For years, local SEO has been taught as a checklist: fill in the Google Business Profile, gather reviews, pick the right category, add some photos, and wait for the phone to ring. That checklist is not wrong, but it has always been incomplete. A newly analysed set of Google Maps data, reported by Search Engine […]
Anyone who has managed a website for more than a few months will have hit this decision. You have got an article that is doing reasonably well, and you spot a related topic buried inside it that could easily stand on its own. Do you bolt it onto the page you already have, or do […]
There is a phrase that should worry anyone running a large website: “lost faith.” It is not the sort of thing you want said about your domain by the people who decide whether it shows up in Google at all. Yet that is exactly the language Google’s John Mueller used this week when discussing sites […]
Most businesses run search marketing as two separate operations. The SEO team works on rankings. The paid team works on Google Ads. They report in different meetings, use different tools, and rarely compare notes. On paper it looks tidy. In practice, it quietly costs money. We take the opposite approach, and we have done for […]
A website owner posted on Reddit recently in a genuine panic. They had used Google’s disavow tool to strip out a batch of backlinks, expecting a tidier link profile and a bump in rankings. The opposite happened. Their traffic fell, and the links they had thrown away turned out to be ones that were quietly […]
For most people searching Google, nothing looks different. Hover over a result, click it, land on the website you wanted. Behind that ordinary click, though, Google has quietly changed the plumbing, and for anyone who measures organic performance seriously, that change is worth understanding. Google has begun routing search result clicks through a google.com/goto passthrough […]
A new piece of research has just given local businesses something they rarely get: hard proof of what actually moves the needle on Google Maps rankings, rather than guesswork dressed up as strategy. Local SEO software company Whitespark analysed 1.8 million Google Business Profiles across 4,209 categories and cross-referenced this against ranking positions. The results […]
Google has confirmed that its August 2026 spam update has finished rolling out. It began on Tuesday 18 August at roughly 12:30pm US Eastern time and completed in the early hours of 21 August, taking a little under three days from start to finish. That word, “complete”, matters more than it looks. While an update […]
A joiner I work with rang me in a slight panic back in June. His website was still sitting in position one for “bespoke staircases” plus his town, the search term that used to fill his diary for months at a time. Analytics showed the page was still being viewed. Enquiries, however, had fallen by […]
You open Google Search Console on a Monday, notice a couple of your rankings have slipped, and think little of it. Then, three or four days later, Google announces it has begun rolling out a broad core update. The two events line up so neatly that the conclusion writes itself: Google started the update early, […]