About SEO & Marketing
Search, paid and social marketing, and how to tell whether any of it is working. Practical guidance on content depth, technical fixes, reporting you can actually read, and getting cited by AI answer engines as well as ranked by Google.
Most marketing reporting is designed to be difficult to judge. Impressions rise, reach grows, engagement is up eleven per cent, and nobody in the room can say whether the money worked. The articles here are about the two numbers that settle it — leads, and cost per lead — and the on-page work that moves them.
The 2026 core and spam updates changed what is worth writing. Pages that demonstrate rather than assert gained ground; pages that covered a keyword without answering the question lost it. In practice that means depth, real figures, visible FAQs, and saying who a service is not for. It also means removing anything unverifiable, because unverifiable trust markers were specifically targeted.
A growing share of research now happens inside answer engines that cite sources rather than list links. The optimisation for that overlaps almost entirely with good SEO, so the work is the same work. What is different is allowing those crawlers rather than blocking them, and publishing a plain summary of what your business does.
Timelines are given honestly throughout. Paid produces data within days. Organic takes three to six months before the trend is clear, and longer against established domains.
4 articles in SEO & Marketing
Local SEO for Manchester Businesses: What Actually Moves the Map Pack
Relevance, distance and prominence: how Google decides who appears in the Manchester map pack, and the order to work through the signals you can actually change.
How to Get Your Business Cited by AI Search Engines
Being crawlable is the easy half. The hard half is being corroborated: what answer engines check before they will name a business, and how a small UK company can pass those checks.
Google Ads vs SEO for UK SMEs: Where to Put the First £1,000
Paid buys leads this month and stops when you stop paying; SEO compounds and takes six months. What each costs a UK SME, how to tell which you need first, and why the answer is usually a sequence.
10 SEO Tips to Grow Your Organic Traffic
Ten things that still move organic traffic after the 2026 core and spam updates, ordered by impact. No tricks, and three of them you can do this week.