SEO & GEO Guides
Straight, evidence-led answers on SEO, AI search, audits and tools — written by a senior SEO consultant and updated in place. Every guide links to the exact service that does the job for you.
Choosing & Vetting SEO
How to Vet an SEO Provider
Twelve practical questions to ask any SEO provider before you hire — what a strong answer sounds like, and how to evaluate the work before you commit.
Read guide →Productized SEO vs. Agency Retainer vs. Freelancer
Agencies average $3,209/month. Freelancers $1,348. Per-service pricing changes the maths entirely. Which model fits which situation, with survey data.
Read guide →How Much Does SEO Cost? Real Prices, Per Deliverable
What SEO really costs in 2026. Retainers average $2,917/mo, but priced-per-deliverable work is comparable — real prices for audits, keyword research and more.
Read guide →SEO for Small Business
SEO for a small business on a tight budget. What to prioritise, what to do yourself, and which fixed-price deliverables return the most per dollar.
Read guide →Cheap SEO vs. Affordable SEO
Cheap SEO hides low quality or real risk. Affordable SEO is genuine value at a sensible price. How to tell them apart before you buy — and what to check.
Read guide →SEO Packages vs Per-Service
SEO packages save money when the work is genuinely related — and pad the bill when it isn't. How to read a package, price the parts, and decide.
Read guide →Audits & Reports
Free SEO Audit Tools
Which free SEO audit tools are genuinely free, what each one catches, and the three categories of problem no free tool will find on your site.
Read guide →How to Read an SEO Audit (And Judge Its Quality)
What belongs in a real SEO audit, how to read the findings, and six signs that separate a real diagnosis from an automated scan.
Read guide →SEO Report Examples
What belongs in an SEO report, a section-by-section example, and how to tell whether the one you get each month tracks work or just metrics.
Read guide →SEO Tools
What a Year of SEO Tools Costs vs. What the Output Costs
Ahrefs Lite is $1,548 a year. Semrush is $1,679. A professional stack runs $1,800–3,600. Here's what that buys, and when buying the output costs less.
Read guide →Best SEO Tools for Small Business
Which SEO tools a small business actually needs, in what order, and the honest test for whether a $129/month subscription is earning its place.
Read guide →Best Free SEO Tools
Which SEO tools are genuinely free forever, which are trials in disguise, and exactly where each free tier stops. Plus seven free tools you can use here.
Read guide →AI SEO Tools and Platforms Compared
AI SEO tools split into four categories doing completely different jobs. Which one you need depends on whether you want visibility, content, or analysis.
Read guide →Rank Trackers and Rank Checkers Compared
Rank checkers, rank trackers and Search Console measure different things. Which you need, what free options cover, and why position is a weak KPI.
Read guide →Keyword Research Tools vs. Done-For-You Research
Free keyword tools give you a list. Research gives you a decision. What each actually produces, and the arithmetic on doing it yourself.
Read guide →GEO & AI Search
GEO vs. SEO vs. AEO
SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you into answer boxes. GEO gets you cited by AI. Three overlapping practices, one shared foundation, explained plainly.
Read guide →What Is Generative Engine Optimization? A Working Definition
GEO is optimising to be cited inside AI-generated answers. What it involves, what actually moves citation rate, and what's still unproven.
Read guide →GEO Services and Agencies
GEO agencies bill $900+/month on top of an SEO retainer. What the work actually is, what's a dashboard in disguise, and the questions to ask first.
Read guide →Answer Engine Optimization
AEO targets featured snippets, People Also Ask and voice answers. What still exists after Google retired FAQ rich results, and what to optimise now.
Read guide →Is Your Brand Invisible to ChatGPT? How to Check
Ranking on Google predicts almost nothing about AI visibility — only 12% of AI-cited URLs rank in the top 10. How to check where you actually stand.
Read guide →How to Rank Higher in ChatGPT
There's no ranking in ChatGPT — only citation. What the data shows actually drives it, including why your own site is rarely the deciding factor.
Read guide →How to Get Cited in Google AI Overviews
AI Overview citations from top-10 pages fell from 76% to around 38% in a year. What still predicts inclusion, and how AI Mode differs from Overviews.
Read guide →Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot
ChatGPT and Perplexity share only about 11% of cited domains. What each engine actually draws on, and why one AI visibility score hides everything useful.
Read guide →AI SEO Tools vs. AI SEO Services
AI visibility platforms measure. Services change the number. What each costs, what each delivers, and how to tell which problem you have.
Read guide →AI-Ready Content
AI engines retrieve passages, not pages. The structural changes that make sections extractable — and why they improve ordinary search performance too.
Read guide →Technical SEO
llms.txt Explained
llms.txt is a markdown file that maps your site for AI. Adoption is 10%, and major crawlers rarely fetch it. Here's what the 2026 data shows.
Read guide →Schema Markup
Google retired FAQ rich results in May 2026 and HowTo in 2023. Here are the schema types that still produce visible results, and which to stop adding.
Read guide →Internal Linking for SEO
How internal linking distributes authority, what anchor text to use, how to find orphan pages, and how to fix the cannibalisation it often exposes.
Read guide →Hreflang Tags
Hreflang tells Google which language and region version of a page to show. The three implementation methods, the five errors that break it, and how to check.
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