Damian Jennings 
Reviews are the most powerful trust signal a local business has. More than your website, more than your social media, more than any ad you’ll ever run. When someone is deciding whether to spend money with you, they look at what other people say about you. And right now, most businesses leave this almost entirely … Read more
We already covered why GEO is mostly noise. Now meet its cousin: AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation. Same energy, different acronym, equally overblown. AEO is the idea that search is shifting from keyword queries to conversational questions, and that you need a new optimisation discipline to capture the “answer engines” — voice assistants, featured snippets, … Read more
Every conversation about content marketing for small businesses eventually arrives at the same question: where do I actually start? Blog? Podcast? Social media? YouTube? The answer you get usually depends on who you’re asking and what they’re trying to sell you. Here’s an honest take, having watched a lot of small businesses try — and … Read more
Meta made $134 billion in advertising revenue in 2023. The vast majority of it came not from sophisticated brands with dedicated media agencies, but from small and medium businesses who largely have no idea whether their ads are working. That’s not an accident. It’s the product. This isn’t a “social media bad” screed. Meta ads, … Read more
Most businesses put off email marketing for way too long. They tell themselves they’ll start once they have more subscribers, a better offer, or more time to do it properly. Meanwhile, they’re not collecting emails, not building a list, and handing the advantage to competitors who just got on with it. The truth is that … Read more
Google My Business is Google’s free tool that lets you control how your business appears in Google Search and Google Maps. You’ve seen it a thousand times — the box on the right side of a search result showing a business’s address, phone number, opening hours, photos, and reviews. That’s it. That’s what Google My … Read more
GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the latest thing the SEO industry has invented to make you feel like everything you knew is obsolete and you need to hire someone new. It is, with a few minor caveats, largely nonsense. Here’s the pitch: AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews are changing … Read more
Your email list is the only marketing channel you actually own. Social media platforms can change their algorithm, restrict your reach, or disappear entirely. Google can update its rankings overnight. But the people who’ve given you their email address and said “yes, I want to hear from you” — that relationship is yours. Email marketing … Read more
Content marketing is the practice of creating genuinely useful, interesting things — articles, videos, guides, tools — that attract the people you want as customers, build trust with them over time, and eventually convert that trust into business. It’s a long game. It’s not for businesses that need customers next week. But for businesses thinking … Read more
Paid advertising is the closest thing digital marketing has to a tap you can turn on and off. Need more enquiries this month? Run ads. Quiet period sorted. The trade-off is that the moment you stop paying, the traffic stops. But used correctly, paid ads are one of the most powerful tools in the kit. … Read more
