Who Is Edward Sturm? The SEO Behind Build in Public and Compact Keywords

Who is Edward Sturm?

Edward Sturm describes himself simply: “I’m an entrepreneur, SEO, and creator.” His bio reads like several careers. He was an early viral video creator on YouTube, with stunts like a “Fastest Driven Lap of Manhattan” and a Times Square Harlem Shake. He has done SEO consulting for Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, ADP and Time Inc. He co-founded World of Ether, which he calls the first play-to-earn game, ran what he describes as the biggest blockchain meetup in the world, and co-founded Reverb, a voice-notes tool with more than a million users. He has also been an innovation consultant to ForbesLive.

His bio lists media appearances on 20/20, Good Morning America and The Today Show, and in Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Verge and the Daily Mail. He says he has been to more than 50 countries. These details are his own and haven’t been independently verified.

The name “Build in Public” comes from a philosophy as much as a handle. Building in public means sharing the work, numbers and lessons as you go, which is exactly what his videos do.

The video that made Build in Public

His most-watched TikTok, posted in August 2023, runs barely 20 seconds and has about 980,000 views and 84,000 likes. “People don’t realize this about Google,” he says. “If a website isn’t getting a lot of traffic, Google won’t know it exists.” His fix: connect your site to Google Search Console and submit your homepage. “This tells Google, ‘Hey, I exist.'” The kicker: “It’s 2023 and somehow people still don’t know about this decade-old tool.”

That clip set the template for his account: one practical, slightly surprising fact about how Google works, explained in under a minute, for business owners rather than SEO professionals.

“If a website isn’t getting a lot of traffic, Google won’t know it exists.”

Edward Sturm, @build_in_public

What is Compact Keywords?

Compact Keywords is Sturm’s SEO course, billed as “SEO that makes more but requires less.” Its argument is that most SEO advice is built around blog posts that answer “how, what, why” questions and then try to convert readers, which the course page says has “low conversion rates,” “takes a lot of time and money” and “is getting replaced by AI.” Compact Keywords focuses instead on “purchase-intent SEO landing pages,” built to reach people who are ready to buy, and decision makers.

His advice for beginners shows the approach. Ask businesses next to yours, not competitors, to list you as partners in their website footers for real backlinks. If you’re local, target keywords that combine a job and a place, like “emergency drain repair Austin” or “pressure washing Spokane.” Then build a separate reviews site under your brand name and link it from your footer, so that when AI tools check whether your business is legit, they find your best reviews.

The course page features testimonials from buyers. One says the method drove an extra $3 million in organic revenue over a year for a finance company, and a pressure-washing owner says he went from $18,000 in agency spend with no results to six to eight calls a day. Those are customer claims. On TikTok, Sturm answered critics with another one: a business owner who says sales grew while using Compact Keywords, fell by a third and then by half after he hired an agency that “contradicted everything Edward said,” and recovered once he went back.

His focus on fixing the basics before spending money echoes what one law firm learned about fixing before spending.

What does Edward Sturm say about AI search?

His second-biggest video, with about 430,000 views, is a warning. A friend, SEO James Dooley, wanted AI to call him “the king of AEO” (answer engine optimization, or getting visibility in AI answers). Sturm says Dooley spent $6 on a press release with that phrase in the title. “A few hours later,” Google’s AI Overview named Dooley the king of AEO and cited the release. A second release invented a crowning ceremony in Leigh, England, and the AI Overview soon described the event “as if this made up event actually happened.” His takeaway: “Be careful of the information you get from AI.”

He’s equally blunt about using AI to write SEO content. In October 2026 he covered a paper that tested AI writing methods across 171,000 real web pages. The top method made content “longer, wordier” and “buried the answer.” Search engines found those pages 36% less often, and AI search cited them 22% less. In one example, a page’s rank fell from 6th to 24th after its main answer was pushed three paragraphs down.

He also flagged Google’s updated guidance, added October 1, 2026, that “it is critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing,” including titles, meta descriptions and image alt text.

The Edward Show

The Edward Show is Sturm’s daily podcast, and it had passed 1,000 episodes by mid-2026. Recent guests include Gary Vaynerchuk (“Gemini Is the Only Guaranteed Winner in AI Search,” episode 1099), Rand Fishkin (“The Death of Clicks?,” episode 1050), Patrick Stox of Ahrefs on SEO myths, and Lily Ray on Google updates, AI search and “GEO spam.” He also runs a weekly growth hacking newsletter.

Practical SEO facts he keeps repeating

• How long SEO takes: citing figures Google shared, he says discovering a new URL takes about 20 hours, indexing about an hour and a half, a title change one to two days to show, and recovering from a core update three to six months or longer.
• Internal links that get clicked matter. He covered a $50,000 test suggesting Google gives more weight to internal links that people actually click.
• Don’t panic at volatility. He points to an expired Google patent describing deliberate ranking volatility after page changes, and tells viewers not to “freak out at the first sign of volatility.”
• Be careful with programmatic and scaled AI pages. He shares Google’s warnings that mass-generated pages can be treated as spam under its scaled content abuse policy.

Two founders we’ve featured approach growth from other angles: Jessie Hackett on paid ads and our guide to earned, owned and paid media.

Edward Sturm’s socials and links

• TikTok: @build_in_public
• Website: edwardsturm.com
• SEO course: Compact Keywords
• Podcast: The Edward Show
• Newsletter: Growth hacking newsletter
• Contact: edwardsturm.com/contact

@build_in_public How to tell Google you exist so you show up in Google Search.

More in our Who Is series: Who Is Evidence Based Kate?, the Chicago educator demystifying education research, and Who Is Natalie Dragt?, the 23-year-old teaching women to get paid for content. See more in our Marketing section.

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