SEO AMA With Warren Laine-Naida and Rob Cairns

Last Updated on October 12, 2026

Episode 680: SEO AMA with Warren Laine-Naida – Stunning Digital Marketing

Hosted by Robert Cairns, Stunning Digital Marketing

Start with the audience, not the keyword

Before improving SEO, ask: What do you want to be found for, by whom, and where are those people?

The interview correctly identifies a fundamental problem: businesses often demand rankings without defining what business outcome those rankings should support.

Write for humans, search engines, and AI

Your content must serve its intended audience while remaining understandable to search engines and AI systems.

The important distinction is that these are not three entirely separate writing tasks. Clear language, useful structure, specific facts, and well-defined entities can serve all three.

Don’t depend on your website alone

The discussion highlights LinkedIn, Substack, podcasts, and social media as additional routes to visibility. Rob’s experience is particularly telling: he attributes roughly 70% of his non-referral clients over five years to his podcast and social media.

The lesson is to build visibility where your audience already spends time, not to wait for Google to discover every new page.

Small businesses can compete with major brands

A well-managed local business profile can help an independent shop compete with a national chain in local search.

This is a useful reminder that visibility depends on the search context, relevance, competition, and local signals—not just brand size.

SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time service

Customers change, competitors change, and markets change. A website that was effective a year ago may no longer meet the same needs.

Warren’s recommendation is to establish from the outset that SEO requires continuing work, with a realistic project horizon rather than promises of instant rankings.

Question asked by the audience

Please address how you report rankings when most of the answer never reaches a SERP.

How do you report rankings when most answers never reach a SERP?

This is where traditional SEO reporting starts to fall short.

We used to measure visibility by looking at rankings, impressions, clicks, and traffic. Someone searched, saw your website in the results, and hopefully clicked. Simple enough.

But what happens when someone asks ChatGPT a question, gets an answer, and never visits Google? Or when Google answers the question directly, without sending anyone to your website?

The answer may include your expertise, your content, or your brand. The user might never click a link (Zero-Click Search). And your ranking report won’t tell you much about it.

We need to separate rankings from visibility.

I would report three things:

• Search performance: Rankings, impressions, clicks, and organic traffic. These still matter.
• AI visibility: Whether your brand or content appears in AI answers, whether it is cited, and how consistently this happens across repeated queries.
• Business results: Branded searches, enquiries, referrals, and conversions. These help us understand whether visibility is contributing to something useful.

There is a catch. One AI citation doesn’t mean you have lasting visibility. Results can change with the wording of a question, the platform, the date, and the context. You need to test repeatedly and record what you actually observe.

AI citations should be treated as probabilities.

And we need to be honest about what we cannot measure. A person might read an AI answer, remember your name, and contact you weeks later. Unless they tell you how they found you, that connection may never appear in your analytics.

My approach would be to keep traditional SEO reporting, add structured AI visibility checks, and measure business outcomes separately.

Rankings tell us where a page appears. Visibility tells us whether people encounter our expertise. Business results tell us whether that exposure matters.

If most answers never reach a traditional SERP, ranking is still a useful metric. It just isn’t the whole story.

Wrap Up

“Why do you want to be found specifically?”

That question should come before keyword research, content production, technical optimisation, or AI experimentation.

The next step is to connect that principle to today’s search environment: how to make content not only discoverable, but also understandable, trustworthy, and worth citing by AI systems.