Practical thinking on technical SEO, content, and the changing shape of search. From the details that break a crawl to the decisions that build a business.
270 field notes · Page 17 of 23
After 60+ SEO engagements and two contract disasters in 2025, here are the eleven non-negotiable SOW clauses every SEO consultant needs in 2026—including AI-content disclosure,…
Read the field note ↗After running kickoffs for 60+ SEO engagements, here's what actually works in the first 14 days—and what I stopped doing after it repeatedly caused problems in 2025.
Read the field note ↗Sometime around October 2024, I noticed that three of my retainer clients had stopped opening the PDF attachments I sent with monthly reports. Not stopped reading them carefully.…
Read the field note ↗My annual churn rate in the twelve months ending December 2024 was 31.7%. I tracked it obsessively — not because I enjoyed the pain, but because I believed the number was telling me…
Read the field note ↗I audited 11,847 hreflang pairs across a single e-commerce client last March. 3,412 of them were broken. Not slightly off—completely wrong. Missing return tags, URLs that had been…
Read the field note ↗The number was 8,412,847 redirects. That's what we inherited after a platform migration for a large retail client in January 2026—eight years of URL changes, product…
Read the field note ↗I've run three post-acquisition domain consolidations in the past 14 months. Two went well. One was a disaster that took six months to partially undo. All three taught me something…
Read the field note ↗In August 2025, a Series B SaaS company came to me with a specific problem: their brand SERP—the first page of results for their company name—had three Glassdoor pages in positions…
Read the field note ↗In September 2025, I was doing a routine GSC audit for a SaaS client in the project management space when a number stopped me cold: 14.2 words . That was the average query length…
Read the field note ↗I have a client — a mid-size software review site — whose organic traffic dropped 78.2% between January 2025 and February 2026. Not gradually. In two discrete steps: one in April…
Read the field note ↗I have been staring at sitelinks for eleven years. I watched them appear, disappear, collapse from eight links to two, get stripped from branded queries, come back on non-branded…
Read the field note ↗My client makes industrial air filtration systems. Not glamorous. The target query was commercial HEPA air filtration for manufacturing facilities . Monthly search volume: 1,900 in…
Read the field note ↗Get a focused SEO audit or a consultation on your next technical decision. We’ll agree on the scope and fee before any work begins.
