Insights
Two kinds of thing live here. Reports are measured from this marketplace’s verified payments and published on a schedule. Writing is what we think, argued by a person. We keep them at separate URLs and label them differently, because a reader deserves to know which one they are reading.
Measured
Latest reports
Figures frozen at publication. Nothing estimated or projected.
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Reports publish once a completed period carries enough real activity to say something true.
Argued
Writing
Opinion and explanation, written by a person.
Why your website is not ranking: a diagnostic checklist
A stepwise diagnostic for a site that will not rank, cheapest check first — and the one cause most articles skip, which is that it is ranking and you are looking in the wrong place.
· 10 min
When renting attention beats owning it
Owning your audience is treated as obviously correct. It is a strategy with a price and a payback period, and for some businesses renting is the better trade.
· 8 min
What a pay-to-rank marketplace cannot do for you
A category full of sites promising visibility is a category where the limits go unstated. Here are ours, written down, because a claim you cannot check is worth nothing.
· 5 min
What makes a backlink high quality, and how to judge one quickly
A six-question test you can run in about a minute on any link opportunity in front of you, with worked judgements that reach different answers.
· 10 min
What pay-to-rank actually means
A pay-to-rank marketplace decides position by money and nothing else. That sounds crude until you compare it to the alternatives — and the details of how it is implemented decide whether it is a market or a trick.
· 7 min
Topic clusters and pillar pages: structuring a blog that ranks
A blog is a list. A cluster is a structure. The difference decides whether forty articles compound into something or sit there individually failing.
· 8 min
Technical SEO: a complete audit framework
A technical audit ordered by consequence rather than by topic — starting with the faults that stop pages existing in search at all, and ending with the ones that barely matter.
· 12 min
Technical SEO for people who are not developers
Most technical SEO problems are a handful of specific failures, and you can find every one of them without writing code.
· 10 min
Should you hire an SEO agency? A decision framework
A structured way to decide whether an SEO agency is the right purchase for your business right now, what each budget band realistically buys, and the terms that decide who wins if it goes wrong.
· 9 min