Random thoughts on SEO, content and LinkedIn that made it into blog posts
There are a whole load more still in my head, or over on LinkedIn.
SEO Advice Who the f*ck is Admin? And why is he writing your “expert content”?
Go and look at your blog. Pick a post and check what’s under the title. Posted by admin. Posted by team. Posted by the company name, as if a limited company sat down one Friday afternoon and wrote 800 words on choosing an accountant. Or no name at all. You’ve… Read More
SEO Advice Should you redirect 404s to your homepage? Google still says no
I originally wrote this post in March 2025. Google has since covered the topic again, so I’ve added an update below and refreshed the rest of the post. Everything I said about homepage redirects still stands. One point about crawl budget needed correcting, and I’ve done that further down. October… Read More
SEO Advice How to optimise PDF files for Google and get them bringing in enquiries
Open Google, type site:yoursite.co.uk filetype:pdf (swap in your own domain, obviously) and have a look at what comes back. That’s every PDF Google has found on your website, and for a lot of small businesses it’s a bit of a horror show. Price lists from 2019 with the old rates… Read More
SEO Podcasts Why isn’t my new website on Google when the designer said it was SEO friendly?
It was on the proposal, somewhere between “fully responsive” and “bespoke design”. SEO friendly website. You read it, nodded, signed, and paid the deposit. Six months later you’re on the phone to somebody (possibly me) asking why the new site is nowhere on Google when it was meant to be… Read More
SEO Advice B2B keyword research is missing the questions that stop people buying
Most B2B keyword research goes something like this. You work out what you call your service, then what your customers call it (hopefully the same thing, often not). You find the version with the most searches and build a page around it. That gets people to your website. It does… Read More
SEO Advice The SEO contract you didn’t bother reading
Your SEO contract is sitting in somebody’s inbox right now. It’s probably attached to an email from two years ago, called something like “FinalSEOAgreement2024”, and you signed it on a Friday afternoon after a lovely call where everyone got on brilliantly. You skimmed it (don’t worry, nearly everybody does) and… Read More
SEO Advice Why has my SEO ranking tool suddenly stopped working?
Update October 2026: It’s happening again. Over the past few weeks, ranking tools have been struggling to pull reliable data from Google, and this time it’s not a missing parameter. Google is now blocking huge ranges of IP addresses, throwing far more captchas at anything that looks like a bot,… Read More
SEO Advice Website migration traffic loss cost Maggie Beer Holdings $800,000 in emergency advertising
In June 2025, Hampers & Gifts Australia moved its websites to Shopify. Nothing wrong with that. Companies change platforms all the time, usually for good reasons, and Shopify is a perfectly decent place to sell hampers. Then Christmas arrived, which for a hamper company is not one trading period among… Read More
SEO Advice Google spent 2026 targeting content volume, not AI content
Two things happened recently in the SEO world that look unrelated until you put them side by side. Kevin Indig published a study of 5.32 million search results asking whether Google has demoted listicles. Separately, reports started coming in that the August spam update went after mass-generated AI content. One study about a… Read More
SEO Advice Which tool pages are most at risk from AI Overviews?
If your website has a calculator, a checker or any other little tool on it that brings people in from Google, Google has started building its own version of that tool inside the search results. It’s called generative UI, and it means someone can now ask a question and get… Read More
SEO Advice Your free SEO audit isn’t free – it’s a sales pitch with a spreadsheet on top
Your free SEO audit took them twenty minutes to produce. It arrived looking thorough. And it’s about to cost you a lot more than you think. This isn’t because the problems it found aren’t real. Some of them probably are. But because a crawl report with your logo on the… Read More
SEO Advice You’re searching like an expert, not a customer
Most business owners approach keywords the same way. They sit down with their web designer or their SEO person, they’re asked what phrases they want to rank for, and they come up with a list that sounds very professional and very logical and very much like how they’d describe their… Read More