Working notes, not content marketing
Things we have had to explain often enough that it was quicker to write them down. Specific enough to be wrong, which is the point: advice vague enough to always be true is not worth anyone's time.
Paid media
Spending less to get the same result.
How much should you spend on Google Ads?
There is a real answer to the budget question and it comes from arithmetic, not from what feels comfortable. The floor is set by your market's click costs and the need for enough data to learn anything.
Read →Performance Max: what you get and what you give up
Performance Max is a real tool and a genuine black box at the same time. The trade is reach for visibility, and whether it pays depends on things you control before launch.
Read →Should you bid on your own brand name?
Brand campaigns show spectacular numbers because they harvest people who already chose you. Sometimes that is worth paying for anyway. Here is how to tell.
Read →Cost per lead is the wrong number to manage
Cost per lead is the number most advertisers optimise against, mostly because it is the one the dashboard shows. It is also the number easiest to improve while making less money.
Read →SEO
What actually moves rankings, and what people sell that does not.
Why your rankings dropped, and how to tell if it matters
Ranking drops have about six causes, and panic-fixing the wrong one does more damage than the drop. Here is the order to check them in, from most to least likely.
Read →What actually moves local rankings
Local rankings come down to a short list of things, and one of them is where the searcher happens to be standing. Knowing which levers exist saves a lot of money on the ones that do not.
Read →Analytics and tracking
Making the numbers defensible before optimising against them.
Call tracking, explained without the vendor gloss
If your customers call you, your marketing reports are missing their biggest number. How dynamic number insertion actually works, what it costs, and the one setup mistake that matters.
Read →The GA4 mistakes that quietly corrupt your reporting
GA4 fails politely: dashboards keep rendering, numbers stay plausible, and the errors hide inside defaults nobody revisited. The most common ones, and how to check yours in an afternoon.
Read →Why your ad platform and your CRM disagree
Three systems, three numbers, and a meeting where nobody can defend any of them. The causes are usually mundane and there is a sensible order to check them in.
Read →Marketing automation
Not losing the leads you already paid for.
The follow-up automations worth building first
Before buying more traffic, it is worth finding out how many enquiries you already paid for and never replied to. Usually the answer is uncomfortable.
Read →AI visibility
What changes when buyers ask a model instead of searching.
AI Overviews are eating clicks. What to do about it
Positions holding, clicks sliding: the results page now answers questions above your listing. Which searches are exposed, which are safe, and what a sane response looks like.
Read →Should you block AI crawlers from your website?
Blocking GPTBot feels like protecting your content. For most businesses it is removing yourself from the pool of things AI can recommend. The decision comes down to what your website is for.
Read →Web development
Where architecture decisions turn into search problems.
Page speed: what actually matters and what is theatre
Speed matters for visitors first and rankings second, and most speed work is aimed at the score instead of the site. Where the real gains are, in order, and when to stop.
Read →How to redesign your website without losing your rankings
Rankings do not die because a site got prettier. They die from dropped pages, missing redirects and a noindex tag that escaped staging. Every one is preventable, before launch.
Read →Ready to get moving?
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