Ann Smarty, Co-Founder of Smarty.Marketing

Ann Smarty is the founder of Smarty Marketing, a boutique SEO agency based in New York, focusing on viral and Reddit marketing as well as cross-channel organic visibility.

Ann’s search engine optimization career began in 2005. She is the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs, including Wix and Search Engine Watch.

The internet is like the wild, wild West; you might strike gold or you might be left in the dust. It is always shifting and growing, so you must be quick on the draw to thrive. Fortunately, our co-founder Ann Smarty is a marketing maverick whose passion for helping websites succeed is matched only by her love for deciphering the “why” behind search engines.

Since the launch of her career in 2005, Ann Smarty has established herself as one of the most well-respected and influential authorities in the SEO and digital marketing circles. She is the founder of Viral Content Bee, the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal, and a regular speaker at Pubcon and other prestigious conferences. For over ten years, she acted as the Community and Brand manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, an industry-leading SEO and content marketing agency.

This success has been driven by Ann Smarty’s curiosity, creativity, and incredible capacity for understanding both the big picture and the many puzzle pieces that build it. Ann is a wizard AND a doctor when it comes to SEO; she diligently diagnoses what ails a website’s rankings and conjures up custom, multi-ingredient potions to bring them back to life!

Ann is also known for engaging with her audience and delivering her wealth of knowledge in active, actionable ways. Beyond being a highly sought-after speaker, she appears weekly at our Smarty Live Podcast to share fresh insights and practical advice that can be implemented for sites of all shapes and sizes. She is also always eager to answer any questions, so we highly recommend catching a broadcast, especially if you are an e-commerce entrepreneur!

Here are some of the excellent publications Ann Smarty has contributed her wealth of SEO and marketing knowledge to:

• My Google profile
• Practical Ecommerce
• Medium
• Wix SEO column
• Wix AEO/GEO column
• Search Engine Journal
• LifeHack
• Entrepreneur
• Moz
• BuzzSumo
• MakeUseOf
• MarketingProfs
• Agorapulse
• And more!

“I don’t believe in learning or succeeding without practice. All my marketing tools and courses are highly actionable: You learn by doing!” ~ Ann Smarty.

Wherever you find Ann Smarty’s published work, you can rest assured it will be helpful content.

When Ann is not busy discovering the inner workings of the web, she is traveling the world by land, air, and sea! In fact, the Smarty Marketing logo was inspired by her passion for sailing and the ocean. The triangle represents the sail of her boat and the sideways ‘S’ below is both an ocean wave and our company’s initial.

It encompasses Ann Smarty’s pioneering spirit and love for adventure both on the World Wide Web and in the wide, wonderful world! Ann is a proud mother to two bright, courageous daughters who are the ultimate globetrotters and a beloved cat named Masya (who we suspect is the true SEO mastermind feeding Ann secrets).

Ann Smarty specializes in:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• GEO (Generative Search Optimization)
• AI visibility strategy
• Reddit marketing strategy

Recent articles by Ann Smarty:

• The State of SEO + AI (AEO/GEO) Industry: What Do In-House Marketing Teams Prioritize and Fear?

  by Ann Smarty

  The SEO industry has never been noisier than now. The rapid evolution of web interactions due to AI-generated answers has resulted in thousands of theories, playbooks, self-proclaimed experts, and risky practices. To cut through the noise, I’ve reached out to in-house marketing teams and business owners to learn what they are doing for AI visibility, […]
• Google vs ChatGPT: Where Do US Consumers Start Shopping Journeys? (Survey)

  by Ann Smarty

  ChatGPT has seen unprecedented growth, expanding at an incredible pace year after year. And even though the numbers seem to have slowed down this year, the looming question remains the same: “Is AI going to replace traditional search, and if so, when?” We were determined to explore one specific angle of this question: “How often […]
• Digital PR + SEO + Reddit: The Key to Search & AI Visibility [Case Study]

  by Ann Smarty

  ​We have been doing digital PR campaigns for more than 13 years now. We have a unique approach, which is sometimes hard to explain to clients who are used to traditional PR. Our approach: In other words, our digital PR campaigns are purely organic, long-term assets that attract all the signals (links, brand mentions, clicks) […]
• SEO for AI (GEO) Statistics 2025: 90% of Businesses Are Worried About the Future of SEO and Organic Findability Due to AI / LLMs

  by Ann Smarty

  Organic online findability is changing faster than any of us expected. We’ve all seen it coming: Transitioning from search engines to answer engines, a slow but steady decline in traffic, etc. The future has long been known. What we didn’t expect was how fast it was going to happen. For the past two years, we’ve […]
• SEO+AI/GEO Checklist for Content: Download and Use Every Time When Writing an Article

  by Ann Smarty

  For creating content, SEO and GEO (AI citability) tactics 100% overlap. In other words, when optimizing your content for AI Answers (ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity, etc.), you are optimizing it for organic search results as well. There’s no specific tactic that would be “AI-only”. All SEO best practices apply here. Moreover, all of these tactics […]
• Reddit Marketing Statistics 2025: Brands Facing Reputation Risks & What to Do

  by Ann Smarty

  Reddit is the 2nd visited-website in the United States, and a massive global community of real people discussing real problems (including problems with specific brands). It’s also an official partner of both Google and OpenAI, providing them with training data. Reddit enjoys incredible search visibility (both in organic results and through a dedicated “Discussion and […]
• Linkable Assets: How to Create Successful Link Magnets + Promote Them on Reddit

  by Ann Smarty

  Getting linked is fundamental to online visibility. Search engines (and AI platforms) discover your site by crawling links from other pages. Fresh links encourage crawlers to come more frequently.  Solid editorial links from trusted sources act as both direct and indirect signals helping your whole site rank higher: However, getting people to link to your […]
• Custom GPT for SEO: Free In-depth AI Search Query Analysis

  by Ann Smarty

  Keyword research and optimization has changed a lot over the years. At the early days, Google was simply matching keyword strings in a search query with keyword phrases within web documents, so the on-page strategy was simply to use those keywords as much as we could all over the content. It worked until it didn’t. […]
• Link Building Stats: Survey

  by Ann Smarty

  Have you been wondering how to align your link building strategy in 2024? To help you make more informed decisions, we have put together a link building survey to figure out what experienced SEOs think about backlinks, their impact on rankings and which tactics they consider the most effective. Link building has changed a lot […]
• How to Build Links for Better Rankings and Higher Topical Authority

  by Ann Smarty

  Links have been at the core of Google’s algorithm from day one. For years, Google has been using links as “votes”, i.e. if you link to a page, you “vouch” for its quality, just like citations are being used to evaluate the impact or influence of academic work in science (I think this is where […]

A few more fun facts about Ann Smarty:

Go-to comfort food?
Greek Salad (I feel like I am a disappointment when I say this :))

Favorite color?
Blue

A song you know every word of by heart?
Hailie’s Song by Eminem

Most rewatchable show/movie?
Friends

The last thing that made you smile?
Playing cards with Dasha, my daughter 🙂