News & Updates
What Are White Hat and Black Hat SEO? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
White hat and black hat are the terms the industry uses to distinguish honest, sustainable SEO from manipulative, rule-breaking SEO. Understanding the
Read More What Is Duplicate Content? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Duplicate content is a term that causes a surprising amount of confusion and, occasionally, needless panic. It refers to the same or
Read More How Much Does It Cost to Get on the First Page of Google?
Most articles on this question give you a range so wide it’s useless. “Anywhere from £500 to £10,000 a month!” Thanks. So
Read More What Are Nofollow and Dofollow Links? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Nofollow and dofollow are terms you will bump into whenever the subject of backlinks and link building comes up, and they are
Read More What Are Google Penalties and Manual Actions? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Google penalties are the consequence that makes all the warnings elsewhere in this glossary real. Throughout these articles, manipulative shortcuts have been
Read More How to Get Your Business on Google Maps
When someone near you searches for what you sell, Google shows a map with three businesses pinned on it before it shows
Read More What Is Search Volume? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Search volume is one of the foundational numbers in SEO and one of the most useful for making sensible decisions about where
Read More Why Is My Competitor Above Me on Google?
There’s a particular kind of annoyance that comes from searching for what you do, and finding a business you know is worse
Read More What Is Keyword Cannibalisation? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Keyword cannibalisation is a term that sounds alarming and is often explained badly, which leaves business owners either ignoring a genuine issue
Read More Why Doesn’t My Business Show Up When I Google It?
You typed your own business name into Google. Maybe you added your town. And it wasn’t there. Or it was, but four
Read More What Is Page Authority? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Page Authority is a close cousin of Domain Authority, and the two are easily confused. Where Domain Authority estimates the strength of
Read More What Is a Referring Domain? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Referring domain is a term that comes up constantly in backlink reports, and the difference between it and the raw number of
Read More What Enterprise-Grade SEO Actually Means for an SME Budget
“Enterprise-grade” might be the most overused phrase in agency marketing. It sits alongside “bespoke”, “data-driven” and “results-focused” on just about every SEO
Read More VKNG Digital Turns One: 5 SEO Lessons From Year One
On 30 October, VKNG Digital turns one. A year ago, I set up VKNG with one idea. The SEO approach I’d used
Read More What Are HTTPS and SSL? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
HTTPS and SSL are terms you have seen the effects of thousands of times, even if the words themselves mean nothing to
Read More What Is Mobile-First Indexing? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Mobile-first indexing sounds like deep technical territory, but the idea behind it is simple and its practical lesson is one every business
Read More What Is PageRank? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
PageRank is a piece of SEO history that still shapes how search works today, and understanding it helps explain why backlinks matter
Read More What Are Sitelinks? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Sitelinks are one of those search features you have relied on many times without knowing they had a name. They are the
Read More What Are Breadcrumbs? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Breadcrumbs are one of the friendlier terms in this glossary, borrowing their name from the Hansel & Gretel fairy tale in which
Read More What Are Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Pillar pages and topic clusters are a way of organising the content on your website so that it works together as a
Read More What Are Core Web Vitals? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Core Web Vitals is a term that sounds thoroughly technical, and the details behind it genuinely are, but the idea at its
Read More What Is a Landing Page? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Landing page is a term used in two slightly different ways, which is a large part of why it confuses people. Both
Read More What Is a Long-Tail Keyword? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Long-tail keywords are one of the most useful concepts a smaller business can understand, because they point towards a smarter, more achievable
Read More What Is Keyword Difficulty? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Keyword difficulty is a concept that helps answer one of the most practical questions in SEO: is it realistic for my business
Read More What Is Conversion Rate? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
If there is one metric in this glossary that comes closest to measuring what actually matters to your business, conversion rate is
Read More What Is Click-Through Rate (CTR)? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Click-through rate is one of the numbers you are most likely to see in a digital marketing report, and one of the
Read More What Are Impressions? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Impressions are one of the first numbers you will meet in almost any digital marketing report, and one of the most commonly
Read More What Is Bounce Rate? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Bounce rate is one of the most frequently quoted and most frequently misunderstood numbers in the whole of digital marketing. It gets
Read More What Is a Google Business Profile? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
If your business serves local customers, the Google Business Profile is quite possibly the single most valuable free tool available to you
Read More What Is Local SEO? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
For any business that serves a particular area or relies on local customers, local SEO services are arguably the single most important
Read More What Is Anchor Text? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Anchor text is one of those terms that sounds far more complicated than it is. The moment you understand what it refers
Read More What Is Schema Markup? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Schema markup is one of the more intimidating-sounding terms in SEO, and it is often left deliberately vague by agencies because it
Read More What Is a Canonical Tag? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Canonical tags are about as technical as this glossary gets, and they are almost never explained to business owners in a way
Read More What Is a Title Tag? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
The title tag is one of the most important elements on any webpage, and yet most business owners have never knowingly looked
Read More What Is Indexing? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Indexing is the natural partner to crawling, and the two are so often mentioned in the same breath that they tend to
Read More What Is Crawling? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
When people talk about how Google works, one of the first words that comes up is “crawling”. It conjures up an odd
Read More What Is a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
If you have spent any time talking to an SEO agency, you will almost certainly have heard the word “SERP” thrown around.
Read More What Is a Meta Description? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Of all the technical-sounding terms in SEO, “meta description” is one of the most useful for a business owner to understand, because
Read More What Is Domain Authority? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Domain Authority is one of those terms that gets quoted by an SEO Agency at business owners with great confidence, usually accompanied
Read More What Is Search Intent? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Search intent is one of those concepts that sounds like industry jargon but is actually rooted in something very human and very
Read More What Is Organic Search? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Organic search is a term you will encounter constantly in conversations about SEO and digital marketing. It sounds slightly technical, but the
Read More What Is a Backlink? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
If you have spent any time in conversations about SEO, you will have heard the word backlink. It is one of the
Read More What Is a Keyword? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
Keywords are one of the most fundamental concepts in SEO, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. The word itself is simple
Read More What Is a Search Algorithm? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
The word algorithm gets used constantly in conversations about SEO and digital marketing, often in ways that make it sound more mysterious
Read More What Is SEO? A Plain English Guide for Business Owners
If you have ever been told that your business needs SEO without being entirely sure what that means, you are in good
Read More AI Search, AIO and GEO: What It All Means and Why It Shouldn’t Cost You Extra
If you have been paying attention to the conversation around digital marketing over the past couple of years, you will have noticed
Read More How to Get the Most Out of Working With a Digital Marketing Agency
Finding the right agency is only half the job. The businesses that see the best results from agency relationships are not always
Read More Do You Actually Need an Agency, or Is Something Else a Better Fit?
This is not a question many agencies will ask you, because the honest answer is sometimes no. There are situations in which
Read More Contracts, Lock-ins and Small Print: What to Watch Out For
Digital marketing contracts are not the most exciting reading, but understanding what you are signing before you sign it is one of
Read More How to Read a Digital Marketing Report and Tell if It’s Hiding Poor Performance
Most business owners receive a report from their digital marketing agency every month and feel broadly the same way about it: mildly
Read More Red Flags: How to Spot a Bad Agency Before It’s Too Late
Most bad agency relationships do not begin with obvious dishonesty. They begin with a convincing pitch, a plausible-sounding proposal, and a price
Read More The Questions You Should Ask Any Agency Before You Sign Anything
Choosing a digital marketing agency is a significant commercial decision. The right relationship can meaningfully grow your business. The wrong one can
Read More What Should You Actually Be Paying? A Guide to Realistic Digital Marketing Costs
Pricing in digital marketing is one of the most opaque areas of the entire industry. Agencies rarely publish their rates. Quotes vary
Read More What Good PPC Actually Looks Like
Pay-per-click advertising, most commonly through Google Ads, offers something that SEO cannot: immediate visibility. While organic search rankings take time to build,
Read More What Good SEO Actually Looks Like
Search engine optimisation gets talked about constantly, promised regularly, and understood rarely. If you’ve ever been pitched SEO services and come away
Read More Why So Many Small Businesses Get a Bad Deal from Digital Marketing Agencies
If you’ve ever paid an agency for SEO or PPC and come away feeling like you’re not entirely sure what you got
Read More Where Does Google’s Algorithm Stand Today and What Does It Mean for Lancashire Businesses?
Having traced Google’s major updates across more than two decades, it’s worth stepping back and asking what the overall picture looks like,
Read More What Was Google’s Reviews Update and Why Did It Change How Product and Service Reviews Rank?
Over the course of 2021, 2022, and into 2023, Google ran a series of updates specifically targeting review content. Collectively referred to
Read More What Was Google’s Spam Update and Why Did It Take Aim at Manipulative Content?
In October 2022, Google rolled out a broad spam update that targeted websites using manipulative tactics to inflate their search rankings. While
Read More What Was Google’s Helpful Content Update and Why Did It Raise the Bar for Every Website?
In August 2022, Google introduced an update with a name that made its purpose unusually explicit. The Helpful Content update was designed
Read More What Was Google’s Page Experience Update and Why Did Technical Performance Start to Matter More?
In June 2021, after months of advance notice from Google, the Page Experience update began rolling out. Unlike many previous updates which
Read More What Was Google’s BERT Update and Why Did It Matter for How We Write Content?
In October 2019, Google announced one of the most significant advances in how it understood language since Hummingbird. The update was based
Read More What Was Google’s Medic Update and Why Did It Hit So Many Websites Hard?
In August 2018, a broad core algorithm update rolled out that caused some of the most significant ranking shifts seen in years.
Read More What Was Google’s Possum Update and What Did It Mean for Local Search?
In September 2016, a significant but unannounced change rolled through Google’s local search results. It was given the nickname Possum by the
Read More What Was Google’s RankBrain Update and Why Did It Mark a New Era for Search?
In October 2015, Google confirmed something that had been quietly running in its algorithm for several months. A machine learning system called
Read More What Was Google’s Mobilegeddon Update and Why Did It Cause Such a Stir?
The name alone tells you something about the expectations surrounding this update. When Google announced in advance that it was making mobile-friendliness
Read More What Was Google’s Pigeon Update and Why Did It Matter for Local Businesses?
For businesses that rely on customers in a specific area, few Google updates have been as directly relevant as Pigeon. Launched in
Read More What Was Google’s Hummingbird Update and Why Did It Change How Search Works?
In September 2013, Google made one of the most significant changes to its search engine since the company launched. Unlike Panda and
Read More What Was Google’s Penguin Update and Why Did It Target Links?
A year after Panda reshaped how Google thought about content, another major update arrived to tackle a different form of manipulation. Launched
Read More What Was Google’s Panda Update and What Did It Mean for Website Content?
In February 2011, Google launched an update that fundamentally shifted how website content was evaluated. Named Panda after one of the engineers
Read More What Was Google’s Florida Update and Why Did It Change Everything?
If you’ve ever wondered why Google takes such a dim view of websites that try to game the search results, the story
Read More Why I Founded VKNG Digital & What It Means for Lancashire Businesses
I’ve spent the best part of twenty years working in digital marketing. I’ve sat in strategy meetings at some of the biggest
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