: they pay an SEO agency $1,500+ a month and don’t really understand what they’re getting, or they install a plugin like Yoast and feel like they’re flying blind. Neither is great.

This blog is where we talk about the stuff in between - the actual tactics, the AI search trends that are reshaping how people find websites, and the plain-English how-tos that we wish existed when we started.

What you’ll find here

A few things, on repeat:

• Practical tutorials for WordPress site owners. How to fix the boring-but-critical things (meta descriptions that convert, image alt text that ranks, internal linking that builds topical authority).
• AI search research. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the new generation of answer engines are changing how SEO works. We read the papers so you don’t have to.
• Honest write-ups of what we tried. What worked on getsmartseo.com, what flopped, and what we’d do differently. No “10x your traffic” hype.
• Showit-specific tips for the designers and photographers who use our plugins. Showit gives you a beautiful site, but the blog and SEO side needs more love.

Who this is for

If you run a WordPress site (or a Showit site with the WordPress blog) and want to grow without becoming an SEO expert, you’re in the right place. We assume you’ve heard of keywords and meta titles, but we don’t assume you’ve read a hundred Moz articles.

What’s next

I’ll be posting weekly to start. First few topics on the list:

• Why “AI Overviews” changed SEO more than the BERT update did
• The Showit blog SEO checklist (the one we wish existed when we built our first plugin)
• How Smart SEO writes a 12-month content plan in 10 minutes (and why that’s hard to get right)

If there’s something specific you’d like us to dig into, shoot us a note. We read everything.

Thanks for being here early.

• Ryan