Practical digital marketing insights, tested in the real world.
A link is a citation, and a citation requires that someone writing about your subject needed you to make their point. That is the whole mechanism, and it is the reason most "linkable content" earns nothing. The test, before you build anything: Could a writer covering this topic finish their sentence without referencing you? If […]
Outreach fails for exactly two reasons, and only one of them gets written about. The first is that the email was not worth replying to. That is the reason every guide addresses, and the advice — personalise, be brief, offer value — is correct and insufficient. The second is that the email never arrived. Nobody […]
Google's own position, stated publicly by Gary Illyes at Pubcon in September 2023: "I think they are important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links. I don't agree it's in the top three. It hasn't been for some time." That sentence should have ended a whole industry of tactics, and it did not. […]
HARO is gone. Not deprioritised, not rebranded again — permanently discontinued on 9 December 2024, when Cision confirmed that "the Connectively (HARO) platform has been permanently discontinued." It was announced on 11 November 2024 and closed four weeks later, with Cision saying it had decided "to focus our attention on core offerings where we see […]
This page does not name a winner. Both major tools are competent, their feature sets converge every year, and the differences that matter to you depend on facts about your situation rather than about the software. It also carries no prices, because they change, and no affiliate links, because the comparison is only worth reading […]
Search intent is what the person wants to happen next, and it decides the format of your page completely. An article cannot rank where Google is returning product pages. A product page cannot rank where Google is returning tutorials. No amount of quality overrides a format mismatch. The reliable way to determine intent is not […]
Long-tail keywords are winnable for a small site because the answer is specific, not because the volume is small. That distinction is the whole thing, and most coverage gets it backwards. "How do I fix a WordPress database connection error after migrating hosts" has a real answer, and a page that gives it exactly beats […]
Most keyword research starts in the wrong place: a tool, showing estimated volumes for a market you have no position in. Start instead with Search Console, which shows queries your site already appears for, how often, and roughly where. That is measured data about you rather than an estimate about a market — and no […]
A paid keyword tool gives you two things you cannot get free: search volume estimates for markets you have no presence in, and a backlink index. Everything else in keyword research is available without paying anything. And for a small site, the free sources are frequently better — because they are your own measured data […]
Most reported keyword cannibalisation is not cannibalisation. Two of your pages appearing for one query is normal, common, and frequently good — Google chooses which page fits each search, and having two relevant pages is not a problem in itself. Real cannibalisation has a specific signature: two pages that answer the same question, swapping positions […]
Technical SEO is the work of making sure a search engine can reach, render, understand and store your pages — and almost every real failure happens in the first two of those, not in the sophisticated parts people spend their time on. The useful mental model is a stack of four layers, each of which […]
A blog needs four schema types, and two of the types most blogs are currently adding produce nothing at all. FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google on 7 May 2026, HowTo rich results were withdrawn in 2023, and neither type appears in Google's structured data gallery any more. That matters because a great many […]