JHF Blog

Search Visibility & AI Strategy Insights

Practical writing on SEO, AEO, SEM, and AI strategy: the same thinking JHF Research brings to client work.

SEO & AEO

Why Page Speed Still Decides Who Ranks

Core Web Vitals have been a ranking signal for years, and most sites still treat speed as a nice-to-have. Here's where the milliseconds actually go.

September 20, 2026
Analytics

How to Measure SEO and SEM With One Shared Scorecard

Organic and paid search are reported in separate dashboards by separate teams. The channel they're both fighting for, the SERP, doesn't care about that split.

September 19, 2026
SEO & AEO

Why Answer-First Content Wins Search and AI Overviews Alike

Featured snippets and AI Overviews both pull from the same kind of text: a direct answer, close to the top, with the windup cut out.

September 15, 2026
Analytics

Traffic Is Not a Metric. Pipeline Is.

Your traffic dashboard is trending up and sales still says leads are down. Here's why that gap exists, and what closes it.

September 1, 2026
AI Strategy

AI Strategy Is a Workflow Problem, Not a Tool Problem

Picking ChatGPT over Claude isn't a strategy. The teams getting real value from AI made a workflow decision first, a tool decision second.

August 18, 2026
SEM

Your UTMs Are Probably a Mess (Here's a Naming Convention That Holds)

One inconsistent tag and your campaign reporting fragments into duplicates. Here's the naming convention we use so it never happens.

August 4, 2026
AI Strategy

Why Most AI Pilots Never Make It to Production

Most AI pilots produce a great demo and then stall. The three things that decide whether a pilot becomes a system, or another slide in a deck.

July 21, 2026
SEO & AEO

What Schema Markup Actually Does (and the Fields Everyone Skips)

Schema isn't a ranking hack. It's how you tell machines what your page means, and most sites leave the fields that matter most blank.

July 7, 2026
SEO & AEO

Why AI Search Readiness Is the New SEO Baseline

AI assistants now answer the questions your buyers used to Google. Here's the baseline we check before recommending anything else.

June 23, 2026
Design

How to Use the Color Wheel and Image Color Picker Together

Two free, browser-based color tools that work better as a pair: pull a real color out of any photo, then build a full palette around it. Here's how, and when you'd actually reach for each one.

June 9, 2026
SEO & AEO

How to Read Search Console When Rankings Look Fine and Traffic Still Dropped

Average position held steady and clicks fell anyway. The gap is almost always in one of four places, and Search Console shows every one of them if you know where to look.

May 26, 2026
SEO & AEO

How to Use the SERP Snippet Preview Tool

A free, browser-based way to see how a title tag and meta description will actually look and truncate in Google, on desktop and on mobile, before it's published.

May 12, 2026
SEM

Negative Keywords Are a System, Not a List

Most accounts have a negative keyword list that was built once and never touched again. The accounts that stay efficient treat negatives as a routine, with a cadence, a structure, and a rule for when to stop.

April 28, 2026
Analytics

Attribution Models Don't Disagree. They Answer Different Questions.

Last click says paid search drove the sale. Data-driven says it was the webinar. Neither report is wrong. They were built to answer two different questions, and most teams are asking the wrong one.

April 14, 2026
SEM

How to Use the UTM Campaign Builder

A free, browser-based UTM link builder that normalizes your values as you type, so every tracking link you send out is lowercase, correctly encoded, and consistent with the last one.

March 31, 2026
AI Strategy

The AI Use Case That Pays for Itself First Is Usually the Boring One

The impressive AI demo rarely turns into the first real return. The first return almost always comes from something nobody would put on a slide: looking things up, summarizing meetings, drafting the report that gets rewritten anyway.

March 17, 2026
SEO & AEO

How to Write Title Tags That Survive Google's Rewrite

Google rewrites a large share of title tags before anyone sees them. The ones it leaves alone have a few things in common, and none of them are tricks.

March 3, 2026
SEM

Your Landing Page Is the Part of the Campaign Nobody Owns

Paid search teams own the bids and the ads. Web teams own the site. The page that turns a click into a lead sits between them, and it's usually the weakest link in the campaign for exactly that reason.

February 17, 2026