The Daily Carnage

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Enterprise SEO Is A Team Sport

SEPTEMBER 7, 2026

Enterprise SEO isn’t just regular SEO with more pages. Once a website spans thousands or millions of URLs, the person who finds an SEO problem often isn’t the person who can fix it.

Changes may need approval from engineering, legal, regional marketing, brand, or other teams — and a single template change can affect thousands of pages. That means enterprise SEO is as much about prioritization and coordination as it is about rankings.

So how should enterprise teams prioritize SEO work?

Measure impact: Estimate how much a task could improve rankings, traffic, or revenue.
Consider implementation cost: A high-impact idea isn’t necessarily a good first move if it requires months of work.
Account for approval friction: The more teams involved, the longer a change can take.
Think at the template level: Fixing a system that affects thousands of pages is often more valuable than manually optimizing a handful.
Look beyond Google: AI search visibility is becoming another part of the equation, making content governance and cross-team coordination even more important.

At enterprise scale, the best SEO strategy isn’t about finding the most problems. It’s about finding the problems worth fixing first.

Head to Semrush for the full framework.

The Internet Has An Outdated Version Of Your Brand

SEPTEMBER 7, 2026

AI search has created a new brand visibility problem: conflicting information.

Your website might say one thing, an old PDF might say another, a partner page might use outdated product language, and an executive bio might still list a title that hasn’t existed for years. Traditional search could show users multiple results and let them figure it out. AI search may pull those conflicting sources together and confidently give them the wrong answer.

So how do you keep AI from learning the wrong version of your brand?

Audit your sources: Look beyond your website and find outdated PDFs, partner pages, documentation, profiles, and other public content.
Connect old and new terminology: If a product, role, or service has changed, explicitly explain what replaced it.
Create bridge content: Don’t just publish the new information. Connect it to the terminology people still use to search for you.
Treat content governance as SEO: Keeping information consistent across the web is becoming part of search visibility.
Update the evidence chain: AI can’t use the right information if it can’t retrieve it.

Publishing more content won’t necessarily fix an information problem. Sometimes, the best SEO move is making sure the information you already have tells one consistent story.

Get the full scoop at Search Engine Journal.

Stop Re-Teaching AI How You Work

SEPTEMBER 3, 2026

If you find yourself pasting the same instructions into ChatGPT or Claude every time you start a task, you might be doing things the hard way.

AI Skills let you turn a repeatable process into a reusable set of instructions. Instead of explaining your preferences from scratch every time, you can build a skill once and use it whenever that task comes up.

So what can you actually use Skills for?

Standardize workflows: Turn a process you repeat — like building a content calendar — into something AI can follow consistently.
Save your best prompts: Stop digging through old chats for that one prompt that worked perfectly three months ago.
Build from existing conversations: If you’ve already worked through a detailed process with AI, you can turn that process into a reusable skill.
Keep improving: Unlike a static prompt, a skill can evolve as your workflow or preferences change.
Think smaller: You don’t need one mega-skill that does everything. A handful of focused skills can work together to handle different parts of your workflow.

The real win isn’t getting AI to do one task once. It’s teaching it a process you’ll need again and again.

Head to Planoly for the no-code guide.

The Audience Is Part of The Brand

SEPTEMBER 2, 2026

Your audience doesn’t need another brand trying to get them to like, comment, and buy. They need a reason to participate.

HeyOrca’s latest examples of community-led marketing show how brands like Dr. Pepper, Squishmallows, My Indie Coffee, and HeyOrca itself are giving their audiences a more active role in the brand. Dr. Pepper turned a fan-made TikTok sound into an actual brand jingle. Squishmallows invited followers to create their own version of a summer day. And HeyOrca shifted its community spaces toward conversations, advice, and shared experiences.

So how can you make your audience part of the marketing?

Invite participation: Give people something to create, vote on, answer, or contribute to.
Give credit: If someone creates something great for your brand, recognize them and give their idea room to grow.
Create connections: Help community members learn from, support, and discover each other.
Connect your channels: Let your newsletter, social content, events, and community spaces work together instead of operating in separate bubbles.

The goal isn’t to create more content for your audience. It’s to create more reasons for them to be involved.

Head to HeyOrca for more.

Your Competitors Aren’t Your Only Competition

SEPTEMBER 1, 2026

Keeping an eye on competitors makes sense. But if you only study the brands in your category, you might be missing the best ideas.

Buffer’s latest roundup of competitor analysis tools makes a good point: on social media, everyone is competing for the same limited supply of attention. And sometimes the most interesting ideas are coming from industries completely unrelated to yours.

So how should you approach competitor research?

Look beyond your category: A skincare brand doesn’t have to get all its inspiration from other skincare brands.
Track patterns, not just posts: Look for recurring formats, topics, creative approaches, and audience behaviors.
Compare across channels: The useful insight might be hiding in a competitor’s SEO, email, paid media, or social strategy.
Watch AI search, too: As people use AI to discover brands and products, competitor visibility there is becoming another piece of the puzzle.
Know what you’re actually trying to learn: Don’t pay for a massive competitive intelligence platform if all you need is social engagement benchmarking.

The goal isn’t to copy your competitors. It’s to figure out what they’re doing, what everyone else is doing, and where there’s an opportunity to do something different.

Head to Buffer for the tools.

Can Google Ads Optimize For The Right Thing?

AUGUST 31, 2026

Google Ads is taking more campaign decisions off marketers’ plates. That makes one thing increasingly important: making sure Google knows what a good conversion actually looks like.

As bidding, targeting, budgets, and creative combinations become more automated, the data you feed the system has more influence over what it optimizes for. A form submission might look like a conversion in Google Ads, but if half those leads never become customers, you’re teaching the algorithm the wrong lesson.

So what should marketers measure?

Lead quality: Track which leads become qualified opportunities, not just who fills out a form.
Downstream outcomes: Connect ad conversions to appointments, closed deals, revenue, or whatever actually matters to the business.
Conversion value: Give Google more context when some conversions are worth significantly more than others.
Baseline performance: Document your current results before major campaign or automation changes so you have something meaningful to compare against.

The more Google automates, the less useful it is to simply ask whether your campaigns are hitting their CPA or ROAS targets. Make sure you’re measuring what actually matters before Google starts optimizing for it.

Head to Search Engine Journal for more.

Your ICP Might Be Too Narrow

AUGUST 26, 2026

A strong ideal customer profile should help you focus your marketing, but getting too specific can make the profile less useful. Fletcher PMM argues that many teams build their ICP around assumptions about who looks like a good customer instead of looking closely at who actually gets value from the product.

That can lead marketers to exclude potential customers before they’ve had a chance to prove themselves — especially when the profile is built around things like company size, industry, job title, or geography rather than the problems the product actually solves.

So how should marketers rethink their ICP?

Start with the problem: Define the pain your product solves before narrowing down who experiences it.
Look at your best customers: Find patterns among customers who get the most value, not just the ones who fit your existing profile.
Question your assumptions: Company size, title, or industry can be useful signals, but they shouldn’t automatically determine who gets targeted.
Leave room to learn: Your ICP should evolve as you learn more about who buys, uses, and succeeds with your product.

Head to Fletcher PMM for more.

YouTube Creators Are More Than a Reach Play

AUGUST 24, 2026

Creators are becoming a bigger part of how brands build relationships with audiences, but there’s still a tendency to treat creator partnerships as a media buy: find someone with the right audience, negotiate a deal, publish the content, and move on.

YouTube is making that model more interesting. As creators build businesses around their channels, brands have more opportunities to work with them beyond a single sponsored video — from longer-term partnerships to integrations that feel more naturally connected to the creator’s content and community.

So what should marketers keep in mind?

Think beyond one-off deals: Longer-term creator relationships can give brands more consistency and make partnerships feel less transactional.
Look at the whole creator business: A creator’s value isn’t limited to their audience size. Their formats, community, products, and other brand relationships can reveal more opportunities to collaborate.
Let creators keep their voice: The more a partnership feels like something the creator would genuinely make, the less it feels like an ad dropped into their content.
Build for the platform: YouTube gives creators more room for storytelling than a quick social post. Give partnerships enough space to take advantage of that.

Get the full scoop at Ad Age.

When “New” Becomes Normal

AUGUST 24, 2026

AI is changing marketing, but it’s also part of a much bigger pattern. Search, social platforms, consumer behavior, and the tools marketers use every day are evolving faster than ever — making “keeping up” feel like part of the job itself.

And that creates a new challenge: how do you stay current without chasing every shiny new tool?

So what should marketers keep in mind?

Keep the context: Experience still matters. Knowing which “next big thing” actually stuck can be just as valuable as knowing how to use the latest tool.
Stay curious: You don’t need to master everything, but you do need to understand what’s changing and why it matters.
Learn from each other: Younger marketers may bring technological fluency, while experienced marketers bring context and judgment. Good teams need both.
Don’t confuse new with useful: Once the novelty wears off, the real question is whether the technology actually improves the work.

AI may be the latest “exciting new thing,” but eventually it will become part of the infrastructure we barely think about. The real skill is knowing which changes are worth getting used to.

Get the full scoop at Carney.

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