Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
Paul Mackenzie Ross So, you’ve saved money on an experienced professional copywriter by getting Anthropic’s Claude to write it all for you? Great. Claude is excellent, but with precise prompting you can just as good a result from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. However, if you’re simply cutting and pasting text direct from Claude, do you know that they’re … Read more
It doesn’t matter how well you know your 5Ps, your SEO or PPC, a Google certification or even a CIM qualification – if there’s one thing that’s of real old-fashioned marketing value these days it is this – manners! Now it may be cool to say “Hey” these days, much like it’s the American version … Read more
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
Last night I was up late, working, when I spotted a notification on LinkedIn that Google has announced a May 2026 core update. They’ve said it may take up to 2 weeks to roll out and it’s the second core update of the year after the March 2026 core update and a March spam update. … Read more
This new agentic era? Only the other day Google said to keep an out for it. But apparently it isn’t coming, it’s already here! And I have a big feeling that it’s going to make some SEO conversations feel very outdated, very very quickly. OK, so admittedly I didn’t quite catch Google I/O 2026 live, … 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