Matt Gascoigne

$277,760 more sales in the last three months I've been working with this client for around 18 months and revised their previously stagnant SEO strategy. Here are the four biggest levers we pulled: 👉 Optimised collection pages - updated page titles, improved their existing content and internal links between collection pages. 👉 Created genuinely helpful pain-point content for their audience (1/week cadence). People are now finding their product as a solution to their problems. 👉 Leveraged digital-PR to build highly authoritative & relevant links. They've added around 130 links over the past 12 months. 👉 Built out more content on product pages, added FAQs, collected (A LOT of) reviews and added structured data. We've also helped DOUBLED their email list through content upgrades too, with their email channel now driving 600% more revenue than last year. I love it when SEO helps out other channels too.

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LINKS DO MATTER and how you use them / get them matters as well as SIMULTANEOUS changes to brand demand. We've been testing a few different sources for links whilst running some experiments by leveraging brand awareness via other channels. We've been testing a few link sources alongside digital PR campaigns. We've used Serpzilla and Search Intelligence Ltd for campaigns alongside our own SEO testing and query counting process. We found really good links on SERPZILLA saving us the usual outreach headaches. Link in comments. Here's what we've done: 1. We performed an SEO audit for a client SEO Audits IO 2. We got the client to sign up to SEO Stack 3. We did the audit and listed all the work to be done in SEO stack 4. The client asked us to run the SEO and take over, so we executed the campaign 5. We used Serpzilla to build links to specific pages on the domain, we shaped the anchors and internal link anchors 6. We had ran a campaign with Search Intelligence Ltd for digital PR for the root domain 7. We leveraged digital PR and some social spend to drive up brand search volume - this took a while but we increased brand search impressions, variants and google trends for brand 8. We ran various SEO tests whilst maintaining brand and link acquisition campaigns - we focused on driving up query counts for key start of funnel pages 9. As long-tail traffic grew, we did some split testing with navigation changes, footer changes, anchor changes, title CTR improvements, expanded structured data and more 10. We did a content clean up, we didn;t change a lot, the content was good, had good engagement, we did some bolstering of content, improved internal links, added FAQS from AlsoAsked and used markup INITIALLY, there was a bit of lag before anything moved - query counts gave the client insight into page weight movement so they knew there would be a time delay. One interesting aspect was just how much importance brand DOES play a part in ranking. Mark Williams-Cook covered this to a degree in his "Improving your SEO with conceptual models" presentation (link in comments). For example - IF you are building links, but your brand just doesn't have any real verifiable establishment - you lose out on a key point of trust which may lessen the impact of link building exercises. Ticking all the boxes in your SEO strategy is KEY - if you miss out something important such as brand - it can undo the benefit from links, content quality improvements or bosltered E-E-A-T etc. Anyhow - a happy client. Note, growth is NOT I repeat NOT inclusive of blogs. #seo #seo2025

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This site is an extremely interesting case. Brand in the finance sector. Destroyed by the HCU update 2023. Backlinks from digital PR (and paid links), albeit some of the digital PR ones are totally off-topic, and some look like paid DPR placements. The site increased its content by 1000 pages in a year, so I suggest that it might have used AI content to scale. The site is well-designed, with lots of E-E-A-T elements. My gut says this site was hit by multiple factors: a bit of waffly content, some link devaluation, and AI content. It looks like they've deleted over 1000 pages a matter of weeks after being hit, so perhaps they took a chance. An interesting case, might reach out to the owners of this one.

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A new Google core update is currently underway, which could help small business websites who have been at the receiving end of previous updates 🤔 At Targeted SEO Ltd. our aim is to always create helpful content for people, rather than try to 'game the system', or fill sites with AI content with sole purpose of manipulating rankings. It will still be interesting to see if this does impact any of the sites we manage (in a positive way!) 📈 What Google said. “Today, we launched our August 2024 core update to Google Search. This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search,” John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google. "There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people. For those that might not be ranking as well, we strongly encourage reading our creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page [https://lnkd.in/gZTG99qb]." Read the full article for details ➡ https://lnkd.in/giSWRT33

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Local SEO: Don’t build links with locations in guest post or niche edit anchor text. No one links like this naturally. NO ONE. “Dentist Birmingham” 🫣 “Manchester Plumber” 🤢 “Lawyer in Chicago” 😩 Just build brand and natural anchors, trust.

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Thought I’d weigh in on the Google leak having had a few days to review it. I've seen plenty of posts with a lot of info but not much practical advice, so here's a few (6) concise takeaways and how we'll be adapting our SEO approach as an agency going forward: 1️⃣ Click data matters 📊 Previously, click data was thought to have minimal impact. The leak reveals it significantly influences rankings. We'll be implementing A/B tests across titles and descriptions to improve click-through rates (CTR). 2️⃣ Site authority is key 🌐 It wasn’t confirmed that Google used site-wide authority metrics. The leak shows “siteAuthority” impacts overall site ranking. This doesn’t necessarily change our approach; we will continue to develop holistic content strategies and pursue high-authority backlinks. 3️⃣ Chrome data utilisation 🔍 SEOs were unaware of the extent Google used Chrome data. The leak confirms its influence on rankings, highlighting user experience metrics. We will continue to optimise page load times, ensure mobile-friendliness, and enhance site navigation. Again, no real change in approach here. 4️⃣ Content freshness is crucial 📝 SEOs knew freshness was a factor but not the specifics. Google uses multiple date-related metrics to evaluate content freshness. We already have resource ring-fenced on a monthly basis to keep key pages up to date for clients so it's good to have this validated as a strategy. We will continue this practice, refreshing old posts with new information and updating key ranking pages with re-optimised content. 5️⃣ Detailed link evaluation 🔗 We all knew links were important but lacked detail on evaluation. The leak shows metrics on link diversity and relevance, with low-quality links potentially ignored altogether. We’ll continue to acquire backlinks from reputable websites through our digital PR activity, but we can maybe start running campaigns to specifically target certain domains where we know average domain authority is high i.e. university and charity sites. Obviously continuing to target the big news sites as well. It could also be worth exploring more ways to create ongoing relationships with the most relevant websites in each niche to ensure we're consistently generating links with high relevancy scores. 6️⃣ Brand presence is essential 📣 The direct impact of brand recognition on SEO was unclear. The leak highlights the importance of building a strong, recognisable brand. An omni-channel approach is potentially the key here and reinforces the point that marketing shouldn’t be a single channel strategy. Display and PPC will naturally improve brand visibility over time, so should probably be considered for clients expecting to see significant results through SEO alone. #SEO #GoogleLeak #Marketing #SEOTips

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We need to hold agencies accountable for paying creators on time. The amount of late payments from agencies I have experienced recently is astronomical. Industry standard is net 30. If you’re lucky net 15 and if you’re even luckier you can negotiate an upfront payment/ deposit. Now I have seen a rise of data driven creative agencies with net 45 + net 60 payment terms taking another 30 days to actually pay. This is absolutely unacceptable… I always push back on net 45 and rarely agree to net 60 unless talent genuinely love the brand. We need to have a lot more serious conversation about brands paying agencies on time + agencies paying creators on time. Obviously it’s not always on the agency but often times it is…

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Stop selling SEO. Instead, educate clients on how optimising their site, creating content and building links will help them get more clients than any other channel, with tiny customer acquisition costs in comparison. Demonstrate the outrageous ROI at month 12 if they stick with it and all the traffic goals are met. Then let them decide if they want to commit. Business owners want low customer acquisition costs, longterm, not "SEO".

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3 underrated skills of working in SEO Showing the potential → to win clients or to get resources Setting expectations → to keep clients happy or manage internal politics Ruthless prioritisation → to actually get those damn results Three of the biggest, yet often hardest parts of SEO. Showing potential, telling that story. → For prospective clients, show them how big their market is (total potential searches * conversions * AOV) → For internal resources, show them the total potential impact of the project To keep people happy (clients or internal). Set those expectations. → Highlight competitors, what they have vs you (missing content, missing links, etc) → Showcase other's growth trajectory tied with inputs To get results. Prioritise effectively. → Fixing those five 404 pages on a site with 200,000 pages likely isn't going to make an impact → Getting thousands of additional pages indexed, probably is Getting sign-off, winning clients, getting results. You nail those three and you'll print money with SEO.

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SEO Silo Structure: Why It Makes No Sense (And What to Do Instead) Everyone knows that structuring your website in a logical way is as important for users as it is for SEO, and “siloing” is one way many SEOs recommend doing this. But I think that “siloing” is a terrible idea and isn’t something you should do. In this post, I’ll explain why that is and what you should do instead. But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page… What is silo structure in SEO? Silo structure in SEO is a type of website architecture where you group, isolate, and interlink content about a specific topic. This creates clean, distinct sections of related content on your website. Here’s roughly what SEO silos look like in practice:

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Here we go again - Google is rolling out yet another core update. Our advice is not to panic! There will be a lot of flux in the coming days so try not to stare at your rankings all day and worry. #seotips #seonews #seoagency #smeseo https://lnkd.in/etBkTxzG

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CRO weekly #199 - Why you should run AA tests Welcome to a fresh CRO weekly newsletter with an overview of interesting reads and jobs you might have missed. ☚ Smart tooltips: web form optimisation without development from Exatom ☚ What are AA tests and why you should run heaps of them! from Simon Jackson ☚ List of the best Linkedin post from Ron Kohavi ☚ Career interview with Oriol Vila Masip at Experimentation Jobs ☚ 5 reasons why you can’t miss: The Convert x Women in Experimentation Summit from Daphne Tideman ☚ Why doesn’t senior management care about CRO? from Fenil Mangukiya 4 featured jobs: ➽ Growth Analyst at Paired (United Kingdom) ➽ Data Scientist, Product at Figma (Multiple locations, USA) ➽ CRO Lead at New Balance (Amsterdam, Netherlands) ➽ Staff Data Scientist - Experimentation at Instacart (USA) Find 100+ jobs at Experimentation Jobs The next CRO weekly is send out Thursday morning, signup if you don't want to miss the next one. Read the full newsletter in the comments.

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☠ SEO Horror Story #4 ☠ Nothing like waking up to find 1,000+ pages of the dev site being released into Google's index. Nick Swan and SEOTesting could this be one of your next features, please? Mechanism to monitor when a dev site that used to have noindex, nofollow on all pages got changed into index, follow? I guess you can discover the issue even now through SEOTesting through the automated emails you guys send when a page that wasn't getting impressions starts doing so, but I guess the damage is done if we get to that point. #endthenightmareforusplease #seo #searchengineoptimization #searchengineoptimisation

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Want a better ROAS on Performance Max? 🔥 We found one counter-intuitive optimisation after $1M+ in adspend... Try removing search themes completely. We saw shopping spend go up 50% in accounts when we implemented this... Alongside significant improvements in ROI. Here’s why this works: Adding in search themes prompts pMax to spend more on the search network. This means that pMax will then begin to cannibalise your existing cold search campaigns. Google says this themselves: "On Search inventory specifically, search themes in Performance Max campaigns will have the same prioritisation as your phrase match and broad match keywords in Search campaigns." Here's why this is bad: We want the majority of our adspend to be on the shopping network… With brand name fully excluded from the campaign. Meaning we’re spending on the highest quality, cold traffic. For 9/10 brands, shopping ads will produce the highest ROI. We want to leave the search adspend for the search campaigns instead. This is because in regular search campaigns we have more control over: ➡️ Ad copy ➡️ Negative keywords ➡️ Cost per clicks So, how do you check if you’re overspending on search? Here's your action plan: 1. Run Mike Rhode’s Performance Max script. 2. If more than 30% of your spend is on search, remove search themes. 3. If shopping spend doesn’t increase after 1-2 weeks, create a new pMax campaign w/o search themes. 4. Add in more exact match keywords to your cold search campaign. Over time, this should produce better ROAS in pMax as more of your adspend goes to the shopping network. Agree? Disagree? Always up for discussion 👇.

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Listen to why you should ignore the advice and bring link building in house! Check out the link to the full episode in the comments 👇

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Applying widely-given SEO advice verbatim on your website only works for so long. Every website has a unique set of conditions (technical & qualitative) that need to be approached in a tailored and bespoke way. There my be good reasons to follow best-practices & reasons not to.

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SVG4SEO - Here's the result of a simple little SEO experiment that confirmed the suitability and value of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) for the purposes of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). https://lnkd.in/egWMR2XF

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