Status update
What I am working on now.
Last updated:
This page is a snapshot of what I am currently doing, building, and thinking about. It updates when something meaningful changes. If it has not changed in a while, that is what was true at the time of the last update.
Building
daudlawrence.com: the site itself.
The core of the site is now live: the homepage, About, Contact, this page, the legal pages and the Writing hub. Both pillar guides are published: the Semantic SEO guide and Content architecture for topical authority.
The architecture was defined before a single piece of content was written. Thirty-six URLs across four nodes. Every page has a defined purpose, a parent entity link, and a place in the internal linking structure. Content follows the map, not the other way around.
This is the methodology in practice. daudlawrence.com is the live demonstration of the semantic SEO approach documented in the writing.
Client work
Applied practice at Digital Versify.
Day-to-day work is delivered through Digital Versify, Gravesend. Current engagements cover topical authority builds for local service businesses in the United Kingdom: transportation, pest control, commercial cleaning, and related sectors.
There is no change to the client work itself. Alongside it, I am also working on other projects.
The work follows the same four-stage methodology documented on this site: research the entity landscape, map the full topic architecture, publish in the order that builds authority fastest, then compound off-site signals. Each client engagement runs in that sequence.
Case studies from this work will be published on this site in Phase 3, once daudlawrence.com has established sufficient topical authority to contextualise them correctly. All case studies will be published with client permission and attributed through Digital Versify.
Writing
What is being written and published.
Both pillar guides are now published. The Semantic SEO guide covers the method: what semantic SEO is, how Google’s understanding of topics works, and how a topical map is built. Content architecture for topical authority covers the build: site structure, URLs, internal links, structured data and entities.
I am now planning the first article. The articles beneath each guide will follow in publishing order, and each one links to its pillar guide before anything else.
The frameworks sub-silo at /writing/frameworks/ comes after the clusters are established. The entity mapping framework and topical map template are the first two framework posts in scope.
Thinking
Open question
The question that does not have an answer yet.
How AI systems (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude) decide which entities to cite when answering a question. The mechanism is not identical to Google’s Knowledge Graph, but it is not entirely separate either. Entities that are well-established in the Knowledge Graph appear more frequently in AI-generated answers. The relationship between traditional entity SEO and AI citation is the thing I am currently trying to understand precisely.
The hypothesis: the same signals that make an entity legible to Google’s knowledge system (consistent attributes, cross-platform corroboration, schema-backed identity) also make it more citable by AI systems. If that holds, the methodology documented on this site has a broader application than traditional search. That question is currently open.
About this page
The /now/ page format was created by Derek Sivers. This version exists primarily as an entity freshness signal: a structured update that tells search engines and AI systems that this entity is active, current, and practising. It also happens to be the most honest window into what Daud Lawrence is actually doing. It updates when something meaningful changes. The datestamp at the top tells you how current it is.