SEO Strategies That Actually Work in 2026 (James Dooley Interviews Charles Floate)

James Dooley: Best SEO strategies in 2026.

Today I'm joined with Charles Floate. Pleasure to have you.

Charles Floate: Thank you for having me.

James Dooley: With regards to search engine optimisation, there is a lot of change happening, especially with AI overviews, AI mode and people using ChatGPT a lot more.

From an SEO standpoint, what is working in today's algorithms?

Charles Floate: From a purely SEO standpoint, we are moving, especially since the March core update, into an algorithm state that is no longer meant to power the 10 blue links. It is meant to power the AI overviews on top of them.

We are moving away from an algorithm that was supposed to promote authorship, expertise and trustworthiness, and more towards an algorithm that pushes content that matches consensus, new information, verifiable information and factual information. It is going more towards similar, consensus-led and trustworthy content than the signals behind it. I do see, especially with the newest algorithm update, user engagement signals mattering less and the content underneath mattering more. The links underneath are still going to power the ability to rank in the first place. You need the underlying root authority, link power and all those things, especially in YMYL niches, to get there in the first place. But once you're in the top 10,000 results that they are going to push into the top 100, especially the top 10, that is when information, content, consensus and gain start really mattering.

James Dooley: So you're saying that E-E-A-T and user signals are factors within Google search and live search. They are using that information in Google search or Bing search, so it is an indirect ranking factor, but not directly pulling that information through.

With regards to SEO strategies that are working, what are you doing differently? A lot of people talk about topical authority on the website. A lot of people talk about link building, schema markup, technical SEO and making the website as fast as possible. What do you seem to focus on the most now? You mentioned consensus, so I presume you mean not just your own website, but third-party corroboration on other articles repeating who you are, what you do and why you're brilliant. Can you explain that a little further? I know what you're doing, and I think it is brilliant. Not just for ranking within Google, but because you now have multiple properties ranking in Google. That consensus building is what is getting into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Can you expand on what you mean by consensus?

Charles Floate: Consensus is basically what Google understands that topic to be and what it understands the user intent to be.

If you search “buy hats”, then that is very clear intent. But if you're searching for information about a historical figure, it might be relevant to the time period they were active in. It might be relevant to a specific battle they were involved in, or you might be looking for something else. Google might need a more generic information source. Consensus is first what the user wants, and then what all the pages on the internet say about the topic the user is searching for. Google will try to build a map of that consensus and only push pages that match that consensus. It can be a bad thing if you're looking at scientific journals and exploration, because scientific consensus changes when new research comes out. There might be 100,000 pages on the old consensus and only 10 on the new scientific consensus until it comes further forward. I see Google making moves more for AI overview powering than for traditional search at this stage. When it comes to what I am doing, I will have my main website piece, and that will be a really in-depth, well-researched, consensus-based article. From there, we create other pieces that we try to rank for the same queries on third-party websites, parasite pages, as some might call them, and other sources. Those pages reinforce what we are saying where other pages may not have said it yet. If you're trying to rank for “best CRM tools”, the consensus might be that number one is HubSpot, Atlassian or another brand. If you're trying to say that you're number one, then you are not matching the consensus of all the other pages. So we have to force pages into the index to match our consensus, so we are allowed to rank number one at the top of Google.

James Dooley: With regards to the best SEO strategies, specifically for SEO now and not just third-party work, how important is schema on your own website?

Charles Floate: If it matches consensus, then you should add it.

I have always gone by the idea that if five of the top 10 competitors have the same schema, then you should have that same schema. If none of your competitors have any schema, then you do not want to be the odd one out adding schema to the site. I do not think schema by itself has any more of a direct ranking signal than your body content does. I think they are effectively the same thing. It is just structured. Where Google is having to make an educated guess on your body content, schema is specifically telling Google what that data means. There is no increased ranking signal because of it. It is the same as your body content, just structured in a way that Google can process and apply more easily to your page. It can mean more because it is easier to process, but is it a higher-level ranking signal? No, it is effectively the same.

James Dooley: What about topical authority and on-page SEO?

How important is NLP, semantic content and internal linking? Do you build a semantic content network first? Do you map out all the pages you are going to have and how you will structure the pages and internal linking? Is that key for SEO in 2026?

Charles Floate: For your own website, 100%, yes.

Whenever we make a new website, we map out at least the core pages to make sure we have everything working that we need from day one. If you're trying to rank for link building, your core pages might include what is link building, who invented link building and why link building is important. All of those core questions and topics are directly connected to the main hub, which is the link building query. We want to have all of those live on day one so Google can process, understand and topically assign our website a site focus score. That is the literal exact thing from the Google algorithm. The quicker you can get that site focus score, the easier it is for all your new pages to rank for related queries.

James Dooley: So with site focus, you do not want topic dilution. You do not want to go off topic. You want to go very deep on the topic and build that up.

Let's talk about off-page and link building. How important is powering up guest posts? You might get a guest post on a site with decent DR, so the domain ranking is high, but the page level is not that strong. How important are tier-two backlinks to guest posts?

Charles Floate: If the tier-one page is not as strong as it could be, but it is on a very high-authority site, building those tier-two links is going to activate its true potential.

You want to make sure that any links that do not have their full potential activated, or are orphan links, or do not have any signals going to them, have something that activates and allows that juice to flow over. Google is often neutralising links now. If you have a completely orphan link, sometimes it does not matter if it is on a gigantic authority site. Google can still treat that as a neutral signal, and you will not get any positive uplift. But if you build one backlink to it, that could be enough to trigger a positive signal to move over. If you can go from zero to 10, it is a gigantic increase because zero means nothing, and 10 is still enough score points to move over. We have found that even if you have links on some of the most powerful domains in the world, building one or a handful of links to that page can massively increase the effectiveness of that backlink. It is not just links for tier two. A lot of people think tiered link building means only building links directly to your links. You can build social signals directly to your links. You can do traffic. You can do all these things to power up and activate that link. It is not just links to build up links.

James Dooley: What about virality?

There are a lot of people now talking about virality. Some people are doing it by spending money. Dennis Yu talks about the dollar-a-day strategy. He might share certain things on LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, then spend a few dollars boosting them to get clicks through. Other people are doing pop-under ads through platforms like PropellerAds, sometimes through a t.co redirect on Twitter, and they might hit 3,000 to 5,000 visits. They are triggering a virality campaign where Google goes, “What is going on here?” How important is that? It can get fast rankings, but they only seem to last maybe 72 hours before dropping off, then they need to run it again. How important do you think that is long term for rankings?

Charles Floate: Number one, a lot of people do not take into account the devices or browsers the ads are running in.

If you're going to do that kind of strategy, I would recommend it, especially for a new website, because you're going to get user engagement signals the domain and website does not already have. But those user engagement signals need to be on Chrome. They cannot be on Firefox, Edge or other browsers. They need to be in Chrome. It is specifically Chrome UX and Chrome user engagement signals that Google is pulling from. First, make sure all your user activity is in Chrome. Second, make sure they are not random users who click through, wonder what the site is and bounce back two seconds later. They need to be targeted. You need a decent engagement rate, decent click-through rate and all those signals for it to have an effect. If every single click-through has a two-second bounce, that could potentially be negative. If you do it properly, especially for new websites or certain niches, it is a massive growth hack. But user engagement signals do seem to be temporary. Again, virality is always temporary. Nothing goes viral forever.

James Dooley: For sure.

Anyone watching this, I hope you liked the episode on best SEO strategies in 2026. I dig deeper with Charles Floate on other topics, including LLM rankings, ChatGPT and how to rank specifically in Bing. Make sure you check out the links in the description. I hope you liked the episode on best SEO strategies in 2026.