After a few years of running PSEO programs we keep seeing the same handful of habits separate teams who ship and rank from teams who do not.
The ten habits
- Pick a real shape. Service in city, X vs Y, attribute combinations. If you cannot draw the page pattern on a napkin, do not start.
- Test the prompt on one row first. Generate one. Read it. Tune. Then run 200.
- Pin your sources. The first time the model gets a fact wrong, fix it by pinning the right source. Compounds across articles.
- Set a banned-words list early. Catches AI-tells before they reach 500 published pages.
- Roll out in batches. 50 a day for two weeks beats 1,000 in one shot. See the index-safe guide.
- Internal-link before publishing. Pages that ship orphaned rarely get indexed.
- Schema on every page. Cheap to add, big rich-result wins.
- Set up GSC on day one. You cannot improve what you cannot see.
- Refresh stale pages every 90 days. Builder will tell you which.
- Track keywords you actually want to win. 50 tracked keywords > 5,000 noise.