Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
When ChatGPT first appeared at the end of 2022, my immediate thought was for the copywriting craft I’d spent over two decades perfecting. The zeitgeist after November 2022 was that anyone could “write their own copy” now, no professional needed.. Then, about eighteen months later, Google started tightening up. Its “helpful content updates” and a … 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
This article originally appeared on the Air Social blog, you can see the original here. We regularly have conversations with clients over the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in content for their digital marketing. Our position at Air Social is that it’s perfectly fine to use AI as a tool to assist in your … Read more
April 2025 continued the trend of significant changes in the search landscape. Whilst Google didn’t announce another core update (the March one had only just finished, after all), we saw persistent ranking volatility, some eye-opening research on AI Overviews’ impact on organic traffic, and important updates to how Google evaluates AI-generated content. Let me walk … Read more
Many years ago I questioned an author who refused to put outbound links in their web articles. Their response was that the blog posts would be “leaking” any “link juice”. This was their way of saying that any benefits the article had would be undone by linking out. My response was: Never be afraid to … Read more
31st March 2025: Google Confirms You Can’t Add E-E-A-T To Your Web Pages 3rd April 2025: How To Apply E-E-A-T To Your Site & Boost On-Page SEO If you saw both these headlines in Search Engine Journal recently you may be asking yourself which one is right? (Fight, right, Harry Hill?) Google’s John Mueller says … Read more
The acronym E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s Google’s framework for evaluating the quality of a website’s content, and Google uses teams of people around the world as “Quality Raters”. Practical E-E-A-T is my way of helping you put it into practice. So E-E-A-T is the backbone of any manual analysis of … Read more
February 2025 was yet another month of interesting developments in the SEO world. Whilst we didn’t see any confirmed core updates from Google, there was plenty of volatility, some significant local search changes, and continued evolution in how AI is reshaping search results. If you’re managing a website or running a local business, understanding what … Read more
Now this is a well-worn subject, having to discuss the benefits of blogging for businesses. But this blog post is written from my own unique perspective in over twenty years of blog writing with commercial success. TL;DR Blogs Still Work: Blogging remains effective for businesses, even 20 years after it came about. Blogging Boosts Traffic: … Read more
This morning I was reading a fascinating post about an alleged deterioration in the quality of Google Search. Titled Google Quality Issues: Part of an Intentional Strategy? the piece critiques Google’s search quality, particularly for certain financial queries. I won’t go into those now because my attention was caught at the very first piece of … Read more