Blog
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The client never knew I existed, and that was the point
The best result I can show you from the last two years belongs to a law firm I have never spoken to. They were the client of an agency. The agency brought me in on a white-label basis. I set the strategy and handled link building, their team implemented alongside me. Twelve months of Business…
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Two things I recommended in most of my audits, and have stopped recommending
I went back through eleven audits I have written since 2021 to count what I actually find, rather than what I remember finding. Two recommendations show up in most of them that I would no longer make. One is out of date because Google changed something. The other was never right, and I repeated it…
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466 of 812 pages were thin. The fix was not to rewrite 466 pages.
Two audits, two sites, same finding. One had 466 of 812 indexable pages classed as thin. Fifty-seven per cent. The other had 93 of 189. Forty-nine per cent. Different businesses, different platforms, different catalogue sizes. In both cases roughly half of everything the site had in the index was a page nobody would choose to…
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How to prove to Google that you are one business
Most advice on this topic is one sentence long: keep your name, address and phone number consistent everywhere. Nobody disagrees with it and almost nobody can act on it, because it doesn’t say where “everywhere” is, what “consistent” means, or how you’d know if you’d failed. I’ve had clients tell me their details were consistent…
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659 tag pages, competing with the pages the store actually sells from
A Shopify store I audited had 659 tag pages indexed. Not products. Not collections. Tag pages: the URLs Shopify generates automatically when you tag a product, of the form /collections/something/tag-name. Nobody had created them on purpose. Nobody knew they existed. They outnumbered the store’s real commercial pages several times over. What Shopify is doing when…
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The question every patient has before they book, and almost no clinic website answers
There is a pattern I keep finding in roofing that I suspected transferred to chiropractic. I went back through three clinic audits to check, and it does. The roofing version Almost every roofing site I open is missing two things: whether they offer financing, and whether they will help with the insurance claim. Neither is…
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The campaign that ended because it worked
I have had two engagements end because the client got more calls than they could handle. One was a roofing contractor in South Carolina. One was automotive. Neither of them fired me over poor results. Both of them stopped because the work did what it was supposed to do and the business underneath was not…
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A car accident click costs $300. The lead behind it costs $442. There is a cheaper number.
Most arguments for SEO are made badly, and they are made worst to lawyers. The usual pitch is that search traffic is “free”, which is not true, or that it “compounds”, which is true but unfalsifiable, or that it “builds authority”, which means nothing to somebody deciding where to put next quarter’s marketing budget. Personal…
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The three firms in the map pack all had over a hundred reviews. The firm doing the serious work had nine.
Every local SEO article says the same thing about reviews. Get more of them. Get them regularly. After your primary category, review count is the strongest thing you can influence for map pack position. That advice is broadly right. For criminal defense it is close to useless, and following it will cost a firm two…
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27,903 impressions. 106 clicks.
That’s one query, one site, three months. Twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and three times Google showed the page. A hundred and six people clicked. Everyone I show that to says the same thing: the title needs work. Sometimes it does. But I’ve pulled four of these out of my old audits and the title was…