Insights
Insights on search, websites and brand
Research, guides and analysis on search, websites and brand. We publish when we have something worth reading, not to a content calendar.
Choosing an agency
Written to be useful even if you decide not to work with us — including the cases where an agency is the wrong answer.
Agency, in-house or freelancer: a comparison that includes when to hire none of us
Three ways to get marketing done, with genuinely different cost structures, risk profiles and ceilings. This includes the cases where an agency is the wrong answer — which are more common than agencies tend to mention, and easy to identify in advance.
12 min read · updated
What does an SEO agency do, and is it worth paying for?
If you have never bought SEO, the fee is abstract and the deliverables are vague. This sets out what the work consists of, what belongs in a report and what is padding, how long before anything is visible, and the conditions under which the honest answer is that your money should go somewhere else first.
12 min read · updated
How to Choose an SEO Agency: Proposals, Pitches, Case Studies and Contracts
Most SEO buying decisions are made on the quality of a pitch, which is the one thing that has no relationship to the quality of the work. This is how to read a proposal, interrogate a case study, find out who will actually do the work, and check the contract before the deck.
11 min read · updated
Questions to Ask an SEO Agency, and What Good and Weak Answers Sound Like
Fifteen questions worth asking in a pitch, each with the shape of a strong answer and the shape of a weak one. You do not need to know SEO to use them. You need to know what a specific answer sounds like.
10 min read · updated
SEO Agency Red Flags: The Practices That Quietly Cost Clients Money
Six practices that should end a conversation, five that deserve a hard question, and an explanation of why the incentives in this market keep producing them. Written about the practices, not about anyone in particular.
9 min read · updated
Cost and budget
No invented price ranges. These explain the cost drivers so you can work out the number for your own situation.
How much SEO costs: the drivers, the pricing models, and what each one incentivises
This page contains no price ranges and no industry averages, because there is no honest source for either. What it does contain is the list of things that genuinely move the price, what each pricing model quietly rewards your agency for doing, and a method for arriving at a defensible number for your own situation.
11 min read · updated
How much a website costs: the drivers behind a quote, and why ten quotes differ tenfold
No price ranges here either. Instead: what actually drives the cost of a website build, why apparently identical briefs come back at wildly different prices, and the ongoing costs that get left out of almost every quote until they arrive.
10 min read · updated
What drives a marketing budget: sizing it from unit economics rather than a percentage
Percentage-of-revenue rules tell you what you can afford to lose. Unit economics tell you what you can afford to spend. This is the working — customer value, margin, close rate, target volume and payback period — with placeholder numbers you replace with your own.
10 min read · updated
Organic search
How search actually behaves, and how long things really take.
How to Do Keyword Research: A Working Method
Most keyword research produces a spreadsheet nobody opens twice. This is the method that produces decisions instead: where demand evidence genuinely comes from, how to read a results page to find out what a query is worth, and what to leave out on purpose.
9 min read · updated
Search Intent Explained: Reading It From the Results
A definition and a method. What search intent means, where the standard categories came from, why the wording of a query is unreliable evidence of what the searcher wants, and how to establish the intent behind any query in about ninety seconds.
8 min read · updated
Topical Authority: What the Idea Actually Predicts
Nobody outside Google can point to a topical authority setting, and the term is used to justify a great deal of publishing that changes nothing. What the model genuinely predicts, which parts of it are supported by documented behaviour, and how to act on it without producing forty articles nobody reads.
10 min read · updated
How to Get Backlinks Without Buying a Problem
A link is a citation, and you cannot make anybody cite you. What you can do is become worth citing and then be findable by the people who would. This covers the methods that work, the honest cost of each, and the tactics Google’s published spam policies define as link schemes — with the reason each one is on that list.
11 min read · updated
Digital PR vs Link Building: Which Are You Buying?
These two are sold interchangeably and they are not the same purchase. One buys the chance that somebody independent will write about you; the other buys a placement from somebody who was paid. This is how to tell which is in the proposal in front of you, and what each is legitimately good for.
9 min read · updated
What Is Technical SEO? A Definition and a Boundary
Technical SEO is the work that decides whether a page can be fetched, rendered, understood and served at all. It is defined more usefully by its boundary than by its task list: it removes reasons a page cannot compete, and it does not give anybody a reason to choose you.
11 min read · updated
Core Web Vitals Explained: What Each Metric Measures
Three metrics, three thresholds and one assessment rule that explains most of the confusion: the judgement is made at the 75th percentile of real visits, not on a score produced by a testing tool. Here is what each one records, and why your page may have no data at all.
10 min read · updated
Website Migration SEO Checklist, by Type of Move
A redesign, a domain change and a subdomain consolidation are all called migrations and share almost none of their risk. This is the taxonomy: what dominates each kind of move, which checks are specific to it, and where the Change of Address tool does and does not apply.
11 min read · updated
JavaScript SEO: How Google Renders a Site, and What Breaks
Google crawls, queues the page for rendering, runs the scripts, and only then indexes what is there. Almost every JavaScript search problem is a consequence of that sequence. Here is the pipeline, the failures it genuinely causes, and the ones it gets blamed for unfairly.
10 min read · updated
Crawl Budget Explained: What It Is and Who It Affects
Google defines crawl budget as the combination of how much crawling your server will tolerate and how much crawling its systems want to do. It also names the site sizes the guidance is aimed at, and most sites worrying about this are not among them.
7 min read · updated
SEO vs PPC: the trade is time-to-result against cost-per-result
SEO and PPC are not two ways of buying the same thing. One rents attention at a price that moves with the auction; the other builds an asset that keeps producing after you stop paying. Margin, sales cycle and how long you intend to own the business decide which trade you can afford.
11 min read · updated
Local SEO vs national SEO: two different competitions, not two budgets
Local SEO competes against everyone within a few miles of the searcher. National SEO competes against everyone with a website. That single difference explains almost every tactical divergence between them — including why a business can be strong at one and invisible at the other.
9 min read · updated
How Long Does SEO Take? What Actually Changes the Timeline
There is no single number, and any agency offering one is describing its billing cycle rather than your site. What decides the timeline is which constraint is holding you back — and the leading indicators that tell you it is working long before rankings do.
8 min read · updated
AI search
Precise definitions and an honest account of what can and cannot be measured.
Will AI replace SEO? Some of it, unevenly, and not the part being sold
The word SEO covers two different things: the work of being findable by a retrieval system, and one commercial deliverable — a click from a results page. Assistants depend entirely on the first and are visibly eating into the second. Treating those as one question is why the debate never settles.
9 min read · updated
How AI assistants choose sources: documented, observable, and unknown
Almost everything written about this mixes three very different kinds of statement: things the vendors have documented, things anyone can observe from outside, and things nobody outside the companies knows. Sorting them apart leaves a short list of real work and a long list of tactics with nothing behind them.
9 min read · updated
AI Overviews and click loss: what the published evidence actually supports
You have probably seen a figure for how much AI Overviews reduce clicks. It was almost certainly produced by a company selling something, from a keyword set it chose, over a period it chose. Here is one study whose method is public, what Google says in response, and how to read the distance between them.
9 min read · updated
AEO vs GEO vs SEO: precise definitions and an honest account of the overlap
Much of what gets sold as AEO and GEO is SEO fundamentals under a new label. This page defines all three terms precisely, marks which tactics are genuinely the same work, and names the small set of things that really do change when a model writes the answer instead of listing links.
10 min read · updated
ChatGPT SEO vs Google SEO: the overlap, the differences and the measurement problem
Google ranks pages and returns a list you choose from. An assistant composes one answer from sources it may never name. Most of the underlying work is identical. What changes is the unit that competes, the fact that there is no position to report, and whether a click happens at all.
10 min read · updated
What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)? A Precise Definition
A definition page rather than an argument. What answer engine optimisation is, what an answer engine is, what the discipline actually operates on, how it differs from classic SEO, and the four things it is routinely confused with.
7 min read · updated
What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)? Definition and Scope
A definition page. What generative engine optimisation is, how a generated answer is actually assembled, why being one of several synthesised sources is a different problem from being the single extracted answer, and what the discipline is not.
7 min read · updated
Local search
Maps, proximity and the searches that end in a phone call.
Google Business Profile: Which Fields Actually Change Anything
Google names three things that decide a local result: relevance, distance and prominence. Only a handful of profile fields touch any of them. The rest exist to persuade a person who has already found you — worth doing, but a different job with a different measure.
12 min read · updated
Local SEO Checklist: What to Do, and in What Order
Most local SEO checklists are a flat list of forty items, which is why people work through them in the wrong order and conclude that none of it works. This one is sorted by dependency, split into fix-once and keep-doing, and it names the seven jobs that are not worth your time.
11 min read · updated
Multi-Location SEO: Why Some Branches Rank and Others Do Not
Two branches with the same name, the same services and the same website end up with very different local visibility, and the causes are rarely the ones head office suspects. Most of what determines a branch result is decided at the branch, not at the centre.
12 min read · updated
SEO or Google Ads for a local business: emergency demand behaves differently
A plumber and a dentist face the same two channels and should spend very differently. The variables that matter are whether the demand is urgent or considered, how much of the result page the map pack takes, what a job is worth, and whether anyone answers the phone.
10 min read · updated
Why My Business Is Not Showing on Google Maps: The Causes, In Order
Three different problems hide behind the same sentence, and the fix for each is different. This works through the causes in the order they should be checked, from verification and suspension to categories, service areas, proximity, and the reason it looks fine on your own phone.
9 min read · updated
Diagnostics
Triage sequences for the problems that arrive as a symptom.
measurement
How to Measure Marketing ROI Without Fooling Yourself
Marketing ROI arguments are almost never about the return. They are about what counted as revenue, what counted as cost, which month the money belonged to, and whether anything would have happened anyway. Settle those four and the number becomes useful; leave them open and no dashboard will help.
9 min read · updated
Marketing Attribution Models: What Each One Does
An attribution model does not discover which channel caused a sale. It applies a rule for dividing credit among the touchpoints that happened to be recorded. This explains each model, shows what they do to one identical set of journeys, and states the limits none of them can escape.
8 min read · updated
What Is a Good Conversion Rate? Build Your Own Baseline
Every benchmark table you have been shown is built on a population you cannot see, a denominator defined differently from yours, and a period nobody stated. Here is why the comparison cannot work, the method for deriving a baseline from your own data, and the arithmetic for telling a real change from noise.
12 min read · updated
paid
Google Ads vs Meta Ads: capturing demand and creating it are different jobs
These two channels are not two ways of buying the same thing. One buys existing intent at whatever the auction charges for it; the other buys attention from people who were not looking and asks your creative to do the rest. The choice usually turns on whether anyone searches for what you sell.
10 min read · updated
Google Ads not converting: three different faults that look identical
"Not converting" describes three separate failures — clicks that never become enquiries, enquiries nobody can use, and conversions the platform records that the business never sees. They have different causes and different fixes, and the account will not tell you which one you are looking at unless you ask it properly.
9 min read · updated
web
The website redesign checklist for everything that happens before design starts
Most redesign checklists are launch checklists: redirects, indexing, analytics, the things that go wrong on the day. Those matter and we have a separate tool for them. This is the earlier list — the decisions that, left unmade, are what the launch problems are usually made of.
8 min read · updated
Signs you need a new website, and the more common signs that you do not
A rebuild is the most expensive answer available and the one most often reached for. Some problems genuinely require it: an unsupported platform, an architecture that cannot express what you now sell, a site nobody can change without buying developer time. Most of the reasons people give are not on that list.
8 min read · updated
Webflow vs WordPress vs Next.js: a three-way platform comparison
These three are not versions of the same product. They differ in who can edit a page without help, what maintenance costs over three years, how much control you have over redirects and structured data, and what it costs to leave. The deciding factor is almost always the team, not the technology.
12 min read · updated
Editorial standard
What has to be true before we publish
- It answers a question we have actually been asked, by someone who could become a client.
- It says something that could not be assembled from the pages already ranking for that question.
- Every figure carries a source and a date, or it does not appear at all.
- A named person has read it and recorded their sign-off before it becomes eligible for search.
- We would be comfortable if a competitor read it closely.
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