Lily Ray

If your CTR is weak, it’s probably not your editing. It’s your hook. Most DTC brands blame “fatigue” when performance drops. But the audience isn’t fatigued. They’re just seeing the same belief packaged differently. Different visuals. Same angle. I saw this recently with a skincare brand. They hammered pain. And trust. Acne. Sensitivity. Halal compliance. They built credibility. But they never leaned into desire. → Why upgrade? → What changes in my life? → Who do I become? • Glow. • Confidence. • Pride. They were playing safe. Because they assumed trust alone would scale. It doesn’t. Trust earns consideration. Desire drives action. When we shifted the tension from reassurance to aspiration… CTR moved. Not because the editing improved. Because the belief shifted. If performance feels stuck, don’t ask for better visuals. Ask: Which buying tension are we under-leveraging? That’s usually where scale hides. #DTC #AdTesting #CreativeOps #CreativeFatigue

3

🪦 Attribution is Dead (not SEO)  There’s no less customers… there’s more. 👀 But it’s much harder to identify where they came from. If you expect neat dashboards, clean funnels, and tidy little reports that tell you exactly where every customer came from… that’s not going to happen. ✅ The Customer journey is messy. ✅ Many touch points, across different platforms. ✅ Some, completely impossible to measure. There’s a huge opportunity here… for businesses that stop caring. Ask yourself; “what would I do if I couldn’t track anything?” (because soon you won’t be able to track very much at all). If we can’t track the clicks, then the businesses that win will be the ones who stop obsessing over tracking, and start obsessing over quality. Because without attribution… brand, expertise and trust are what count. SEO isn’t dead but now it needs help. Search is the sum of everything, everywhere, all the time. People don’t just “Google and buy” anymore… they Google, they read, they watch, they return to Google, they compare, they forget, they remember, and one day, they contact you. It's impossible to track this. They contact you because they’ve seen enough of your content, enough times, to be sure that you’re the right choice for them. So the question isn’t which platform to focus on. ❓ It’s… how do I make my business unavoidable? ❓ How do I show up everywhere all at once? And if you’re willing to play the long game (the only game), you’ll win way bigger than the businesses waiting for their analytics to tell them what to do.

7

3 Comments

For fellow SEO folks out there -- what do you think of Google's recent change to SERP monitoring, limiting the viewable positions to the first page only (top-10)? We all know that ranking beyond the first page doesn't bring in leads, but it takes some time for new keywords to climb to the top positions. How will you be monitoring keyword improvements? Or it's all about getting into the AI Overviews now? Any useful tips from Semrush or Ahrefs out there yet? #SEO #keywords #SERP #marketinganalytics #GEO #AEO

4

From one of Eli Schwartz future of seo newsletter, "The agency of the future is much smaller than the one it replaced, and it bills more like a strategic consultancy than one measured by words written or minutes in a meeting." This one hit me pretty hard. Many many years ago, I was part of the agency world where our value was assessed by the number of content briefs delivered, meetings to discuss the recommendations, and sending ranking reports with traffic correlation tied to our briefs. Though those types of activities are still important, the point is that the value of each is now much lesser. As I moved away from agency world and into in-house and SaaS, I realized how little opportunity many good SEOs had in the most important part of an SEO program: really plugging into the business, learning about their offerings / target audiences, collaborating on an overall strategy, and then creating a roadmap. Fast-forward to ~3 years ago, I decided to strike out on my own because I wanted to take all of my learnings and bring it to the clients of my choice. And in doing so, here were my non-negotiables. These were just gut feeling decisions at the time but both turned out to be massively important for my business. >> Be empathetic and always do what's right for the client As I continue to build out my SEO/GEO consultancy, it's clear to me that the strategy & roadmap that we collaborate with our clients on is where our value is. We keep updated with the business, their priorities, and target audience behaviors to ensure our strategy & roadmap is dynamic and flexible. Everything else - the briefs, meetings, conversations, reporting, etc. - revolve around that strategy & roadmap. An engagement where the value is binary (you pay this, you receive this number of deliverbales) is not an engagement at all. It’s a transaction. >> Beyond just marketing & SEO, serve others From a staffing perspective, the conventional agency model (cheap talent, favorable margins) never really appealed to me. It felt self-serving and risky to the client. Though it doesn't scale well, I've intentionally brought on SEOs who have A LOT of experience and THE RIGHT type of experience, while compensating them the same way I compensated myself. They share the some empathy and always do what’s right for the client, prioritizing the strategic engagement over just a transactional one. --- I'm thankful that all the learnings from my career led me to this and extra thankful for the gut feelings that I had ~3 years ago, because they all helped position Keyrise pretty damn well in this world of GEO: to serve clients correctly AND help good consultants with a balanced work life.

10

2 Comments

What changed since the Google Ads August 17th update? 🤔 Anu Adegbola, mMBA turned last month's PPC Live AMA on the August 17 bidding change into the best practitioner write-up of the update I've seen. Three things hold up reading it back:  • The accounts that reset targets to realistic levels before the change had a boring update. Boring was the goal.  • Change history mattered more than performance data. Most of the panic I've seen since traces back to something someone changed themselves.  • Budget limited campaigns now deliver at their target, so the target is doing more work than it used to. If yours was inherited, revisit it first. Since we recorded, two updates.  1. Google's budget simulator started projecting lower cost per conversion at higher budgets on campaigns with realistic targets. A live test is running on one campaign, and the delivered numbers get posted when it has at least two full weeks behind it.  2. Conversion lag still matters. The numbers for any window keep changing for a week or more after it closes, as late conversions get attributed back into it, so early reads move. I'm rereading everything at the one month mark this Friday. Reva Minkoff took the other half of the questions. Her answers cover the other half of the picture and are worth reading twice. Full write-up in the comments. 👇 #googleads #ppc #sem #sea

10

1 Comment

I’ve noticed something interesting... (*Reads on. This is NOT interesting.) The folks I work with fall into two camps: 1. The business that never tried SEO 2. The business that did, but got disappointing results The first camp is the easiest to deal with. I get to tinker with websites that are blank slates—a fresh SEO canvas. Most of these business owners aren't SEO savvy, so it's clear what language I use and how I present the issues and solutions. The second camp is way trickier. These business owners have tried SEO, but it hasn’t worked. They may know why, but they often don't, so they're begrudgingly trying again. In this scenario, clients are sometimes familiar with basic SEO, so explaining gets interesting. As I’ve said before, I don’t know what folks know, so I assume they don’t know anything—not in a condescending way but in a way that guarantees they understand everything. The second camp is a bit sensitive. Whatever they paid to have done hasn’t worked, so they're rightly pissed off. SEO can be very emotive (apparently). These clients experience all five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. And once they accept that SEO isn't the problem, something else is, we can put things right. If any of this sounds like you, DM me. Or take a look at my off-colour emails: https://lnkd.in/evNtixKk

16

1 Comment

Unsolicited #SEO tip: If you are in e-commerce and not thinking about agentic, you are already falling behind. There are ways you can start doing this already. ⬇️ Providers like PayPal are already releasing dev docs on their agentic support (h/t to Crystal Carter and her Women in Tech SEO talk), and we're seeing the future happen fast with Google pushing the ability to buy directly from AI Mode/Gemini this week. (Thanks Glenn Gabe for heads up). Helpful links in comments [click "recent" and scroll if LI is being tricky]

108

16 Comments

Just published in Search Engine Land Why creative, not bidding, is limiting PPC performance. For years we have obsessed over bidding strategies. Target CPA. Target ROAS. Manual vs automated. Portfolio structures. But in 2026, that is not where the real constraint is anymore. Between automated bidding and delivery systems like Meta’s Andromeda and Google’s AI-driven formats, bidding has become table stakes. The platforms are very good at deciding what to show and when. What they cannot fix for you is weak creative. And that is where most accounts are stalling. The plateau I see most often is not caused by budgets. Not by audience size. Not by bid strategy. It is caused by: • Limited creative volume • Slow refresh cycles • Over-reliance on one ��winning” ad • Fatigue creeping in before teams even notice The best PPC teams now treat creative like a product roadmap. Ongoing testing. Clear hypotheses. Structured iteration. Constant input into the system. If you are trying to break through a growth ceiling this year, the answer probably is not another bid tweak. It is better creative, more of it, and deployed faster. Full piece here if you want the deeper dive: https://lnkd.in/eWRNcPrW #PPC #PaidMedia #DigitalMarketing #CreativeStrategy #MarketingLeadership

4

1 Comment

#GoogleSearch #pageviews fell 34% year over year. #GoogleDiscover dropped 15%. #ChatGPT referrals rose 200% but still account for less than 1% of total traffic. #Traffic is shifting, not disappearing. Total weekly pageviews across publishers fell just 6% from 2024 to 2025, a typical swing tied partly to the news cycle. Search is shrinking as a share of traffic, while direct, internal, and messaging channels are growing. https://lnkd.in/g5u7yEYj #seo

3