I hear a version of this question on almost every discovery call. A business owner has been burned before, or they have a friend who spent thousands on an agency and got nothing back, and they want to know: am I about to put money on the table with no guarantee of a return? It […]

Every website is aiming at something. The question is how tightly you aim, and when. Over many years of doing this, I have found that the best keyword strategies are not a choice between two approaches, but a sequence of them. I call them the ‘’scatter gun’’ approach and the ‘’sniper’’ approach. One can comes […]

One of the most common conversations I have with clients is about budget, and it usually goes the same way. The PPC spend is easy to defend because the numbers are right there: spend goes in, revenue comes out, and everyone in the room can see the relationship between the two. SEO is a harder […]

Every few months somebody tells me SEO is finished. AI chatbots have taken over, apparently, and nobody uses Google any more. Then a piece of data lands that makes the whole argument fall apart in about four seconds. This week, Google’s own Senior Vice President of Knowledge & Information, Nick Fox, confirmed that Search hit […]

Imagine waking up to find one of your best performing pages has vanished from Google. Your content has not changed. You have not broken any rules. Yet the traffic has dropped off a cliff, and when you check, the page simply is not in the search results any more. This is happening right now to […]

If you have ever wondered whether it is worth spending time on meta descriptions, Google has just settled the debate, at least partly. Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, confirmed on Reddit this week that meta descriptions are “definitely not a requirement” for ranking well in search results. However, he also said they are still worth […]

Google has officially completed the rollout of its June 2026 Spam Update, with the update taking just two days to reach completion after launching on 24 June. While Google describes it as a routine spam update, many website owners have reported noticeable changes in rankings and organic traffic during the rollout. If your website has […]

One of the most common questions asked after updating a website is: how long before Google notices? The honest answer is that it depends, but that answer is not good enough on its own. Understanding the stages involved gives a much clearer picture of what to expect and when to start drawing conclusions. First, Google […]

If you have ever considered moving your website to a new domain, whether from a country-code extension like .ca to a .com, or from one brand name to another, this is essential reading. Google has made it clear: even when a site move is executed perfectly, nobody, not even Google, can predict the outcome. That […]

Google held a Search Central Live event in Milan in June 2026, and it covered a lot of ground, content quality, crawling, AI Overviews, Search Console updates, and some myth-busting that a good number of SEOs needed to hear. These events are valuable because they give practitioners direct insight into how Google thinks about ranking […]