One of my favorite quotes is: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

That may seem like a strange way of opening this intro, but let me explain.

We are so obsessed with getting our messaging right that it’s easy to end up with tunnel vision (I am very guilty of this myself).

But honestly, if no one was watching you – if you weren’t afraid  – how would you describe your brand?

Stepping into a more reflective state of mind is more important than ever when backlinks, AI search, and how we approach it all are changing so quickly.

I know, here I am with this plant obsession, but to answer my own question, “What would I do if I weren’t afraid?”, the answer would most likely be: “Talk about plants and digital marketing in some strange way.” So here we are 🙂

In the old SEO landscape, a good SEO route would look something like this:

You have a blog and you set a goal that each and every month you need to write X amount of posts, preferably in the style of Q&A. It’s great to have some sort of content calendar in place, but the most important thing is to keep publishing, to keep producing content that is related to your niche so Google finds you and ranks you for an important keyword.

You need a lot of backlinks  – the more, the better. Authority Rating and Domain Rating are key indicators of what makes a good website to get a backlink from. Low-quality blog networks and link farms are maybe not ideal, but hey, you get the backlink.

Using generic or very “Dear Sir”-like email outreach, with very little personalization and applying the “spray and pray” method, seems to work pretty well. You don’t need to spend too much time on outreach, it’s just a small hurdle you have to tackle in order to get that link.

Be active on all social media platforms, even the ones that don’t make any sense for your target audience. Some guru told you this was important (you probably also saw his post about how to become a millionaire by next Tuesday using his “secret formula”). 😉

See the pattern?

It’s a classic “more is more” trap.

Not being selective.
Not being intentional with what you are doing.

Always worrying about Google updates, algorithms, and obsessing over rankings.

You want to send clear signals about who you are, what you do, and what makes you and your brand different from your competitors.

Whereas before you could get away with the “more is more” approach and still rank for important keywords, this is not the case anymore.

And I see this first-hand in every step of the link-building campaign process on a daily basis. I will give you an example:

When I’m doing outreach to appear on podcasts, I write the emails myself. It’s time-consuming, and it’s not really scalable, BUT the conversion rate is great.

And because I put in extra work, I can really show that I care, that I have genuinely listened to a podcast episode. I genuinely care. And this is one of the reasons people often come back to me and say:

“I get so many outreach emails per day that I can see are AI-generated and I delete them straight away. Your pitch was different, it was exploding with personality.”

(An actual quote.)

Being listed and associated with random sites, and writing about random things, is not a good idea because it will dilute your message and confuse Google, AI search, and of course potential buyers about who you are and what you do.

Yes  – you probably guessed it – it’s all about being consistent.

You have to be consistent when it comes to what you talk about and your chosen topics, that is how you build authority. The links need to be more strategic, and this means you have to be selective about which link building consultant you collaborate with. 

I had someone ask me:

“Doesn’t this mean that we could lose part of our creativity if we just keep repeating the same thing over and over again?”

That is a fair question.

Of course, becoming any sort of robot is both boring and wrong. You should not be bound by any script in any case.

But that is not the same thing as saying there shouldn’t be slightly stricter “cluster” guidelines.

People do business with people they like.

But also because search is changing so rapidly, and the way AI works means the user may not even click on your website, but instead ask very specific questions in a dialogue-style format and get the results directly in the search bar –  you need to become one of the chosen.

In this new landscape, you want to be cited as one of the sources – citations are becoming the new clicks. You want to build out these topics so AI engines not only find your brand, but that they rely on you (i.e., you become a trusted advisor).

I started this post by mentioning one of my favorite quotes. It’s interesting that another one of my favorite quotes is about fear 🙂

When I started leaning more heavily into my personality, into my plants, and just being more like me, I was not comfortable. I felt it wasn’t “professional enough.”

But then I felt the fear and did it anyway.

I believe that is the primary takeaway from this article.

Think about who you are, your core message, your related topics, and who you want to be associated with. I just checked, and Ai search brings up plants when I asked it to define “Linksandmaria“. That is topical authority in action 🙂

So go out on relevant platforms and talk about your things.
Over and over again.

Create strong signals.
Be human.

That is how you build trust. And authority.