More and more First Class Content Engine members and SEO 1:1 clients are asking about keyword research on our calls, and I thought it would be a good idea to put everything in one place. And because keyword research is important for both SEO and for thinking of things to write about for your blogs AND your social media posts, you might want to bookmark this to refer back to regularly. For this post I’m using ‘copywriter’ as my starting keyword point, but you can follow the process for your industry. Before you start keyword research Stop thinking of keywords and think of keyph ..read more

If you’re an SEO training client of mine, one of the first things I ask you to do before we have our 1:1 session is to add me to your Google Search Console account, Here’s a quick and dirty blog post to tell you how to do it. Adding a user to your Google Search Console 1) First, navigate to Google Search Console – you’re probably logged in already, but if not, log in to your Google account. 2) On the left, scroll down until you see ‘settings’ 3) Once in settings, click on ‘Users and permissions’. 4) Once you click on this it will show you who already has access to your Google Search account ..read more

Spring is in the air, and thoughts are turning to upcoming days of better weather, a new business quarter, and what the hell can we post on LinkedIn to make us stand out a bit? I’ll be posting about this quite a bit in my membership group, so now’s a good time to join. But back to the Spring blog post ideas. The obvious ones for March are International Women’s Day and Mothers’ Day, St. David’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and The Ides of March, and I’ll throw in some ideas for those over the next couple of weeks. It’s also the month of the Great Daffodil Appeal for Marie Curie Cancer Care, but if ..read more

I’m a huge fan of stats and figures, and knowing where I’ve been and where I’m going. But to do that, I need to track what’s happening with a website that I’m optimising, and, as a copywriter, how my blogs or articles for clients are performing. When it comes to KPIs for SEO, there are a few things you can track. Search Engine Rankings The most obvious one, and why I ask all of my clients to set up either a free SEMrush account* or a trial SERanking account* – while the free and trial versions of both systems are limited, they do help you to track a few things that may be important to you. T ..read more

When you’re struggling for blog and social media content ideas, and you’ve done the usual tricks of: Checking industry and other news. Thinking of questions your customers and potential clients have asked. Seeing if you can work the ‘Day of Whatever’ theme into your post. Asking ChatGPT to give you some answers. Using Google’s People Also Ask. it’s time to try something new – so I bring you… Quora. What is Quora? Quora is a website set up so that people can ask questions and hopefully get answers to them from people who can help. It’s a bit of a cesspit at times, and there’s a lot of spam ..read more

We all know Valentine’s Day is a made up holiday, and if you didn’t know that, you’re going to see a LOT of posts on LinkedIn telling you about it over the next week or so. Don’t be the author of one of those ‘V-Day isn’t real’ posts – they’re not original and everyone gets sick of seeing them – I’d hate for you to be the post that breaks the reader’s back and results in you being unfollowed. But on the other hand, everyone is going to be posting about the love they have for their partner, their business, their dog, and LinkedIn, and you’re not going to stand out by doing that either. So her ..read more

The next reason we’ll look at for pages not being indexed on Google is that Google has noticed that some of the URLs on your website point to other pages. As this would cause a duplicate content error, Google won’t index both pages, they index the one that is the final URL. This often happens when you have changed URLs on a website. For example, most of the issues with the this site are because we restructured the URLs of the blog posts, and Google has decided that the new URLs are the correct ones, so the old URLs it still knows about are redirects. To avoid indexing both, Google is ignorin ..read more

Happy New Year and all that, I know most of you are back in the saddle so I trust we’re ready for a brand new year of content? It’s a strange time of year, because we all feel as if we should be pushing on with ‘stuff’, but some of us (umm me) are a bit discombobulated after a couple of weeks off. We’re not the only discombobulators though, LinkedIn hates the time after Christmas too. The algorithm doesn’t seem to know what to do with anyone, reach is down more than ever, and it can feel a little like shouting into the void. I scheduled some posts for over the festive period, and even that ha ..read more

Quite a few of my Content Engine members joined after initially taking part in my LinkedIn Content Challenge. So I try and check out their posts and profiles on there as often as I can. And that’s the reason why, if any of them feel targeted by today’s tips, they probably are (sorrynotsorry)! We all fall into bad habits occasionally (especially me), so it’s worth having  look at your account and your LinkedIn content to see if you’re on the naughty list. Sin 1 – tagging everyone you can think of While I do recommend tagging people in your posts if the subject is relevant to them or you ..read more

The Google Search Console reason we’ll look at for pages not being indexed on Google is 404 not found – Google has noticed that pages in your sitemap give a 404 error, because the page doesn’t exist. When Google tried to index these pages (usually from a link elsewhere) the page was not there. It may have been renamed, deleted, or the original link may be incorrect. This often happens when you launch a new website, change the URL structure of your website,  or migrate to a new domain (please contact me before doing any of these things, it really will save you so much hassle down the line ..read more