Search Everywhere Optimization With David Wilson of Zozimus

David Wilson has been doing this since AltaVista. The Zozimus executive vice president argues that search engine optimisation has become search everywhere optimisation: findability wherever a customer looks, rather than rankings for their own sake. Key takeaways Findability, not rankings. Social, models and Google are all places a decision gets made, and only one of them has a rank tracker pointed at it. The expected-CTR model turns Search Console into a gap list. Compare what a position should earn against what it does earn, and the shortfall is the work. Internal linking still works after a decade. The least fashionable tactic in the field remains one of the most reliable. Digital PR and brand are the new link building. Unbranded search is eroding, so being known has to carry more of the load. A competitor teardown method that uses several models. Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude feeding NotebookLM, so no single model’s blind spots go unnoticed. The About page is now an AI asset. It is where a model learns who you are and whether to trust you. On this page Search everywhere optimisation The expected-CTR model Internal linking and digital PR The multi-model competitor teardown Moats, faces and the About page People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Search everywhere optimisation The reframe is not a rebrand. David’s point is that customers dream, search and decide across several surfaces, and optimising only the one with a rank tracker attached means you are measuring the part you can see rather than the part that matters. Coming from the AltaVista era gives him a useful immunity to panic. He has watched the interface change several times already, and the underlying job of being findable and credible has not. The expected-CTR model This is the most immediately usable thing in the episode. Take raw Google Search Console data, model what click-through rate a given position ought to produce, then compare it to what the page is actually getting. The gap is the answer. It converts a report nobody reads into a ranked list of pages leaving traffic on the table, which is a conversation a client can act on. The organic CTR table is the version of that lookup you can pick up and use. Internal linking and digital PR David’s point about internal linking is that it has been quietly effective for ten years while the field chased other things. It costs nothing, it is entirely within your control, and most sites do it badly. On external links his position has shifted with the market. As unbranded search erodes, digital PR stops being a link tactic and starts being the way a brand becomes something a model has heard of. The multi-model competitor teardown His method for finding a competitor’s weak points runs several models against the same question and then collects the output in NotebookLM to compare. Ask the same structured questions of Gemini, ChatGPT and Claud...