Platform Leverage

PlatformLeverage is a marketing consultancy specializing in audience-platform research and cross-platform marketing strategies.

Founder, CEO

Search Engine Land

Contributing content around Online Reputation Management, SEO and AI.
https://searchengineland.com/author/gert-mellak

Contributor

SEOLeverage

SEOLeverage is an International SEO agency focusing on increasing your organic conversions.

With site audits and ongoing consulting, paired with an outstanding app for machine-learning and AI insights, SEOLeverage is helping more and more online businesses and local businesses grow with SEO.

My team at SEOLeverage has a vast experience in SEO,
ranging from 5-10+ years of daily focused SEO strategy and implementation.

Get the SEO momentum started: seoleverage.com

solicom consulting sl

Solicom is a digital consulting firm specializing in business process automation, strategic marketing and e-commerce.

Founder

Regus

SEO Consultant

Online reputation management is crucial to your business's success. Ensuring your brand is represented positively across platforms is just as important as driving traffic. At SEOLeverage.com, we specialise in helping businesses build and maintain a strong online presence that fosters trust and authority.

As the founder and CEO of SEOLeverage.com, my mission is to help businesses like yours achieve measurable and sustainable SEO success. My team of 25 senior SEO experts specialises in conversion-driven SEO strategies and comprehensive online reputation management across all platforms, ensuring your brand gets the visibility and trust it deserves.

In a fast-paced digital world, we focus on timeless SEO principles that drive real results—better traffic, qualified leads, and increased sales for your business.

Ready to elevate your brand's online presence? Let’s get you consistent visibility and SEO results that matter.

Message me today to see how we can help your business grow!

Gert Mellak

Your competitors aren't smarter. They're just not wasting page authority.

See your leaks: seoleverage.com/calculator

E-Commerce SEO + AI | Helping Brands Fill $100K+ Revenue Leaks

FROM INVISIBLE TO $287K

Thinking about replacing your 1,000-page website with an AI-generated one? Think again!

@Gregmerrilees explains why your hard-earned SEO and content authority can’t just be replicated overnight. And discover how AI can enhance your site without losing the results you’ve built over time.

Check out the full podcast article here: https://lnkd.in/dC_dK-Nb

#WebDesign #AI #Personalization #ConversionRate #WebsiteStrategy

With all the #semrush buying, how does #adobe have time to do guest post outreach these days? 

Look what I just got (for real!) 😜

I recently discussed how we often misplace our SEO focus—optimizing for “perfect” speed scores while ignoring what truly drives revenue.

A few milliseconds faster doesn’t equal higher rankings. It’s about prioritizing improvements that move the needle.

Curious where your SEO investment should really go?  https://seoleverage.com/

I'm seeing content-to-code ratio come up a lot in some AI visibility tools as a recommended action step to work on for AI Search optimization, but have my doubts ... 

Has anybody seen anything that supports that argument?

Wil Reynolds Steve Toth Lily Ray Michael King Dixon Jones Aleyda Solís Dan Petrovic

No A $3.5M Shopify store was ranking position 28 for their money keywords.

Competitors with weaker domains were in the top 3.

The problem: 186 product pages, zero internal links to category pages.
Google couldn’t tell which pages mattered.

We fixed it in 4 weeks:

Added contextual internal links from product pages
Rewrote category descriptions as buying guides
Added FAQ schema
Fixed crawl budget waste on 2,400 parameter URLs

Result: Position 28 to position 4 across 12 categories. 2,147 new qualified visitors monthly. $287,364 annual revenue increase.

38x ROI first year.

Your competitors aren’t smarter. They’re just not wasting their page authority.

If you’re doing $1M+ in e-commerce, you probably have revenue leaks like this. See your number: https://lnkd.in/dtgdKubh

SEO is completely dead, right?

Unless you get a really good feeling for your target audience,
and focus on the small portion of things that actually move the needle!

SEO can grow your business, or help you recover revenue you are losing. 

Most new clients come to us to fill specific revenue leaks that we help them estimate in $$ numbers with our calculator first. 

The focused 30-day sprint approach then gets everybody necessary on board and helps fix isolated issues to recover revenue and see results fast.

Mentor to $300K–$1M founders | 64:4 Framework | $400M+ results | 16 years optimizing business models | 40 client max

The SEO Secret Most Agencies Hide From You

Most SEO agencies want you on endless retainers.

They audit everything. Work on 20 things at once. Keep you busy with approvals every week.

Here's what the smart ones do instead:

They calculate exactly how much revenue you're losing right now. They identify the one leak costing you the most. They fix it in 30 days. Then they prove it worked.

My partner Gert Mellak just showed me his new approach:

Instead of $5K per month forever, it's $7,500 for one focused sprint. Instead of analyzing everything, he plugs one revenue leak. Instead of constant meetings, you get two calls and three approvals.

The difference? You know the exact value before you start.

One client recovered $96K annually from a single overlooked segment. Another got $9K monthly from reorganizing internal links. A third ranked first just by changing one homepage paragraph.

The calculator shows you what you're losing. The sprint fixes it. The result speaks for itself.

SEO isn't mysterious. It's math.

Most agencies benefit from complexity. The good ones profit from clarity.

After auditing hundreds of eCommerce sites, I’ve learned this:

You don’t need a full audit to find where revenue is leaking. You just need to know where to look.

Most Shopify stores share the same weak points, and fixing them can change everything. See how we approach it here: https://lnkd.in/dCCx-kzp

SaaS Marketing - Content, AEO & SEO | Newsletter: How SaaS companies *actually* get customers

Sam Altman just asked for enough money to buy Japan.
He wants...

$7 trillion (more than Japan's GDP).

The biggest financial ask in human history.

And we don't even know... why?

Here's what's breaking my brain:

Kennedy's moon money? Gotta beat the Soviets.

The Manhattan Project? End the war.

Bank bailouts in '08? Prevent collapse.

$7 trillion. For what enemy? What crisis? What future are we building?

"AGI will change everything."

Cool story, bro. Change it how? For who?

And when Altman gets pressed on it in interviews?

He defends it with the arrogance of a Gringotts goblin.

This is me handing my kid 13 bucks for allowance and him holding out his other hand for 7,000.

Stone-faced. Like it’s normal.

Also a 13X multiple (Google is only 6x).

But we're not united around... anything.

Not a mission. Not a villain. Not even a clear promise.

Apple said "1,000 songs in your pocket."

Google said "organize the world's information."

OpenAI says "give us $7 trillion or get left behind."

Venture capital fanfiction.

At this scale, real marketing HAS to do one thing: unite us.

⚡️

PS - What's the Content IP (named problem) for OpenAI?

I genuinely can't think of it without drifting into Theranos/WeWork/FTX territory.

For those of us bad at math (me), 7 trillions would end world hunger for the next 175 years.

So the problem's gotta be bigger than that?

Ross Hudgens

SEO Manager

Siege Media

We drive organic growth with SEO, content marketing and PR. Past and current clients include Intuit, Zendesk, Casper, TripAdvisor, Shutterfly, Asana and more. 

Notable achievements: 
• Named to Inc. 5000 6x 
• Named to Inc's Best Workplaces 2x
• $100,000,000+ in Lifetime Revenue Generated
• Named a Fastest Growing Company in San Diego 6x
• Named Top 25 B2B Digital Marketing Influencer by Clutch
• Named Top 10 Most Influential Content Marketer by BuzzSumo

Founder / CEO

Member

Full Beaker, Inc.

•	Lead SEO initiatives for Full Beaker, developing web properties from initiation to generating thousands of search referrals monthly across several verticals, including but not limited to insurance and mortgage. Dictated keyword research, content strategy, and link building strategies for Full Beaker's portfolio of websites.
•	Integral part of a team that built Full Beaker from inception to a multi-million dollar, profitable company in under two years. 
•	Developed PPC campaigns in highly competitive mortgage industry.
•	Supported affiliate and business development strategy to rapidly scale the business in the course of two years, utilizing inbound marketing strategies to help improve profit-per-lead and overall lead supply-and-demand levers. 
•	Grew SEO traffic over 500% over the course of two years, leveraging scalable link building strategies to diversify efforts over many domains and still achieve results. 
•	Supplied recommendations for CRO strategies which improved site performance (cumulatively) over 500% across Full Beaker's portfolio of websites.

MediaBoost - Billy.com

•	Head of all SEO operations for MediaBoost. Leads the SEO development of MediaBoost’s multiple properties, from infancy into maturity.
•	Manages an SEO support team of two full-time content writers as well as two developers, half of which are located in Israel, in building out MB properties to match current SEO best-practices. 
•	In charge of all SEO processes as it comes to link building and SEO strategy, utilizing network contacts, creativity and experience to build links, implement best practices, and maintain competitive advantage.  
•	Oversees social media development, providing Facebook, Twitter and blog recommendations to provide growth and build community to meet long-term monetization goals.

Single Grain LLC

•	As Single Grain’s first employee, helped build the company from a base of three clients to a height of twenty. Developed all of Singlegrain’s internal SEO processes, including client reports, link building, scaling strategies, as well as all standard operating procedures. 
•	Analyzed search problems and formulated creative solutions to launch and build SEO campaigns. Performed link building, keyword research, on-site and off-site optimization, and other relevant tasks pertaining to an account’s SEO needs.
•	Managed other employees. Trained new hires on SEO and internal processes. Supervised new employees and nurtured growth and development in the workplace.
•	Wrote all content for the Single Grain blog and Twitter accounts, while managing a personal business-related account. Utilized these accounts to promote expertise and build the Single Grain brand.

Senior SEO Analyst

I’m the founder and CEO of Siege Media. We’re dedicated to helping great brands scale through AI and Google-first SEO, content marketing, and PR. 

Siege Media has been honored with inclusion in the Inc. 5000 list six times and recognized as one of Inc.'s Best Workplaces.

And we’re so proud to collaborate with some of the world's leading brands, including Adidas, Airbnb, Angi, Asana, Audible, Casper, Healthline, HubSpot, Instacart, Intuit QuickBooks, Intuit TurboTax, Norton, Quicken Loans, Shutterfly, The Zebra, TripAdvisor, Williams Sonoma, Y Combinator, Zendesk, and many more.

We grow great brands with SEO-focused content marketing. Past and current clients include Intuit, Zendesk, Casper, TripAdvisor, Shutterfly, Asana and more. 

Notable achievements: 
• Named to Inc. 5000 6x 
• Named to Inc's Best Workplaces 2x
• Named a Fastest Growing Company in San Diego 6x
• Named Top 10 Most Influential Content Marketer by BuzzSumo

Siege Media is excited to become an official partner of Women in Tech SEO!

For years, we've heard great things about their thriving community from Siege team members and also, direct members of the group.

As a company with a female-dominant team (leadership+company wide), it was a no brainer to support such a great group as we head into 2026 and beyond.

I'm a special fan of Areej AbuAli and Erin Simmons (they/them), two leaders behind the scenes who run the organization with class and polish.

We look forward to supporting their events and partnering on content initiatives (such as our upcoming trends report) as we head into the New Year. 

If you haven't heard of Women in TechSEO, highly suggest checking them out!

CEO, Siege Media | SEO for Google + AI, Content & PR

This is the exact process we use to prioritize content for LLM visibility:

First, input the core prompts we care about into a tracker, by creating “what is the best X” using our full set of products and solutions. 

For example, “what’s the best running shoe for wide feet”, or “best organic growth agency for fintech”.

Transactional terms are all that matters, and having those covered for our full product suite is the correct way of pushing visibility towards the things that convert.

From there, identify what URLs are sourced most often across that set of prompts. 

This set of URLs, and how often they’re sourced, is our prioritization scorecard.

We’re looking for “companies like us” in the list. If we see them, that means we can directly create content that has a chance of replacing (or adding to) what’s cited here.

Using this information, we can then weight the pipeline we’re seeing from LLMs so far against SEO data for these same topics. 

If a highly sourced URL – in an industry seeing significant LLM usage so far – is also in high demand on Google, it’s a no brainer to prioritize that content highly in our roadmaps.

If your content hasn’t been touched in the last 90 days, you’re probably not beating NerdWallet.

We pulled update dates across NerdWallet’s major finance verticals and compared them to everyone else on page one.

What we found:

NerdWallet refreshes, on average, every 115 days.

The rest of page one? About 12 months.

In some niches (mortgages), they’re updating in ~49 days — which makes sense with rate volatility.

Credit cards, insurance, personal finance are also on ~2–3 month cadences.

So if you’re publishing once-a-year guides and wondering why they can't beat them out, you now know why.

NerdWallet is basically setting the freshness floor for any lucrative personal finance SERP, even for brands that don’t think they’re competing with them directly.

That’s why we built BlueprintIQ — it takes our “freshness distance” concept (how far behind competitors you are on recency), runs it sitewide, and tells you every month where you’re slipping so you can update before rankings decay.

Freshness is something I think we all feel ramping up, as notifications of it being critical to LLM visibility and overall ability to update increases with AI advances. 

Looking at the top of the top is a good benchmark for understanding exactly where those new standards sit. 

And in many spaces, once a year updates are no longer acceptable to win.

“I've been there 10 years, have filed 1,000 JIRA tickets, and they’ve implemented maybe 5 of them.”

If you work in enterprise SEO, you’ve heard some version of that. Maybe you’ve said a version of it.

The thing is: that implementation rate isn’t destiny.

It’s usually a mix of misaligned strategy, weak business cases, and poor communication design. And sometimes, issues with company selection.

At Tech SEO Connect (Durham NC, Dec 4th-5th), I’m excited to be giving a talk on "The SEO Execution Gap: How to Get Recommendations Deployed in Complex Environments".

I'll be sharing a proven playbook from 13+ years of agency experience working with Fortune 500 companies and high growth startups.

See you in Durham in a few weeks?

Siege Media’s Digital PR department is growing fast!

We’ve been excited to bring on some talented, specialized resources around data journalism and PR in the last few months, with our VP, PR Carrie Van-Brunt Wiley leading the charge.

Some of the talented people we’ve brought on:

Lane Gillespie - Data Journalist 
Ryan Flanigan, CCC - Data Journalist
Taylor Lynch - Digital PR Specialist
Fontaine Gwynn - Digital PR Specialist
Abby Hartness - Senior Digital PR Specialist

… with more on the horizon! 

I’m excited to see how these specialists accelerate results for our clients in the days to come.

"Traffic is down for everyone."

This can be trumpeted as an excuse for a poorly performing SEO program in 2025.

Lots of AI-powered programs I see with a little less traffic than everyone else, but it feels good because publishing volume is up and there's a valid explanation.

If you check the metrics and you see:

- Organic sales are significantly down
- AI visibility is notably behind competition
- Rankings are declining (especially for BOFU terms)

Using that as an excuse is not a valid one.

Yes, it’s reasonable for traffic to be down, especially in B2B. 

But there are layers under that very worth digging into to verify your change is based on the macro, not your own strategy. 

And that's not a valid excuse for every business (or SEO) to make.

ChatGPT is the most popular LLM, but is it the best?

We analyzed more than 2.3 million user sessions across five leading LLMs to get a better sense of which LLM is most effective at sending high-quality traffic.

In our data, ChatGPT is actually the worst of the five, at least based on the engagement rate deriving from traffic it sent to websites we track.

ChatGPT notably had the highest sample size by far (~1.9M visits across our sample), but it's notable to see the other five heavyweights actually outperform from traditional user metrics.

This plays off something we've been seeing recently, as well -- ChatGPT's lead from a quality perspective seems to be shrinking, and this pairs with actual declines in traffic share as well.

It’s possible this engagement rate portends a slow shift to other LLMs. The way things are looking to me, I’d expect Gemini to take the lead.

From a business perspective, getting Pro access free for our entire team on G-Suite makes it a no-brainer choice, and the professional “feel” of the responses is something I personally prefer as well.

Do you need a content engineer? 

My take: no, but you do need content engineering.

What’s the difference? In content-driven workflows and SEO-driven workflows today, there are many opportunities for automation. 

But the name “content engineering” implies it directly (and significantly) flows through to the writing itself. 

A better definition, and one we have employed with our own version of this role, is a head of automation. 

This person can deploy leverage where it’s most impactful: communication, reporting, updates, competitive intelligence, and etc. But I’m not sure that is adequately summed up by the term “content engineer” in particular, which feels more precise to the writing workflow itself. 

Also, if that role were to exist in isolation, I’m not sure there’s enough work within that process to warrant that title in particular, *unless* it’s in aim of high volume, low quality writing.

This was the crux of the great podcast conversation I had with Josh Spilker of AirOps, which has a great tool that in many ways is building on that idea. 

Josh has been at the front of this “content engineer” movement, and like the GEO/AEO/AI for SEO debate, I think we’re all mostly caught in a naming convention back and forth here, while mostly agreeing on the same things.

Do you really need an SEO audit? Or did the market just move on without you?

We looked at a website recently with a market dominant position in a low price market selling information.

Their competition? A changing perception of expected cost and ChatGPT.

Their traffic (the blue line) has dwindled slowly over the past few years.

Their free SEO competition (the orange line) has slowly increased on the same timeline. And there's also ChatGPT.

Unseen, Reddit, a “frugal” disseminator of information, has only accelerated this discovery cycle as free competition has emerged around them. 

So they came to us wanting an audit. 

And like everybody, there’s generally room for improvement.

But when people want an audit, they are often trying to completely refill an empty bucket. Sometimes, only drops can be added back in rather than the original amount, as the competitive environment has been rewritten.

This situation is all the more common in the last two years, especially in markets where information is sold at low cost.

Part of being an SEO is reporting on and understanding the macro, not just a title tag or 404 that needs to be fixed. 

Good SEOs don’t just tell you what to change on the page.

They tell you when the game itself is now played differently.

Programmatic SEO is not a blog strategy.

Programmatic SEO successfully exists in a few forms:

1) Long-tail landing page use cases where the product brings the value, not the copy itself.

2) Situations where "the product" is the UX of the page, and that UX is world-class.

At least, those were the core points programmatic SEO expert Matt Bowers (ex-Zapier, Zillow) brought on our podcast discussing how this approach has evolved in the age of AI.

In short, AI (or programmatic), can do something useful when you give it something great. 

But it's not as useful supplying 1,500 words of copy on an undifferentiated blog design. That's not true programmatic. 

If we think about it correctly, programmatic is essentially the 80% in the equation -- product that took months if not years to build, that then has an extra 20% of value brought from secondary sources (AI, or third party data in situations like real estate) that fill out the equation. 

Even better when you bring this all together. 

A great product, great landing page UX, and a well-considered use of third party data or AI to scale up the operation. 

This was one of our most popular podcasts of the past few months, so the data suggests it might be worth checking out if you're considering a programmatic approach.

(There was a pie-in-the-face moment, too: we praised the AI-driven site Greg(dot)app and then shortly after realized it had gotten hit by a Google update.)

If you're nervous about employing "best X" strategies on your own site, "X alternatives" posts are a great place to start.

1 - You don't have to explicitly call yourself the best.

2 - The article doesn't have to be deeply adversarial, and can instead softly focus on the feature differences without being disparaging to the original site.

3 - There's little argument as to why these shouldn't exist on our sites beyond nervousness of controversy in mentioning competitors.

Given point two -- which can be lighter in tone than even "US vs THEM" posts, this is a great, high impact way for companies to wade their toes into a BOFU approach.

Once the company sees the potential impact (as well as additional lift on LLMs), that will likely open up the gates for scaling the strategy.

taplio

The Battle

Gert Mellak

Ross Hudgens

Followers

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Performance ScoreGert Mellak's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Gert Mellak

Ross Hudgens

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Gert Mellak's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreGert Mellak's LinkedIn Performance