About Abby Fields

Abby Fields is an SEO Consultant at WebFX, where she has spent more than five years, since joining in 2021, implementing, optimizing, and analyzing data backed SEO strategies for clients. Her work spans the full range of what modern SEO now requires: the technical fundamentals that get a site crawled and indexed in the first place, the local SEO signals that get a business found nearby, and the newer challenge of making sure AI platforms describe a business accurately when they answer questions about it.

Abby holds a B.A. in History and has built her technical foundation through certifications in Google Analytics, OmniSEO, Semrush Local SEO, HubSpot SEO, HubSpot Content Marketing, and HubSpot Inbound Marketing. Her background is in B2B, where she has implemented and supported hundreds of optimizations and initiatives aimed at improving online visibility, traffic, leads, and revenue.

As AI platforms answer more and more questions directly, Abby has focused a lot of her recent work on what happens when those answers are wrong. In I Think AI Is Sharing Wrong Information About My Business, What Do I Do?, she breaks down the three main reasons AI gets a business’s details wrong, outdated training data, contradictory information across the web, and outright hallucination, and walks through a three part fix: auditing what AI platforms currently say, correcting the sources feeding that information, and building a long term "single source of truth" page with schema markup so AI has one clean, accurate place to pull from. She also points to a factor businesses often overlook: AI models weigh third party validation heavily, so earning mentions in industry roundups, analyst reports, and reputable review sites can matter as much as fixing your own website.

That focus on accuracy carries directly into her local SEO work. In What Are NAP Citations and Why Do They Matter?, she covers why keeping a business’s name, address, and phone number identical across every directory and listing is one of the most foundational trust signals a local business can build, and how even small inconsistencies, like "St." versus "Street", can cost a business its spot in the local pack. It’s the same principle from her AI accuracy work applied to a different problem: the more consistently a business’s information appears across the web, the more search engines and AI platforms trust it.

Abby’s expertise also covers the technical groundwork that everything else depends on. Her Website Crawling 101 guide walks through exactly how search engine bots find, collect, and index a site’s pages, and gives businesses a practical checklist for fixing common crawl issues: slow server response times, thin internal linking, an unsubmitted sitemap, or a low crawl budget from too many low quality or duplicate pages. She also covers how something as easy to overlook as a misconfigured robots.txt file can accidentally block Google from a site entirely, which is the kind of quiet, technical mistake that undoes otherwise solid content and local SEO work. She’s also written on the broader question of what SEO is and how it works for people just getting started with digital marketing, giving her range that spans from foundational concepts to the more advanced, AI specific problems businesses are running into now.

Beyond how to guides, Abby has led original research for SEO.com, including a survey of more than 700 people across five generations to understand how search behavior differs by age, from Baby Boomers who favor long, detailed search phrases on traditional search engines to Gen Alpha, who split their searches between Google and social platforms like YouTube and TikTok. The research also breaks down which factors each generation weighs most when choosing a result, whether that’s relevance for Baby Boomers or brand trustworthiness and reviews for Millennials and Gen Z, and turns those differences into practical marketing strategy recommendations for each age group. It’s the kind of firsthand data that grounds her recommendations in how people actually search, rather than assumptions about how they might.

Outside of client work, Abby spends her time walking her dog, traveling around Europe, and keeping up with her favorite reality TV show.