Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
A selection of digital marketing articles by Paul Mackenzie Ross, a local expert who has over 25 years professional experience in design and digital after forming his personal studio back in 2000AD.
And nobody wants THIS trophy Every so often a piece of data lands that confirms something I’ve been discussing with colleagues and clients alike. This is, yet again, one of those weeks. SparkToro and Similarweb have followed up their US zero-click study with the same analysis across five more countries, and the United Kingdom has … Read more
Starting work for a renowned client in the financial services industry almost a year ago I was tasked with improving their performance in organic search. The first hurdle was that their website was in a CMS I’d never even heard of before – Silverstripe. I conducted a comprehensive website and SEO audit, drew up a … Read more
I’ve been doing SEO for over 25 years but I’d be the first to admit that I just can’t know everything, as much as I’d love to. So when Google released its AI Search guidance the other week there was a phrase I’d not seen before – “commodity content”. And of course I asked myself, … Read more
I have to admit that when Google released for the first time ever its guidance on optimising for AI search it did make me smile. I am guilty of leaning toward the “it‘s just SEO“ camp but with the clear nuance that SEO is such a huge discipline that it depends on what you understand … Read more
One of the biggest questions in SEO over the past few years has been what to do to optimise for AI search? Because the thing is, if there are no rules and no guidance, then people just make things up. That’s how it’s always been. Until, of course, the powers that be catch up with … Read more
A few times recently I’ve had to explain to clients the concept of information gain. It’s a topic that’s cropped up quite a few times recently in discussions around Google core updates, so I thought it warranted a quick blog post to explain. Information Gain: What is it? When you write about a topic on … Read more
Google has noted that FAQ Schema is no longer appearing in search results. I just investigated this after reading a post by SEO Lily Ray over on LinkedIn. What is SchemaMarkup? Schema markup is machine-readable code that we place in web pages to help inform the search engines of the meaning of that page. Historically, … Read more
It’s a wrap. I don’t know how many times I’ve attended BrightonSEO now but I can count them on one hand I think. Wait, I logged all my visits in SwarmApp (Formerly Foursquare before the app split); Spring 2018, Autumn 2018, Autumn 2021, and Autumn 2022. This is my fifth visit! However, this one was … Read more
For anyone that knows me, I used to do a lot of mountain biking back in the day. I’d cycle locally at least one night a week with “the lads”, drive out to routes near Sheffield, the Brecon Beacons, and South Downs, and even stay away once a year at a far-flung mountain bike trail … Read more
I used to write a year-in-review piece for the digital marketing agency I worked at for nearly eight years until January 2025, as their only multi-disciplined digital marketer and writer. This year I’m doing it for myself. 2025 was the year that AI-powered search became even more mainstream, the year Google delivered on its promise … Read more