SEO Intelligence Without the BS
Notes on search: what changed, what it means, and what to do about it. 591 of them so far, going back to August 2024.
Start here
- Local SEO in 2026What actually moves local rankings, minus the forty-seven-tips listicles.
- Technical SEO checklistCore Web Vitals, crawlability, indexation, site architecture.
- Google Business Profile changesThree 2026 changes to how profiles feed local rankings.
- E-commerce SEOProduct pages, category structure, and the technical layer underneath.
- SEO for startupsWhere to spend first when the budget is small.
- The metrics that matterWhich numbers track revenue, and which ones most people track wrong.
The archive
How to Test an SEO Change Before Rolling It Out Sitewide
Sitewide changes are hard to reverse and slow to evaluate. Testing on a subset first costs a few weeks and prevents the changes that quietly cost a quarter.
Recovering Search Coverage After a Redesign
Rankings dropped after the new site launched. Here is the order to check things in, and which of the usual suspects is actually responsible most often.
Keeping a Large Content Archive Accurate Over Time
An archive that grows faster than it is maintained turns into a liability. Here is a maintenance model that scales without rereading everything you published.
Deciding What to Prune and What to Keep
Deleting old content is sometimes the highest-return work available and sometimes an expensive mistake. Four questions separate the two.
Impressions Went Up and Clicks Did Not. What That Means
Rising impressions with flat clicks has four common causes and they call for opposite responses. Here is how to tell which one you are looking at.
The Queries You Rank For But Never Targeted
Every site ranks for questions nobody planned. Those accidental queries are the cheapest content research you own, and most teams never open the report.
How to Audit NAP Consistency Without a Paid Tool
Citation tools charge monthly to find inconsistent listings. The checks that matter most take an afternoon and no subscription. Here is the sequence.
How Much Faster Does a Page Need to Be to Matter?
Speed work has a threshold and a ceiling. Below the threshold you are losing visitors; above the ceiling you are optimising something nobody experiences.
When Adding Internal Links Makes Things Worse
Internal linking is close to free and hard to overdo badly. There are four ways to get it wrong, and automated linking plugins produce three of them.
Domain Authority Is a Vendor Score, Not a Google Signal
Google does not use Domain Authority. It is one vendor modelling another company system. That does not make it useless, but it changes what it can decide.
What Search Console Cannot Tell You
Search Console is the most trustworthy free data you have about your search performance, and four of its limits routinely produce confident wrong conclusions.
How Wrong Search Volume Estimates Are, and How to Use Them
Every keyword tool reports volume as a precise number. It is a bucketed, modelled estimate of a moving target. Here is how to plan around that honestly.
How to Tell Whether Your Schema Markup Is Doing Anything
Valid structured data is not the same as useful structured data. Here is how to check which of your markup earns anything, and which is decoration.
Where UX Work Belongs in an SEO Roadmap
User experience is not a lever that earns traffic. It decides whether the traffic you already have turns into anything, which changes when to do it.
How to Find Which Element Is Failing Your LCP
A failing Largest Contentful Paint score names a number, not a cause. Here is how to identify the exact element, and which of four phases is actually slow.
Why a Landing Page for Every Keyword Backfires
One page per keyword was a real tactic once. It now splits your ranking signal and buries the version that could actually have ranked.
What Counts as Organic Search Traffic, and What Quietly Does Not
Analytics classifies traffic by referrer, not intent. That gap hides a growing share of search visits inside Direct and Referral. Here is how to find them.
Why Your Conversion Rate Drops When Rankings Improve
Winning broader keywords pulls in visitors who are further from buying, so the site-wide conversion rate falls while revenue rises. Here is how to read it.
What an SEO Handover Document Should Contain
Agencies change, staff leave, and most of what was learned leaves with them. Here is the record that should exist so the next person does not start from zero.
Why Reviews Outweigh Backlinks for Local Businesses
For a business serving one town, the link-building budget is usually the wrong budget.
The SEO Work That Only Pays Off in Year Two
Some of the highest-return SEO work shows nothing at all for twelve months.
Writing for a Reader Who Will Never Scroll
Most visitors decide in the first screen whether to keep reading. Here is how to structure a page for the majority who leave, without gutting it for the minority who stay.
The Difference Between Traffic and Demand
Traffic is what arrived. Demand is what people wanted. Confusing the two is how businesses celebrate a good month and lose a good quarter.
When to Kill a Page Instead of Optimizing It
Not every underperforming page deserves a rewrite. Here is how to tell the pages worth saving from the ones that are costing you more than they return.
What a Google Business Profile Suspension Actually Looks Like
A suspended profile does not announce itself clearly. Here is how to tell a suspension from a filter, what actually triggers one.
When SEO Is the Wrong Investment
Search is not the right channel for every business at every stage. Here are the specific situations where SEO spend underperforms.
Reading a SERP Before You Commit to the Keyword
Difficulty scores tell you how hard a keyword looks. The results page tells you whether you can win it and whether winning is worth anything.
B2B SaaS SEO: Ranking for Problems Buyers Cannot Name Yet
The hardest B2B keyword problem is that your best prospects do not know your category exists. They search the symptom, not the solution.
Search Console Data Limits and How to Work Around Them
Search Console hides more than it shows. Row caps, anonymized queries, and a sixteen-month window all distort what you see.
Site Redesign SEO: Preserving Rankings Through a Replatform
Most traffic lost in a redesign is lost to decisions made months before launch.
Brand Search as an SEO Metric: Measuring Demand You Created
Branded search volume is the cleanest available signal that marketing is creating demand rather than harvesting it. Most SEO reports leave it out entirely.
The Author Entity Problem: Making Bylines Machine-Readable
A byline is a string of text. An author entity is something Google can resolve to a person it already knows about.
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