Morningscore

The biggest journey of my (relatively short) lifetime is unfolding.
Morningscore is an online tool that helps you grow your website's SEO. Like a computer game you are given "missions" to complete. And you get rewards for growing your website traffic. SEO is now fun.

Morningtrain

Today I am partner at Morningtrain. I try to help out with visionary ideas. I have to admit this fast morning train is running just fine (if not perfect) without it's old loco pilot ;)

I love the team and the culture. Proud of what we built together.

Partner

Morningtrain is a digital agency in Odense, Denmark. We give our customers 1st class journeys

We work passionately with 3 things: Design, Programming and Online Marketing

Technology Denmark

Technology Denmark aims to attract, develop, and retain talent within the field of technology for companies. We are a non-profit association and a strong triple-helix partnership between trade and industry, local authorities, and institutions of research and education

Co-Chairmen of the Board

I was responsible for the operations in the early days of Morningtrain.

Toender IT

The first company i co-founded out of high school. Small IT solutions for local businesses.

Some of the brightest people I know started in that company, and are now working in what became the successor, Morningtrain.

Cofounder

My startup journey started with the Agency Morningtrain in 2010. A great company and work place that stands strong today. Things took a bad turn in 2014 when a bitcoin mining operation literally blew up in a  priest house basement. But damn it was fun. Now since 2018 I am part of Morningscore, the easiest all-in-one SEO tool. We have big dreams. And our many happy customers makes us believe they are achievable.

I love to create things and help them grow. Interaction with (all sorts of) people gives me energy and feeds my curiosity greatly.

Steady wins the race.

Some of the most intense 90 minutes in my career

But also a lot of fun

Talk in front of a big crowd of Germans. In German.

After living 4 years in Netherlands my already basic German had gotten just terrible...

2 months ago I got a call from Eric and Fabian (founder of SEO-DAY) together they had gotten the "brilliant" idea I would present 😅 .... 2 times!!?!

I can't read from a slideshow. I am too all over the place and free style for that.

I had to learn "street German"

So I got busy studying. YouTube videos. Music. over and over.

The result was not great but I could keep up and that's a personal achievement for me.

And if you were there and want the slides just send me a message 👍

Karsten Madsen

CCO @ Morningscore

🚀Auf der Suche nach dem besten Programm für den SEODAYam 👉19.11.2026 🏆 Website: seo-day.de

CEO @ Morningscore - turning SEO into a game

The last couple of months have been stressful. The SEO industry is changing and every week I meet into something new.

We have actually had a great year growth wise so far. But there is for sure some uncertainty about the future. And right now the market is acting strange.

It was kinda expected. 

We are going live with our "solution" in december:

Morningscore 4

It will turn Morningscore into the future winner (I am biased of course 👨‍🚀)

But yeah all the work, all the deadlines all the changes here and there needed to pull it off does cause stress.

My brain doesn't worry about anything, since I have logically concluded and calculated our way forward is solid. If not plan A, there is also plan B.

But still my stomach worries. I have told it to shut up and listen. And I use the full toolkit I learned to manage stress. But it's still a fight.

A thing that happened yesterday brough the stress noticeably down.

Totally unexpected.

I watched a 100 minute long documentary about Playstation vs SEGA vs Nintendo.

And oh boy must that have been a wild ride to be part of.

What I learned:

1.
SEGA had a marketing budget in the UK of 2M USD. Playstation had 100M. Lesson: SONY used their full power to win. Nothing SEGA could do. You don't choose your cards, only how you play them.

2
Technology was racing very fast in the 90's. They more or less all had to take a leap of faith on the technology they chose to partner with. Nintendo 64 chose one which turned out to be really hard for developers to work with and they lost A LOT of 3rd party support. MANY similar events unfolded that you could not have foreseen. Lesson: The winners were not smarter. Simply in a more favourable position.

3. 
No one cares much about who won or lost the 90's console wars today. But people remember the best games who went into history as pure works of art with huge honors given to the creators. Deservedly so. Lesson: Maybe you lose in the market. But creating something unique and fantastic that customers love, that is the true honor of building a business.

Lots more micro learnings. But these stood out to me. 

Of course I am playing to win. And I think we will. 

But at the same time I see that when you enter the business arena, you can't just decide to succeed, work hard and cash in. 

Some of the most talented people ever worked at SEGA, and they didn't win. 

Meanwhile you could be mediocre but have joined SONY at the right time. 

Mainly the documentary made me see how random it all was and how winners and losers shifted constantly.

And my stomach seems to relax a bit more now.

Cmon Cloudflare!!

Maybe instead of building one more fancy feature fix your basics...

This has happened way too many times last 2 years. It used to be rock solid...

This is one of my proudest link building moments.

Uploading great images I borrowed from our designer to Pexels, tagging them really well, and then oh boy did they get traffic

Today they have reached 42 Million views 😯

Then next step was to do a reverse image search on Google and reach out to blogs who had used our seal and laptop (the top images)

I was amazed to find some of the biggest blogs in the world had used them.

I asked them to link to us in the picture caption since they used our picture

Technically they didn't have to do it, but I just went after their kind return of a favor (using our images for free)

And it worked like a charm.

I call this tactic "Trojan seal"

I live in Amsterdam but this week in Odense, Denmark with the team, grinding away on Morningscore 4 - our epic new version that puts us in the big leagues.

We set a release date. We have a clear "final final" to-do list now.  

A few hardcore weeks ahead.

Our tractor RANK is looking forward to Christmas and the release 🎅🔥

Can someone tell me who copied who here? 😄😄😄

love how even the comma got in there

It's a funny world we live in.

As part of "growing up" with Morningscore 4 launch in December, we are also double checking our compliance to GDPR and marketing laws.

No more emails you did not ask for for example.

But here comes the (not so) fun part:

Our $450 million revenue a year top competitor and all the other multi million dollar competitors are not compliant to the best of my knowledge.

I signed up to a few last week and received lots of emails I did not ask for.

We are talking huge companies who have entire legal departments, and still decide to operate in a grey zone.

Next time you are after a small company for not being complient, please consider what pushed them in that direction - you really want to moralize the underdogs for not playing fair while the big players laugh in all our faces?

Confession:

I have campaigned for this slogan for a while now:

"GEO = SEO" 

I realise it was wrong. I am sorry to have misled you.

Corrected statement:

GEO = 80% SEO

Morgen gehts los bei SEODAY IN KÖLN - FACHKONFERENZ FÜR SUCHMASCHINENOPTIMIERUNG

Ich teile, was ich in 10 Tagen intensiver ChatGPT-Optimierung gelernt habe.

Ja, dann müsst ihr dabei sein, um meine überraschende Erkenntnis mitzubekommen.

SEODAY IN KÖLN - FACHKONFERENZ FÜR SUCHMASCHINENOPTIMIERUNG

Nerd alert.

I saw a lot of claims on LinkedIn that ChatGPT performs 20+ searches to Bing when you ask it questions and it performs web search.

The famous query-fan-out

An annoyingly fancy word to say "ChatGPT Googles for you"
 
However, when I check the logs to see search_model_queries I only find 2-3 every time.

So now I wonder: Is it that they only give us the top 1-3 or are the claims of these wildly many searches false?

I never understood why an AI would make that many searches for most questions asked, and honestly I think it's another attempt at pretending LLM's and the infrastructure around them are alien level intelligence.

Reality check: It might just be very very simple?

Or the alien level intelligence is not to be found in the logs and I am wrong?

When you translate your website to new languages to grow, you sometimes forget just how much "SEO cleanup" you have to do 😅

Those Spanish alt-tags don't write themselves... 🇪🇸

Or actually they do 🚜🔥 

RANK AI WordPress plugin to the rescue! 

It solves most of the cleanup. Our customers use it extensively.

Coming as a Shopify extension soon too!

To the Gen-z debate I just had this thought:

I am a millenial. 

When I joined the job market in 2012 ish I don't remember a big debate about our willingness to work and to fit in.

Of course you always had the good old "young people can't work hard" bashing, but it was mostly just fun and was rare.

So the question I am wondering now:

If the Gen-Z discussion is exaggerated and wrong, how come it has become such a monumental corner talk thing?

I mean when the whole village talks about something, which they didn't used to talk about, can you still just say that it's just "old people being backwards about things"?

Maybe this is real. Maybe there is a big change in perspective. And maybe there is something to talk about?

I feel like the whole debate is now taboo. Because the older generation being frustrated say it in the corners, since the debate is not allowed to have in public.

I hired several Gen-Z. And I keep hiring them. And I see both wins and challenges. Some of the corner talk might be true. But there is also power to be had in their fresh approach to work.

For example for me personally I am struggling daily to understand why many I meet are not "hungry" or driven to grow (seen from my limited perspective). I simply can't get it. But I would love to understand.

My little burning dream that screams inside me:

I WOULD LOVE TO SEE A FREAKING EXPLOSION OF GEN-Z ENTREPENEURS. CMON GUYS!!!!!! IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WORLD HOW IT IS (AND IT OFTEN SUCKS TO BE FAIR) CHANGE IT!!!!!!!!!!! 🥳🔥😎😎😎 IF YOU LIKE A DIFFERENT LIFE, THEN CREATE IT!!!!!!!!

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