Why I built a video store for SEO
There is more good SEO content being made right now than at any point in the last twenty years, and it has never been harder to find. YouTube’s algorithm feeds you the loudest channel, not the best one. Podcast apps bury the show you’d actually learn from under three hundred you won’t. Newsletters pile up unread. And every “ultimate list of SEO resources” is either five years stale or padded to 200 entries so it ranks for something.
I wanted the opposite of that. I wanted the feeling of walking into the video store on a Friday night: a few shelves, sorted by genre, with a staff pick on the counter and a handwritten note on the box telling you why it’s worth your evening. Somebody had watched everything and made choices so you didn’t have to.
So that’s what SEO TV is. Open all night. No late fees.
Six shelves, six genres
Every source in the store sits on a shelf, and every shelf is a film genre that maps to an SEO discipline. Local SEO is Local Interest. Technical SEO is the Mystery section, because that’s what it is: evidence, deduction, and the occasional corpse in the server logs. The genre names aren’t decoration. They’re the whole navigation.
| Shelf | What’s on it |
|---|---|
| Local Interest | Local SEO, Google Business Profile, Maps |
| Mystery | Technical SEO, crawling, indexing, debugging |
| Sci-Fi | GEO, AI search, LLM visibility |
| Romance | Content and links |
| Big Budget | Enterprise and eCommerce SEO |
| Documentary | News, algorithm updates, industry reporting |
A source can live on more than one shelf. A channel that covers both local and AI search sits in Local Interest and Sci-Fi, the same way a store would file a film under two genres rather than pick a fight about it.
What’s on the shelves
Around 50 sources, and that number is meant to stay small. Right now: 17 video channels, 12 podcasts, 4 newsletters, 6 communities, 4 SEO tools, 3 indie apps, and 4 scripts and repositories. Each format gets its own object in the store, so you can tell at a glance what you’re picking up: video channels are tapes, podcasts are cassettes, newsletters are magazines.
The people on the shelves are the ones I’d point a friend to. Edward Sturm’s daily show, which is past 1,200 episodes and searchable by guest or topic. Barry Schwartz at RustyBrick, who has reported the weekly volatility longer than most of us have been in the industry. Ann Smarty, James Dooley, Sterling Sky, Marie Haynes, Ahrefs, Backlinko, Search Engine Journal. And yes, my own channel is the staff pick. It’s my store. But the shelves also carry people who disagree with me, on purpose, because a store that only stocks films the owner likes is a shrine, not a store.
The part I’m proudest of is New Releases. It pulls the latest video from every channel in the store, one per channel, so the front rack is always this week’s SEO in one place. On a given day that might be a live site audit for AI search visibility, a breakdown of the Google Maps proximity shift, a volatility roundup, and a thoroughly unhinged Halloween episode of SEO horror stories. All free. Every tape in the store is.
Top Channels
- The Edward Sturm Show
- Google Search Central – YouTube
- James Dooly Podcasts
- Barry Schwartz / Rustybrick Podcasts
- Sterling Sky & Joy Hawkins Podcasts
How a tape gets on the shelf
By hand. Nothing is scraped, and nothing is ranked by subscriber count. Three rules decide it:
- It has to be active. Channels that went quiet come off the shelf. A great back catalogue from 2021 is a great back catalogue, not a current source.
- It has to teach or report something. Every tape should leave you knowing a thing you didn’t, or knowing that something changed. Motivational SEO content, however well lit, doesn’t qualify.
- No Shorts farms. If a channel is mostly 40-second clips, it’s not on the shelf, however many views the clips get.
That’s also why the list is short on purpose. A directory with 500 entries has told you nothing; it has moved the work of choosing back onto you. Fifty sources, each one picked, is a recommendation. Five hundred is a search result.
One more thing worth saying out loud: the site itself asks search engines not to index it. An SEO building a page and deliberately keeping it out of the index is either a joke or a point, and it’s a bit of both. SEO TV isn’t trying to rank for “best SEO resources.” It’s trying to be the page you send someone.
Come browse
Go to seo-tv.com, pick a genre, and take a tape home. If you’re new to SEO, start with Documentary to learn what’s going on and Mystery to learn why. If you’ve been at this a while, Sci-Fi is where the arguments are right now.
And if there’s a channel, show, or newsletter you think belongs on a shelf, tell me. The store is small so it can stay good, but the shelves aren’t finished and never will be.
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