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Practical writing, from implementation

Everything here comes from work we have actually done — no recycled listicles, no AI-search fearmongering, and answers first so you can leave quickly with what you came for.

Written around the product, not around the calendar.

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Google will not say what page speed is worth in rankings. The measured gains show up in conversion

Google calls page experience one of many signals and never quantifies it. The better controlled evidence that fixing Core Web Vitals pays is commercial.

A year after the UK banned fake reviews, the first CMA cases are about ordinary business habits

The DMCC Act banned fake reviews in April 2025. The CMA’s first five cases are about suppressed, staff written and incentivised reviews, not invented ones.

Google names three local ranking factors, and most of what the industry adds is inference, not fact

Google publishes three local ranking factors. Here is how the industry's longer lists were built, which claims tests support, and which break Google's rules.

When Google Ads reports no conversions, the first suspect is the counter, not the customers

A conversion tag can fail silently and make a working campaign look dead; how to tell measurement collapse from demand collapse and what to check first.

Paid search that converts and organic search that does not: the gap is only visible query by query

What the Google Ads search terms report and Search Console each hide, why a join by query is the honest comparison, and the six situations it produces.

A single pound figure for what a business is losing is usually a sum of things that cannot be added

Savings, conversions, clicks and risks are different kinds of thing. What the ASA, the CMA, Google and published research say about adding them into one figure.

Google has ended FAQ rich results for every site, but the answers behind them still earn their place

Google switched off FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026 and removed the documentation in June. What a local business should change, and why the answers should stay.

Search Console's four numbers are honest, but each one counts something other than what owners assume

What clicks, impressions, CTR and average position count, the rules that mislead business owners, a ten-minute monthly routine, and what the report cannot say.

No one can promise a local business an AI mention, but the evidence the assistants read can be measured

What Google, OpenAI and Perplexity document about local answers, how often those answers change, and what a clinic or plumber can actually influence.

A Google Business Profile audit, field by field, against what Google actually says

A field-by-field audit of a Google Business Profile: what Google's guidelines say, what affects visibility, what affects conversion and what is cosmetic.

What a regulated clinic may legally say about itself is most of what makes it findable

UK clinics work under registration, advertising and professional rules that decide the words on a page, and those rules produce the evidence search relies on.

Rankings are not enquiries: what local search measurement can count, and what it will always miss

How to count the calls, forms, WhatsApp chats and bookings local search work produces, what the tools miss, and why a written method beats a ranking report.

Structured data can tell a search engine what a business is; it cannot rank it or make an AI recommend it

What Google's own documentation says structured data does for a local business, what it has withdrawn, and where the claims about AI outrun the evidence.

A business has no single Google Maps rank, only a position at each point a searcher stands

Google computes Maps results for the searcher's location, so a single tracked position describes one point on a surface, not a business.

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