SEO PlaysSEO tactics you can start this afternoon
Each play gives you one tactic on one page, with the problem it solves, the numbered steps, the evidence it worked, and the date it was last reviewed. The lead category, AI search, covers getting cited by ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews.
The flagship play is live, free in full. The set grows from there.
100s
of plays, ever-growing
8
categories covered
Free
to read in full, no account
2 min
to read a play
SEO advice ages fast. Every play here carries the evidence it worked and the date it was last reviewed.
What a play is
Problem, steps, evidence
A play opens with the problem, so one line tells you whether it is yours. The steps come in the order you would run them, and the play closes with its evidence, a measured number or a named case.
Effort and impact tags
Every play is also tagged with effort (S, M, or L) and impact (1 to 5), so you can match a tactic to the time you have. Two-hour wins and two-week builds both live in the set, and the tags keep you from mistaking one for the other.
Dated and reviewed
SEO advice ages, and AI-search advice ages fastest. The last-reviewed date on every play means you are never running advice whose age you cannot see.
How a play earns its spot
Every play in the set went through the same three filters.
01
It starts as evidence
A play begins as a case with numbers behind it: a study, a dataset, or a documented result from our own research. Opinion threads do not qualify.
02
It becomes steps
The tactic is rewritten as numbered steps in the order you would run them, tagged with the effort it costs and the impact it moves.
03
It stays on a clock
Every play carries the date it was last reviewed. A play whose evidence stops holding up is rewritten or retired; nothing stands on age alone.
What the plays cover
Keywords & Niches
Pick queries you can win this year and niches with room for a small site.
Content & Programmatic
Decide what to publish, and when scale helps instead of hurts.
On-Page
Lift pages you already have with better titles, structure, and internal links.
Links & Authority
Build the links a new site can get today, then the assets that earn links on their own.
Technical
Keep crawl, indexing, and sitemap problems from capping everything else you do.
AI Search (GEO)
Become a source ChatGPT and AI Overviews cite, and measure whether you are one.
Local & Vertical
Win the queries tied to one place or one industry, where national sites compete least.
Measurement & Maintenance
Read Search Console properly, catch decay early, and hold the rankings you won.
Read the free plays first.
SEO Plays is an ever-growing set of 100s of plays across all eight categories. The first plays are free in full, every step and every evidence line, readable with no account and no email. The rest will join a paid set some time after launch; there is no launch date yet. SEO Plays is an independent, one-person project.
Questions
What is SEO Plays?
SEO Plays is a set of short SEO tactics written as plays. Reading one takes about two minutes, and many need nothing more than an afternoon to run.
Who is it for?
It is written for people who do their own SEO, which in practice means solo founders, marketers in small software companies, bloggers, and owners of small sites. If search is your full-time profession you will already know some of the plays, and the evidence and the dates will still be new.
How is AI search covered?
The AI-search plays cover how assistants pick what they cite, how to shape the page that gets quoted, and how to track whether you show up in answers. They also cover what to skip; one 137,000-site study in our research found that 97 percent of published llms.txt files were never fetched at all.
Is it free?
The free plays stay free. The rest of the set will become a one-time purchase later, not a subscription, and nothing is for sale yet.
How are plays kept current?
A play whose evidence stops holding up is rewritten or retired rather than left standing, and the last-reviewed date shows when that check last ran. The AI-search category is reviewed most often, because that advice ages in months.