Search intent is a business question, not a keyword attribute
Informational and transactional are too coarse to build a page on. What matters is where a query sits in a buying decision, and how far it still has to travel.
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Insights
Ideas for better organic growth.
Written for people who have to make decisions about search, not for people who need convincing that SEO exists. Every figure quoted here is traced to the study it came from, and the ones that cannot be traced are named as such.
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10 articles
Local SEO
Start here if you are working out the order to do any of this in: the complete local SEO guide.
Google Business Profile optimisation: the complete guide
What makes a Google Business Profile complete rather than merely present: the fields the evidence says matter, and the two features that no longer work.
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Google Business Profile suspension recovery: a practical guide
What to do when a Google Business Profile is suspended: diagnose the likely cause first, build an appeal Google can act on, and keep the business running while you wait.
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Google Maps SEO: the complete guide
What actually decides local pack placement, plus the Maps-specific factors checklists miss: photo and video volume, 360° presence, authority-reviewer ratings.
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Local business schema markup: the complete guide
Which local business schema types still earn a rich result, which one lost its rich result in May 2026, and why schema doesn't lift AI citation.
Local review strategy: the complete guide
A review programme that holds up: what the FTC rule and Google's policy each actually prohibit, response structures grounded in real data, and a defensible volume target.
Local SEO for AI search: the complete guide
What actually predicts whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini recommend a local business — and why the controlled evidence says schema markup does not.
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Local SEO: the complete guide
What local SEO actually is, organised around the three questions a customer answers before making contact: can they find you, believe you, reach you now.
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Local business website conversion: the complete guide
What actually turns a local business website visit into a call or booking: form-purpose completion rates, a controlled speed experiment and click-to-call data.
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Local citation building: the complete guide
What actually predicts local pack placement in 2026, which directories carry real citation volume now, and how to audit and fix inconsistent business listings.
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Local SEO when you have more than one location
Multi-location local SEO fails on systems, not effort: location pages that read as one page repeated, and reporting that averages away the branch in trouble.
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3 articles
Digital Growth
Start here if the question is whether any of it is working: the local marketing measurement guide.
How to choose a local marketing agency
The questions worth asking an agency, what a strong answer sounds like, what each pricing model trades off, and the exit terms to settle before you sign.
Local marketing measurement and attribution: the complete guide
Local marketing measurement breaks at the bottom of the funnel, where almost nothing ties a paying customer back to the channel that produced them. Here is the fix.
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How to tell whether SEO is working before the traffic arrives
Organic results lag the work by months. The leading indicators worth watching instead of the traffic chart, and the numbers that should never reach a board slide.
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3 articles
Lead Generation
Start here for how the channels compare and where the money actually leaks: the local lead generation guide.
Lead response and follow-up: the complete guide
The practical system behind fast lead response: notification routing, lead ownership, what automation can't do, and the follow-up cadence.
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Local lead generation: the complete guide
How local businesses generate leads: choosing channels by stage and budget, diagnosing a weak one before switching, and the follow-up stage most guides skip.
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WhatsApp lead generation: the complete guide
WhatsApp as a lead channel: Business App versus Business Platform, what per-message pricing costs, and why free service replies end on 1 October 2026.
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5 articles
Elsewhere
Meta Ads for local businesses: the complete guide
Facebook and Instagram ads for local businesses: cost per lead by industry from $3.16 to $76.71, Meta's own Advantage+ claims read honestly, and a worked campaign.
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The technical SEO checks that actually move something
Any crawler hands you three hundred issues. Most are noise. The shorter list worth fixing first, how to price a finding, and the checks no tool runs.
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Why keyword research keeps producing the wrong content
The problem is rarely the research. The failure is in the handover, where everything specific about a query disappears and a person becomes a phrase.
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How to write a content brief a writer can actually use
Most briefs are a title, a word count and a keyword list — a specification for average content. Here is what to include instead, and what to leave out.
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Your category pages are the most under-built asset you own
Ecommerce teams pour effort into product pages and paid ads, then leave the pages with the highest commercial search volume as bare grids. What belongs on them, in order.
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Nothing published in that category yet.
How this is written
Source-first, or it doesn’t ship.
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Every statistic is traced to its origin
Never a roundup citing a roundup. The date recorded is the date of the data, not of the article that quoted it.
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Unverifiable claims are named, not dropped
Where a widely repeated number cannot be traced, it is documented with what could not be established — so a reader who has met it elsewhere finds out why it does not hold.
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Evidence, interpretation and recommendation are labelled
A measured finding, a practitioner consensus and a judgement about what to do are three different things, and are marked as such.
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Correlation is not written as causation
Observational findings say “associated with”. Where no study exists, the page says no study was identified in the sources reviewed — rather than that nobody has looked.
The graded numbers behind these pieces live in the statistics archive.
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Reading is cheaper than a mistake.
If any of this raised a question about your own site, it is usually quicker to just ask.
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