I wanted to talk about my observations on the evolution of on-page SEO and content marketing. In the late 90’s and early 00’s of the internet, great content was easy to find as there wasn’t many talented SEO’s, and these creators of it were rewarded. As with all things, the market was eventually flooded by every L plate-wearing ChatGPT writers. On-page content marketing is always going to be a primary method of driving the best kind of traffic – organic.
Because of those bad writers, high quality content is becoming more difficult to find. It’s still out there, but it has a harder time gaining traction in a market dominated by dubious SEO practices. Basically, the internet sucks at discernment, but how about a solution?
Hire a Content Manager Digital Project Manager for UK and International SEO
In 2000, I was working full time for the local newspaper Weston Admag and Mercury
Online since the late 1990’s, I was active in forums and online chat rooms, playing 12″ records live direct from my front room. In 2000, I was working full time for the local newspaper Weston Admag and Mercury, learning sales techniques in the early era of B2B internet advertising on their website.
In 2004, I realised that a stable career online was futureproof
I predicted the decline of printed media as a main news outlet. I created an opportunity, bought an entire record collection of pristine records and quit my job to sell them on eBay.
Over 4 years to 2008, I single handedly listed, sold and despatched 15,000 12” records, many going overseas to vinyl collectors. My online learning knowledge had spiked to unprecedented levels after years of heavy daily use. Then, working alone began to feel isolating, so I applied for a digital marketing job locally in Bristol.
In 2008, somehow, I found myself armpit deep into a website and domain migration
Working in Bristol for Funky Pigeon cards, I handled this new experience and welcomed the rapid learning curve. Succeeding at this, I continued to learn SEO in UK marketing forums and learned from old, wise SEO’s that I’d never met. I created my first YouTube brand channel and became adept at post production upload featured in the YouTube editor.
In the following 11 months I was solely responsible ranking their eCommerce store to #1 in Google beating their competitor Moonpig Cards. At the time I was moonlighting with SEO training online, I formed SEO Lady Ltd.
2009 – After a WH Smith company takeover, I joined another local eCommerce company and outranked major UK department stores and Amazon for various ‘futon’ related keywords – with a perfectly optimised YouTube video embedded on their homepage.
At the same time, I was still moonlighting as an SEO coach, and was flown to Ireland by a Digital Agency to train their team. During an intensive, one-day training schedule I coached a classroom of ten website developers how the main fundamentals of SEO should be applied to their website design process.
This Digital Agency which is still thriving today.
During the 3 years I spent with that company, I grew their annual turnover from 2M to 5M. In the 3rd year, I asked for my first pay rise and they offered me £1,000. It was time to work from home as an SEO freelancer and grow my self employed business. Every project I accepted, I would make a positive impact. I’ve never experienced a domain that didn’t increase their rankings in my career.
Isn’t it curious how a love for music leads to becoming a capable, confident and successful SEO?
Without knowing it, I was an accidental SEO in 2001.
Over on eBay, I was optimising for entities, subtopics, and category relevance. Every listing was unique. Every photo downloaded from my digital camera was original, each file was renamed with unique identifying keywords before I even knew the jargon keyword ‘keywords’.
In the listing description I internally linked related records, referenced the record label’s history, and embedded YouTube code. I’d externally link to Wikipedia and Discogs. Not because some algorithm told me to, but because it’s common sense.
2010 to self employment
Future Insights was a rival to Brighton SEO in the mid-2000’s, owned by the IBM and Salesforce umbrella, I was enticed into an International SEO role starting with a week’s office training in Boston, MA. The events I promoted meant I was in-person for the New York and London based Digital Marketing conferences.
The ‘Ruby PPC’ event which is now in the Google Ads hall of fame
My voice was unheard, even when I discovered the office secretary had set up Google Ads for the single keyword ‘Ruby’ to sell ‘Ruby On The Rails’ event tickets. My protests and command chain escalation led to my sideways demotion away from SEO and PPC to a Linkedin commenter and group-poster under my own account. This was the push I needed to become a full time freelancer.
2010 – Building my brand and SEO’ing my own domain
Oh the joy of no alarms, a Digital Project Manager happily working beyond the 9-5, offering a high impact service with unrealistic Google ranking deadlines that I pulled out of my armpit. I absolutely loved these high pressure roles. I was hired as a white label SEO for dozens of Digital Agencies in my career, all of which failed to lead to a Digital Agency bum-on-seat role.
Local Digital Agency: Job hunting in 2025
I’m looking for a Digital Agency that is actively looking for new talent. Whilst I don’t drive, I can offer hybrid availability to local Somerset agencies via the rail network if a fully remote position isn’t on the cards. Working alone as a sole trader faded over time when I missed the humans, the managers to learn from, my colleagues in the trenches to laugh and bond with, the works ‘Christmas do’.
Back in 2019 I was applying to Digital Agencies. I craved the agency environment – then the lockdown bought a flood of new direct clients and website owners. So, why am I job hunting in 2025? In the last 24 months, small business budgets have reduced. Some of my pandemic clients either retired, sold their business, or experienced cash flow issues and AI entered our lives. Small businesses could now use ChatGPT instead of hiring a human.
I’m attending Brighton SEO in April 2025 as a Brand Engagement Strategist for Inlinks.com. As a small-time entrepreneur living alone, additionally I run a second home business which ties me to the property most of the week as an Airbnb and Booking.com live in host.
The ability to communicate with my team and Manager would be a big draw to any role. Whilst I’m comfortable working autonomously for a short while, I always prefer the daily interactive brand culture as a whole.
Video and Web Content Strategist: My Entity-Driven Approach
To combat the problems of keyword stuffing and link farming, the trend is to increase a mix of both short form content on YouTube and web. With a million screenshots or pictures thrown in, because the longer you’re on a page, the higher it ranks. We call these skyscrapers. Because they’re tall, obviously. (Final count of this post is 3724 words.)
This is great news for you, a respectable business owner/digital agency.
Step 1: Start with a Large Language Model (LLM)
What kind of system you have matters not at all, but your writing and organisation will be greatly improved if you can access everything you need all at once. LLMs are a specific type of AI designed for understanding and generating human language. While “AI” covers a broad range of technologies, LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude focus on natural language tasks. It’s important to distinguish between them, especially in SEO discussions.
Step 2: Create a copywriting outline
When you’re crafting deliberate content, you want to look at it from the reader’s perspective. The longer you spend asking yourself what your reader wants, the more it’s going to feel like you reached into their head, given them brain fingers like Deadpool & Wolverine. You want them to feel like you know them like mates, or whether they are technical, niche, or a fish out of water. The goal is to define your ideal reader, thinking laterally helps to understand more about these target individuals, which will shape how you answer the usual questions.
For example, if you’re still reading this, it’s likely because you want to write better content, and you want it to rank better in search. You’re frustrated by the sheer amount of bullshit that gets shared on the internet these days, especially when you know that you have actual solutions to actual problems. And if you could just get your stuff in front of people, you know that you could help them. You have a genuine desire to serve your customers or clients, and also, you’d like to be able to pay the bills while doing it.
One old school way of creating a blog outline uses the 80/20 Copywriting guide
You should go into this worksheet with a general concept about what you want to write, but it doesn’t have to be super specific yet. Pay special attention to the box on the bottom right, common words and phrases. Because that’s what you’ll be doing next.
Step 3: Ask questions
Currently, search algorithms are leaning pretty heavily to questions, because people are using voice interface. Think of how you’d talk to Alexa or Siri. You’re asking a specific question. “How do I do this thing?” “What’s the name of the guy on Brooklyn Nine Nine who says cool a lot?” “I need a recipe for a no bake dessert.” “What’s the best software to solve my specific problem?” You know, that sort of thing.
What you want to do is reverse engineer your content into these kinds of questions. Just pretend you’re Alex Trebek. If the answer is your content, what’s the question you’d ask to get there?
Next, you want to go plug it all into Google and see what comes up. There are a number of tools that you can use for this. Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, Serpstat, Google Correlate (those last three are free for basic use). But if you’re not already using one of them, you don’t have to panic and start now. Google is more than enough to get you started.
SEO is based on keywords, which is why keyword stuffing is still a thing. But if you can put those keywords into the form of a question, you’ll have a little more leeway with the answers. So, if you ask, “What is the scientific name of a rose?” that exact phrase doesn’t have to be your post title, or even a part of your content at all. Just the keywords, plus the answer. In this case, that’s “scientific name,” “rose,” and “rosa.” If your content has all three of those things, then you’re well on your way to a good SEO ranking.
Before you move on, take a look at the competition. Click on every link on the first page (second and third pages too, if you’re really being diligent) and see what’s there. You’ll use this to form the basis of your outline, while also filing away quality outbound links to be used later. More on this in a minute.
Step 4: Create a content outline and review the sections and writing flow
So, now that you know what questions you’re asking, and what the competition is doing, you should be able to start turning this information into your own very long content. The value of an outline can not be overstated. Taking ten minutes now will save you a ton of time later, and the more details you have, the easier it’ll be to do the actual writing. Use a bulleted list (or numbering if your topic is technical or especially complex) and come up with basic headings and subheadings.
This allows you to do a number of things. First, you’ll know what additional research you need to gather. The more quality links your content has, the higher it will rank.
Next, you’ll be able to design the flow of your content, especially if your goal is to get the reader to take action on something. Maybe you want them to subscribe to your list. Good content will guide them from the top of the page all the way down to your optin, where they will immediately subscribe because of all the amazing information you just gave them. Most businesses prefer the lead gen model with the use of Contact Form.
Finally, a good outline will help you figure out roughly how long your content is going to be. If you have ten headings and you average 200 words a section, that’s 2,000 words. Remember to mix up your content into short and medium form to encourage dwell time.
Step 5: Research outbound links, affiliate links
I mentioned that using quality links will improve your ranking. Here’s how that works. It used to be that any backlinks from any site increased your traffic, and volume was a factor. The more links, the better. This led to a lot of link farming and other dubious SEO strategies, and it brought down the overall quality of searchable content. To combat this problem, search engines started prioritizing higher quality links. The better the site overall, the better the ranking from that site’s links, both inbound and outbound.
What that means, then, is that links in your content that lead to other high quality content makes you look good by virtue of association. If your outbound links are high quality, then your content probably is too, at least as far as the algorithm is concerned.
If you’re using affiliate links (and there’s no reason why you can’t–just make sure you disclose them), this is the time to gather them and any product screenshots. Longform content is often a great place to use affiliate marketing, because the length demonstrates to the reader that some actual effort went into selecting the products. It’s not just a generic listicle or gift guide, it’s a thoughtfully curated addition to your content. Your readers CAN tell the difference.
Step 6: Write your article, apply ethical SEO practices, and publish
Now you’re finally ready to write. The good news is, you aren’t starting with a blank page, so you can’t successfully claim writer’s block. You’re just going to plug in a few paragraphs per section to get things going. Remember, this is a rough draft, and you have lots of time to polish this thing up.
Unless you’re writing for an academic crowd, you’re aiming for an 8th grade reading level. The fact is that we love to share longform content because it makes us look smart. But we don’t actually read it. It’s just more noise (and a lot of it) in an already noisy world. So, the easier it is to read, the more likely it is to actually be…read. That’s a painful truth when you’re pouring hours of your time into something, but it’s reality.
On the other hand, that takes some pressure off of you. You don’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winner here. Just easy to read.
Step 7: Write subheadings, introduction, and conclusion/call to action at the top
I never write my introduction first. I might scratch out a few sentences to get the ball rolling, but it’s nearly always crap, and I nearly always change it. It’s much easier to write a compelling introduction and conclusion once you know the actual contents of your piece.
The same goes for subheadings really–you can write a much snappier section title if you know what’s in there. Your headings matter. Keywords in header tags rank slightly higher than text, so if you can naturally incorporate your keywords here, you should. But ONLY if it’s natural.
Step 8: Write SEO semantically keyword rich chatty headline to appeal to NLP
Now for the fun stuff. It’s time to come up with a title that’s appealing to Natural Language Programming algorithms . Let’s be crystal clear on this: your title is everything. You want to strike a balance between creative and SEO friendly, which takes some time. Start with keywords and include as many of them as you naturally can. Make a list of AT LEAST ten possible titles.
If there’s no obvious winner when you come back, pick the one that you yourself would be most likely to click on. Your writing is a direct conduit from you to your customers. It’s a safe bet that if they are buying something from you, it’s because they like you. Which means that if YOU like a title, there’s a reasonable chance that your readers will like it too. Don’t overthink it. Just consider if you yourself would click, and pick your favorite.
Step 9: Proofread a gazillion times
There are seven proofread sweeps in all, and if you learn to apply them, it will automatically make you a better writer. Don’t read my blogs as an example, I’ve got 15 years of content to repurpose and many have old oopsies in them.
But, if that freaks you out, then print out a physical copy of what you’ve written and read it aloud several times. That will allow you to trim out most of the bad writing and inconsistencies, because the more conversational your writing, the easier it is to read.
Proofreading should make you feel good about what you’ve written. The more you read it, the more you should like it. Most writers spend a lot of time rereading their work and telling themselves how clever and amazing they are, and it’s an important part of the process. Don’t sell yourself short, you’re writing good stuff here.
Step 10: Add images with ALT tags
Once your text is all nailed down, go back and add images. The more you have, the better you’ll rank. That’s why recipes have step by step photos and completely inane stories to go with them. All that fluff makes the recipe itself rank higher in search. It adds theoretical value to the content and increases SEO.
Tutorials of any kind should be well documented, with photos for each part of the process. If it’s something that’s not as easily documented, then use photos that are in some way related to the text. Obviously, memes, gifs, and cat pictures work too, or you wouldn’t still be here.
Because I am writing this for my blog, you’re missing out on the experience of me speaking to you in person. Break up photos, creatives or video embeds with content in between.
Also make sure you use image ALT tags, and add descriptions if you’re feeling fruity. Descriptions are great for clever asides, but if you go that route, make sure your tags are complete for accessibility purposes.
Step 11: Outbound links – Wikipedia and Trusted Related Source
Next you want to add your links. There’s two types of outbound links. Nofollow and dofollow. Don’t overcomplicate this. Dofollow links to sites you know, like, and trust (this is just a normal standard link). Nofollow the ones you don’t.
Remember, hyperlinks should say what they are with descriptive keyword anchor text, not here or ‘read more’.
Step 12: Check your formatting on mobile
Before you publish, make sure you take a look at your content on mobile. Your content management system probably has a way to do this, but if nothing else, read it through on your own phone. You want easy navigation and lots of white space. Mobile users scroll through the text faster, so make sure that it’s easy to do.
Check that pictures resize automatically, that headers and subheaders don’t break off in unfortunate places, and that everything is visually appealing. In 2015, approximately 70% of users browsed Facebook via a mobile device. In 2018, that number was 95%.
As of 2023 and 2024, the overwhelming majority of Facebook users access the platform via mobile devices. The exact percentage has fluctuated slightly over the years, but it’s consistently been well above 90%. The trend towards mobile-first usage has been consistent for several years, and it’s unlikely that there will been a significant shift away from mobile devices for Facebook access in 2025.
While I don’t have an exact figure for 2024 readily available, you can find more recent data from reputable sources. These websites may provide further statistics on Facebook usage, including device breakdown.
Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109866/number-social-media-users-worldwide-select-platforms/
DataReportal: https://www.statista.com/topics/751/facebook/
Backlinko: https://datareportal.com/essential-facebook-stats
Step 13: Publish
Okay. It’s pretty, polished, and as close to perfect as you can get it. Plug it in your CMS, check formatting one last time, add your keywords to Yoast if you use it, and you are ready to go.
Some say the best day of the week to publish most forms of content is Tuesday. There’s an huge number of factors that go into that calculation though, so really, do what you want. SEO is a long game. You’re looking to score traffic over time, not create viral content (although if you do, that’s certainly a bonus). Virality is hard to predict though, and carefully SEO coded content will nearly always do well in the long run.
Step 14: Social media/email scheduling and other promotion
With content marketing, actually writing the thing is only half the battle, and that’s probably being generous. You have to get eyes on your stuff. Obviously, the first step is to promote it on all of your own social media channels.
If you have an email newsletter, promote it there. With these folks, you can go a step farther and ask them to share it for you, because they already like you. Give them the opportunity to share your message, and you’ll create a fan base that feels like they’re a part of what you’re creating.
Once you’ve done that, head over to your social scheduler and plug it in to be promoted later in the week, later in the month, and then every three to six months, depending on how much content you already have. The more content you create, the easier this becomes, and you’ll get new traffic every time you share, because there will ALWAYS be people who missed it the first time around.
Now, about that scheduler…. You have a LOT of options here, and they run the gamut from free to definitely not free. Hootsuite is a great way to get started, and isn’t so complicated that you’ll be overwhelmed. If you want more features to play with, then Coschedule and Meet Edgar are probably my favorites.
Finally, find yourself some content ambassadors. These are people in your niche or in an adjacent niche who will share your content for you (this is how you get your backlinks, and you’ll have to work for them). Reach out to your network. Ask friends on social media. Mention an influencer by name in your content, and then @ them on social. Guest posts, Slack channels, message boards, relevant subreddits. There’s a ton of ways to get links to your content.
And remember–this is a long game. You don’t have to do it all at once. You can spread this out over several weeks, even months. Mention it organically in conversation. Reach out via email. Make it a part of your regular routine to ask people to share your content–”hey I wrote a thing your people might like, would you please share it?” If you’re not belligerent about it, you may have a good chance.
Step 15: Internal Linking to Cornerstone Content
Once you have created a library of content (around 30 pieces), you can and should take every opportunity to link to it. The goal here is to keep your visitor on your site for as long as possible. If you can get them to click around to your other content, and read everything you’ve ever written, your bounce rate will drop, and you’ll rank higher in search.
Using cornerstone content, it also helps you build your authority and reputation. There’s a difference between a scattergun approach and a structured plan. You can make money while genuinely being of service. Your free, Google indexable helpful content is what helps you demonstrate that in droves. A library of free content says that your actual product or service is worth my time.
