Hey hey!
I’m not afraid to say I’ve had a bit of a crisis of confidence with this newsletter recently – I have so many things to say, and so many ideas, that I still haven’t managed to distil it down into something I can send weekly and know my readers will still find useful.
(This is the 10/02/2026 issue of my newsletter – subscribe here)
I don’t want it to be one of those newsletters that is just links to my blog posts. But I also don’t want it to just be about the latest SEO news a lot of you won’t even care about.
So this week, instead of trying to do everything, I’m doing one thing properly. Something that’s been bothering me for a while, and that two things this week have brought right to the surface.
Fear-based marketing, and why worry is profitable
There’s an entire corner of the SEO and digital marketing world that survives on making you feel like your website is broken, your rankings are about to collapse, and only their expensive service can save you.
Every Google announcement gets twisted into a crisis. Every documentation change becomes an emergency. Every new technology is positioned as the thing that’ll kill everything you’ve built – unless you pay someone to fix it right now.
It’s a business model built on fear, and I think it’s abhorrent.
This week alone, I’ve seen two perfect examples. Google announced a Discover Core Update – the first of its kind – and within hours, people were posting about it as if it were a major search update that could tank your rankings. It’s not. It’s a Discover update. If you don’t even know what Google Discover is, it almost certainly doesn’t affect you.
Then there’s the crawl file size documentation update. Google clarified that it crawls the first 2MB of HTML. Almost immediately I saw the “URGENT: Is your website too big for Google?!” posts. (Your website’s HTML is probably about 22KB. You’d need a page 90 times bigger than normal to even get close to that limit.)
Neither of these things will affect most small business websites. But they’ve been packaged up as something to worry about, because worry is profitable.
And if you’re a business that does this – I’m genuinely curious. Why? Do you not know the thing you’re posting about is irrelevant to most of your audience? Because if so, that’s a knowledge problem, and you should probably fix that before advising anyone else. Or do you know full well it doesn’t matter, but you post it anyway because panicked people buy faster? Because if that’s the case, you’re not marketing. You’re manipulating. And the clients you win that way will eventually figure that out.
I could do this too. I could use jargon and worst-case scenarios to frighten people into working with me. It would probably be quite effective. But I’d rather explain what something means, tell you whether it affects you, and let you make your own informed decision.
That’s why I write the way I do. Not posts full of panic. No jargon without explanation. A distinct lack of manufactured urgency.
So here’s my genuine plea – if you see something online that’s making you worry about your website, whether it’s a Google update, a scary-sounding technical change, or someone telling you SEO is dead and you need their new shiny thing instead, drop me a message before you stress about it. I’d rather spend two minutes telling you it’s nothing than have you lying awake at 2am wondering if your website’s about to disappear from Google.
You don’t need to be a client. You don’t need to book anything. Just ask.
That’s it for this week, I’m off to play with my beautiful granddaughters and muse a bit more on how to make this newsletter more useful for people – feel free to reply and tell me what you think I should do – just don’t try and scare me into doing it!
Always non-wanky
Nx
