Technical SEO: Are We Building Websites for Google or for People? Stop chasing green scores. Start removing friction. A recent Search Engine Land article by Helen Pollitt raises an important issue: technical SEO teams can waste considerable time resolving automated audit warnings without considering their actual impact. Imagine two findings:– A decorative footer icon missing … Read more
What Can Your Website Tell Me Before I See Your Analytics? When analysing a prospective client’s website, I often don’t have access to their Google Search Console, Analytics, CRM or sales figures. Does that mean there’s no evidence to work with? Far from it. It means we need to be disciplined about what we know, … Read more
AI Can Write. But Does It Know What You Need to Say? There’s a lot of anxiety around AI and content. Will AI replace content writers? Do businesses still need SEO specialists and marketers when an AI can produce 1,500 reasonably convincing words before I’ve finished making a cup of tea? Earlier this week I … Read more
Your Website Doesn’t Have ‘Users.’ It Has People. A logical question during any optimisation process is: Is this page performing? And, just as importantly: For whom is it performing? Google Analytics, Search Console and other tools provide a deluge of useful activity data:Queries. Impressions. Clicks. Engagement. Conversions. It’s vital evidence. But evidence about activity doesn’t … Read more
A Business Problem Doesn’t Care What Department Solves It A website has an SEO problem.Or does it? Perhaps the page isn’t being discovered because its topic isn’t clear.That’s SEO. Perhaps the topic is clear, but it’s attracting people the business doesn’t actually want. Now we’re moving into audience understanding and business strategy. Perhaps they’re exactly … Read more
Let’s imagine optimising a site with two service pages. Page A — The Mirage Page B — The Engine Which page is performing better?The obvious dashboard answer is Page A. But let’s add one more piece of information.Page A attracts people researching something adjacent to what the business sells.Page B attracts 200 people looking for … Read more
Data collection tells us what is happening. It doesn’t automatically tell us what should be changed. A familiar SEO audit usually goes something like this: Audit → Enormous spreadsheet → Hundreds of things apparently demanding attention. Missing titles. Redirects. 404s. Internal links. Keyword opportunities. Pages with falling clicks. Pages with low CTR. We collected the … Read more
Every industry has its favourite shorthand. In digital marketing, terms like E-E-A-T and Topic Clusters are routinely tossed around as if they are mechanical levers we can pull to force a search engine to rank a business. We look at a successful website and observe a clear pattern: comprehensive content, an interconnected structure, strong trust … Read more
Every business wants more visitors. More enquiries.More customers.The natural question often becomes: “How do we improve our SEO?” It’s a reasonable question.But I increasingly think there’s an even more important one. “Why should somebody choose us in the first place?” Because optimisation doesn’t create a compelling business.It helps people discover one. Visibility Isn’t the Same … Read more
Every business wants a better website. More visibility.More enquiries.More customers. The temptation is to immediately ask:“What should we improve?” But before changing a system, there’s a more important question.Do we actually understand its current state? That’s one reason website crawlers remain just as valuable today as they were before AI.Not because they improve SEO.Because they … Read more
