Small tweaks, big upside. The most fixable roast we have done.
On the grill this week
Podium
podium.com
Roasted by
Yaron · Ben
S138:25
In this episode
The wheel of roasts picked Podium, the AI employee for small businesses, and we watched their non-brand organic traffic collapse from 155K to 55K.
Around 750 pages fell out of the rankings right around a Google core update, and the total absence of author pages might be part of the story.
We found an H4 rendering at 42 pixels while the H3 sits at 35, so the page reads big, small, big, small all the way down.
Their dental industry page still sells Podium as marketing software while the homepage pitches an AI employee. The industry pages never got the memo.
We ran a live anchor text masterclass on their internal links and sent them off with a B minus and a clear path back up.
The roast scorecard
Podium
podium.com
B-Final grade
show avg · C+
FDCBA
On the grill:Heading hierarchyKeyword strategy & mappingInternal linking & anchorsAuthor pages & attributionTopical relevance & driftContent freshness & refresh
Key findings
Non-brand organic dropped from 155K to 55K and roughly 750 pages deranked between November and December, right around a Google core update.
Broken heading hierarchy: bold text standing in for H3s, and an H4 at 42px rendering bigger than the 35px H3.
No author pages on the blog, a likely liability in a post-EAT-update world.
Anchor text mismatches, like the anchor e-commerce business pointing at a conversational messaging article that will never rank for that term.
The best-performing pages are off-audience: happy holiday messages and how to add a Facebook administrator bring traffic but not buyers.
Industry pages are outdated for the AI-for-X wave: AI for HVAC has real search volume and Podium, an AI product for HVAC businesses, doesn't rank for it.
Top action items
1Mine positions 11 to 30 in Search Console and Ahrefs and optimize the pages behind business-relevant keywords first.
2Refresh the industry and use case pages around AI for X keywords, since the current templates still pitch old-school marketing software.
3Build a bottom-of-funnel cluster of listicles (conversational messaging platforms, tools, software) and get featured on other people's listicles too.
4Add author pages, fix the header sizing, and surface the Facebook guide's chapter structure instead of burying it in dead space.
What we learned (steal these)
AI overviews are coming for generic what-is queries, so shift your investment toward bottom-of-funnel listicles and comparison content where buyers still compare.
Positions 11 to 30 are the cheapest traffic you'll ever win back. Start every recovery there.
Internal links tell Google what matters: anchors must match the target page's keyword, and links from posts to product pages signal which page your whole site revolves around.
Signed and grilled by
Yaron · Ben
SEO Bros · S1
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