Writing, tools, and
templates worth keeping.

We publish long-form essays on the technical and strategic parts of SEO that we think are under-covered. We don't gate the useful stuff behind email walls. If it helps you, take it.

/ 01 This month
// answer-engine-optimization.essay
Long read April 2026 · 24 min read

Answer-engine optimization is just SEO with the marketing stripped out.

Everyone is rewriting their SEO strategy for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. Most of that rewriting is theatre. The underlying mechanics — crawlability, semantic clarity, entity consolidation, authoritative citations — haven't changed. What's changed is how little tolerance these systems have for marketing fluff. A case for writing less, meaning more, and structuring everything as if a machine was going to quote you. Because one is.

Read the essay →
/ 02 Writing

Recent essays.

Technical April 2026 · 12 min

The thin-content problem nobody's solving in e-commerce.

Why merchandising-driven category architecture keeps killing organic performance, and what a replacement pattern actually looks like when you've got ten thousand SKUs.

Read →
Strategy March 2026 · 9 min

How to read a GA4 report without losing six hours of your life.

A checklist-driven framework for getting signal out of GA4's event model, plus the five custom reports we rebuild for every new client.

Read →
Content March 2026 · 15 min

Topic clusters are a crutch. Here's what works instead.

A post-mortem on five years of hub-and-spoke content strategies, and the relational model we've been shipping for the last 18 months.

Read →
Technical Feb 2026 · 18 min

A complete playbook for surviving a CMS migration.

Everything we do on a migration project — URL mapping, redirect QA, pre-launch crawling, staged rollout, post-launch monitoring — written up as a runbook you can actually use.

Read →
Local Feb 2026 · 11 min

Google Business Profile is 60% of local SEO now. Here's how to treat it that way.

A monthly GBP workflow for multi-location brands — the posts, the review strategy, the category audits, and the things we've seen Google change quietly in 2026.

Read →
ai the overviews era
AI & search Jan 2026 · 20 min

What we learned auditing 200 pages that got cited in AI Overviews.

Patterns in structure, citation style, and on-page markup across pages that Google's AI systems are pulling from — plus the patterns on the pages they're quietly ignoring.

Read →
/ 03 Free downloads

Templates and tools
we actually use.

Checklist · PDF

The 92-point SEO audit checklist

The exact checklist we run against every new client in the first two weeks — technical, on-page, content, links, local, and analytics — annotated with why each item matters.

Download the PDF →
Guide · 48 pages

Keyword research, the way senior strategists actually do it

A walkthrough of our research process — SERP-intent clustering, opportunity scoring, and the spreadsheet we use to turn 3,000 raw keywords into 60 commissioned briefs.

Download the guide →
Template · Notion / Sheets

Technical audit template

A Notion database and Google Sheets template for tracking a full technical audit — crawl findings, prioritization, owner assignment, and fix QA, all in one pane.

Copy the template →