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 to ride bikes in the daytime and drink beer in the evening. When my youngest daughter was born, I remember blasting around Hawley Woods and Hawley Lake every morning of the week.
And then I stopped.
Life, being busy, a young child; it all made the old Specialized full-suspension mountain bike redundant. And there it has sat now for many years now, unloved and unserviced.
But then last year my daughter, 12 at the time, asked if I’d accompany her on the Rushmoor Parkrun she does with her mum. I went along.
And now, six months later, I’m still doing it. In fact, today I ran my 25th today, a milestone run where I can now order and wear the official Parkrun 25 t-shirt to show off my running prowess (Other milestones are 50, 100, 250, and 500, so I’ve made it to the bottom rung!)
You Said Parkrun and SEO?
I did. There really are similarities between Parkrun and SEO.
Regularity
One of the key things in Parkrun is that it’s taken 25 runs to reach my first milestone. That’s 25 weeks of getting into running gear, driving to the venue, lining up at the start line and running 5km/3 miles. Of course, those haven’t been 25 consecutive weeks, as I have missed a few for various reasons.
However, I did attend the Christmas Day event and the first Saturday of January 2026, so missing the New Year’s Day activity was one justified missed week, and there were others too.
SEO is the same – you have to keep turning up, week after week. SEO is not some “fire and forget” or “one and done” activity. You need to attend to issues regularly, and the advantage over Parkrun is that you can do it every day if you need to.
Keep it Going
One anecdote I have of SEO is that if you don’t keep working on optimising your website, then it can fail. I once managed a huge information-based portal that attracted thousands of visitors every day for over a decade. When that business was sold on and I left for a new venture, I watched in horror as the impressions and traffic quite literally “fell off a cliff”. I can still see in my mind’s eye the Google Search Console chart with a massive 80% drop in performance. That’s what happened when I was removed from the equation and the new variables were added – they did not keep up the good work and it was like that for months from what I recall.
Another truth is that if you are not conducting regular SEO work then your competitors likely will – and they’ll outrun you and get to the next t-shirt first. You’ve got to be “in it to win it” and while I may not ever be the fastest at Rushmoor Parkrun (Never say never!) at least I’m in with a chance by simply turning up.
Warming Up
When you turn up to a run, you need to flex those muscles before you launch into strenuous activity. Squats, stretches, dynamic stretching, even a walk or quit run first might help. But it’s always best to warm up cold and stiff muscles before they burst into action.
It’s the same with SEO. Of course, you can just crack on with the on-page SEO and probably get some results, but it’s best if you can fix underlying technical SEO issues first and give yourself a fighting chance.
Having a warm-up routine in SEO could consist of checking your GSC data and focusing on fixing the pages that are not indexed. Look for 404s, canonical issues, etc. Once you’ve made some positive technical SEO changes you can then move on to on-page optimisation or writing that latest article.
Marginal Gains and Compounding
I wrote an article about marginal gains many years ago when the British Olympic Cycling Team won a horde of gold medals at the 2012 Olympics in London. The then Head of Cycling was Dave Brailsford, and he introduced this concept of margin gains so that doing everything just 1% better added up to a better sum of its parts.
Parkrun is the same – focusing on breathing in a more controlled manner, regulating your strides, your pace, when to sprint into a space, when to slip back into a slower pace, these are all seemingly minor things but they all add up to making you a better runner.
And it’s the same in SEO where all the little things you do add up to make something better. Chipping away at fixing those 404 errors, ensuring old HTTP URLs are now HTTPS, enabling GZIP, compressing CSS and JS, improving titles, descriptions, etc. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
This is like in finance where you have the most powerful force in the universe – the law of compound interest. In time, your gains will all add up to make a winning website.
Personal and Competitive Wins
Now every website owner wants to beat the competition, be it the other firm down the road, or maybe some national or global giants. Whatever situation your business is in, there’s a parallel where SEO is very much like Parkrun.
You may be competing against others, but ultimately you are trying to improve yourself. Trying to get a regular Personal Best (PB) is a challenge for all runners. I’ve been advised to “chip away” at PBs and only try to make margin gains on times every week in my runs. However, nature hasn’t allowed that and, I had a few muscle tears that held me back for a few weeks, but then I recovered and just ran ny 6th PB in a row.
With SEO and especially the SEO audit, you should have a set of figures that you can beat every time you conduct SEO on a site. Whether it’s the seemingly arbitrary “site health” score, or reducing those 404s to zero, you can watch the Google Search Console data as impressions, clicks, and rank also improve every month but especially year-on-year. You’re competing with yourself as much as you are with others, and that’s a great philosophy to continually focus on self-improvement.
Useful Data
How do you know what your time was and what tells you it was a PB? Data, that’s what.
I use Strava on my iPhone to record my runs and the Parkrun volunteers have a barcode system where every runner gets a sequential . Once the data is processed, we get a notification before midday on the Saturday of the run and can see our time, if it was a PB, and where we ranked overall, in our gender, and age group.
SEO has its own data sets – GA4, GSC, SEMrush, Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls – these all provide essential data that helps us achieve PBs every week.
For example, if your business has a small digital marketing budget you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console to use for free. Those impressions, position, and click metrics are targets to be beaten with regularity. Every time you report to your client or up the chain to the line manager, you want to be publishing results that are incrementally better than the last time – and that level of improvement is up to you to set.
Plateaus Can Happen
On the last point about useful data in SEO, I like to make sure that I’m managing expectations for clients and ensuring that we have regular benefits for the optimisation work, otherwise, what’s the point?
Last year I took over some work from a previous, flashier SEO agency, but when I looked at the past promises, they had SEO packages that had 10%,. 20%, and 30% traffic growth per month. I ran some calculations, and even the 10% per month promise was unrealistic – I projected that for even modest traffic websites, the increase within 12 months was triple the original level. And for many specialist small businesses, that can be more than the potential search volume and hence pretty pie in the sky.
The reality is that sometimes impressions, rank, clicks can plateau, just as in running. You may not be able to get a PB every single week in running and that can happen in SEO as well. Seasonality, algorithm updates, reducing irrelevant visibility whilst increasing relevant results can all look like table-tops in the graphs.
The Buzz
If there’s one thing I love about Parkrun, it’s the buzz. Getting up every Saturday morning and joining between 500 and sometimes 8-900 likeminded people on a polo field in Aldershot has become a great habit. I enjoy skipping the beers on a Friday, getting up early, exerting myself for 30 minutes, trying to achieve a personal best, and then having the rest of the day free, whilst keeping an eye out for notifications of my time.
SEO is the same. OK, so I;ve only been running for 6 months and doing SEO for over 25 years, but there’s something very addictive about both that gives me a real sense of achievement.
End Note: Education
As with all things, be it Parkrun or digital marketing, the key to it all is learning. We have to learn ourselves and educate our clients so that we all understand and grow together. So just as you get to know your own body, the aches, the pains, the joints and muscles, and all the things you do to treat it well and stay fit and injury-free, eating, drinking, sleeping, and exercising correctly, managing your stride, breathing, and when to burn or conserve that vital energy, it’s the same with managing a website.
When you conduct SEO it’s the same management principals about knowing the hosting, the CMS, the website structure, all the files, and pages, the content and all the seemingly minor components – the sum of all parts is greater than the whole and you should intimately understand your organisation’s website as you do your own body. There’s a huge level of self awareness there that I could and should be another post…
But until then, look after yourself, keep your mind, body, and spirit in shape, and the same for your website and SEO too – and I’ll see you at Rushmoor Parkrun or you can call me for any holistic digital marketing or leave a message on my contact form.