Connor Gillivan

What's the single design change that's moved leads the most on your site? A sidebar, an in-content CTA, an author bio, a chart, a pricing table, something else? I'm collecting these. Curious if the same two or three win everywhere.

Open your top page by traffic. Count the CTAs a reader sees before they scroll. What's your number? Zero is the most common answer I get. Drop yours below, no judgment.

Marketing managers don’t sign up to do it all. They’re just expected to. Write the copy. Run the ads. Design the creative. Analyze the data. Manage the projects. No one can excel when they’re spread this thin. Marketing managers shouldn’t have to wear every hat. They should be supported so they can focus on leading strategy and driving growth. Big shoutout to @ecomchasedimond for originally sharing this! Really appreciate the valuable insights. P.S. Want to start ranking on AI? 2 months of AI SEO content on the house. Built with our new AI SEO Agent. Keyword to be published in 15 mins. Email me to see if you qualify.

For most of my career the process was: write it, publish it, then go back and fix the CRO if you got around to it. The second job always lost to something more urgent. Now the page gets designed while it's written. In-text CTAs, charts, book-a-call callouts, all built in from day one. One step instead of two. The one that used to get skipped can't anymore.

One month. Three changes to the EcomBalance blog. CTAs inside the content. Author bios. A sidebar that scrolls with you, with one offer matched to each blog. Conversions jumped. Leads from SEO went up with them. The content didn't get one word better. The rankings didn't move. The design moved, and the leads followed.

An author bio is a conversion element. Name, face, what this person has actually done. A reader deciding whether to trust you with their books wants to know who's on the other end. It's also an E-E-A-T signal. So it earns rankings and leads at the same time. Cheapest upgrade on the page.

Every good article has a paragraph where the reader thinks "okay, I need help with this." Put the book-a-call right there. Not at the end. Not in the footer. There. The decision moment is inside the content. So is the CTA.

17 MUST-See Prompts for Ranking on ChatGPT in 2026: Most brands have no idea what ChatGPT says about them. Their buyers already asked. They just weren't in the answer. I run SEO and GEO for 30+ B2B clients at TrioSEO. The first thing we do is ask the AI directly. These are the prompts we run, in order: Step 1: Audit your visibility Prompt 1: "Who are the top [category] providers for [use case]?" ↳ Run it in ChatGPT. See if you show up. Prompt 2: "What do you know about [brand]? Cite your sources." ↳ Shows what AI believes about you, and where it learned it. Prompt 3: "Compare [brand] vs [competitor] for [buyer type]." ↳ Reveals how AI positions you against rivals. Prompt 4: "Which sources would you cite to recommend a [category] tool?" ↳ Gives you the list of sites you need to be on. Step 2: Find the real prompts Prompt 5: "List 25 questions a [buyer role] asks before buying [product]." ↳ This is your new keyword list. Prompt 6: "Rewrite these as prompts people type into ChatGPT." ↳ Buyers don't type keywords anymore. They type sentences. Prompt 7: "Group these prompts by stage: learn, compare, decide." ↳ Decide-stage prompts get built first. Step 3: Build citable pages Prompt 8: "Rewrite this intro to answer the question in 2 sentences." ↳ LLMs pull the clearest answer. Put it first. Prompt 9: "Add a 5-question FAQ using real buyer language." ↳ FAQs map cleanly to how people prompt. Prompt 10: "Find every claim on this page that needs a stat or source." ↳ Vague claims get skipped. Specific ones get cited. Prompt 11: "Turn this page into a comparison table AI can quote." ↳ Tables are easy to lift into answers. Prompt 12: "Write FAQ and Organization schema for this page in JSON-LD." ↳ Helps machines understand who you are. Step 4: Earn off-site mentions Prompt 13: "Which third-party sites mention competitors but not us?" ↳ That's your outreach list. Prompt 14: "Write 5 pitch angles to get us onto 'best [category]' lists." ↳ Listicles are heavily cited by LLMs. Prompt 15: "Find podcasts and newsletters [buyer role] trusts in [niche]." ↳ Mentions in trusted places compound over time. Step 5: Track and close gaps Prompt 16: "Rerun our top 20 buyer prompts. Score mentions, position, sentiment." ↳ Do it monthly. Track the trend, not one result. Prompt 17: "What would make you recommend [brand] over [competitor]?" ↳ The AI tells you the gap. Fix that next. Ranking on ChatGPT isn't a hack. It's clear answers, real proof, and mentions elsewhere. Most of it is SEO fundamentals done well. The brands that start now will be hard to catch. Which prompt are you running first? ♻️ Repost to help a founder show up in AI answers. P.S. Want to rank faster on AI and Google? I'm offering 2 months of AI SEO content right now in exchange for a case study. Email me for details.

A sidebar with six links is a sidebar with none. One offer. Matched to the topic of the page. Follows the reader down. The second they decide they want help, the button is right there. That's the whole job of a sidebar.

7 design elements that turn a reader into a lead: 1. An offer in the first screen 2. In-content CTAs that match the section 3. A sticky sidebar with one offer 4. An author bio that answers "why believe you?" 5. Charts, tables, and graphs 6. A book-a-call moment at the decision point 7. Your brand, baked in Most blogs have one of these. The ones that convert have all seven.

Ranking #1 on Google doesn’t mean you show up in AI answers anymore. I’ve run SEO for 15+ years, and the playbook just split underneath all of us. One number from Semrush’s AI Visibility Index 2026 made that clear. Ten domains can account for nearly 40% of AI Mode’s citation weight The report tracked 180M+ AI answers across 9 markets and 4 platforms. I was amazed by how differently each engine picks its sources. From January to July, the top ten sources held 27.9% to 39.2% of citation weight in AI Mode’s US data. For ChatGPT, that same top ten held 14.3% to 15.8%. Same market. Very different concentration. My takeaway: the platform you’re targeting should change how you check your visibility. On AI Mode, citation weight clusters around a small group of domains. So that’s a focused place to start an audit: → Which domains keep showing up in your category → Which specific pages actually get cited → Whether your brand is described accurately when it does On ChatGPT, the sources are spread much wider. That means casting a wider net, not chasing ten domains. Most teams still audit AI visibility the way they audit Google. One list, one approach. The data says that’s a miss. Check the engine before you build the plan. Which domains keep showing up for your brand in AI answers right now? ♻️ Repost to help another marketer get found in AI. See the data: ai-visibility-index.semrush.… Paid partnership with Semrush. P.S. I write about SEO, GEO, and building a B2B portfolio daily.

At its peak, the EcomBalance blog pulled 10,000+ people a month. Rankings strong. Content doing its job. And the leads didn't match. Thousands of people read our stuff and left. Nothing on the page asked them to do anything else. That's when I stopped writing for a month.

Carbon didn't start as a product. It started as a hobby. Nights and weekends. For a video game site. At the start of 2026, my partner Steven got curious. He opened Claude and started building an SEO writing agent. No client. No business plan. Just a founder poking at a new tool. Here's how it went from nothing to a real product in 6 months: Month 1: The hobby project ↳ Steven builds the first agent for his video game site. ↳ Pure experiment. Nobody asked for it. Months 1-3: The stress test ↳ No lead gen. Just traffic. ↳ 750 pages indexed. 2,500 users in a single day. ↳ It grew straight through Google's AI spam updates. Month 3: The test I failed ↳ Steven sent me finished pages. ↳ I'd spent 2 years publicly calling AI content garbage. ↳ I couldn't find the AI tell. Months 3-5: The difficult reader ↳ My job became reading every article and complaining about it. ↳ Hundreds of edits fed back. Our team and clients joined in. ↳ That loop became our 25-check QA process. Month 5: Two brains, two agents ↳ An SEO brain built on 15+ years of TrioSEO knowledge. ↳ A brand brain with each client's real proof and voice. ↳ Carbon researches. Ember writes. Month 6: A working product ↳ Real client pages, live. ↳ Keyword to designed page in 10 to 15 minutes. Here's what I keep thinking about. The tool wasn't the magic. Everyone has access to Claude. The magic was a founder who knew exactly what good looked like. Steven brought the curiosity. I brought the complaints. Ha. Put a founder's judgment next to new technology and things move fast. Six months fast. Today Carbon writes for 40+ businesses. What's the side project you keep almost starting? ♻️ Repost to remind a founder that the hobby might be the business. P.S. Want to see Carbon on your own site? Join the 10 free articles Beta Program. Email [email protected] to apply.

Most AI writing tools stop at the words. Carbon doesn't. It designs the page too. A great article on an ugly page still loses. People skim, bounce, and never see your offer. So we built the design into the system. Here's what every Carbon page ships with: 1. A CTA box at the very top ↳ Some readers are ready to buy right now. ↳ Don't make them scroll 2,000 words to find you. 2. A clear H1, hero image and real byline ↳ One promise. A named author. A fresh date. ↳ Readers trust it. Google checks for it. 3. Bold-label lists ↳ Skimmers get the whole point from the bold words. ↳ Nobody reads every line. Design for that. 4. Comparison tables ↳ Easy to scan for people. ↳ Easy for ChatGPT and AI Overviews to lift and cite. 5. A mid-article opt-in ↳ For the reader who isn't ready to buy yet. ↳ They give you an email instead of leaving. 6. Step-by-step H3s and an FAQ accordion ↳ A clear system keeps people scrolling. ↳ The FAQ handles objections without a wall of text. 7. A product card that matches the article ↳ Not a generic "book a call" bolted on the bottom. ↳ The CTA sells the exact thing the post just taught. Ranking gets you the click. Design decides what happens next. Most SEO content stops at the first part. We care more about the second. What's the one thing on your blog that loses readers? ♻️ Repost if your blog ranks but doesn't convert. P.S. Want to see a Carbon-designed page on your own site? Join the 10 free articles Beta Program. Email [email protected] to apply.