Every few months, something in the search industry gets labelled as the thing that will change everything. AI Mode has that energy right now, and to be honest, the anxiety isn’t entirely unreasonable. Google is openly positioning it as a potential wholesale replacement for the search experience most of us have used for twenty-five years.
Most SEO advice is written with smartphones in mind. That’s understandable — mobile accounts for the majority of global search volume, most industry benchmark data skews towards consumer behaviour, and the major platforms optimise their tooling and guidance accordingly. For B2B businesses, this creates a quiet but persistent problem. You’re applying a framework built around
Something strange has been happening in search over the past year or so, and it is showing up in client conversations more often than almost anything else. Rankings look healthy. Positions haven’t slipped. The site hasn’t been penalised. And yet traffic is down. Sometimes significantly. It’s a reasonable thing to find confusing. We’ve spent years
The firm is large and well known. The UK had grown organically for years on the same Drupal platform. The home page scored 26 out of 100 on PageSpeed. Most of the content was indexed but unread. The agency relationship had drifted into reporting cycles that flattered the numbers without telling anyone whether the site
Three agencies in the building. Three pitch slots of forty five minutes each, with fifteen minutes of questions. Eight hours from arrival to handshakes. By the end of the day, the partners will have decided who’s getting the contract. The most common way to waste this day is to let the agencies pitch their RFP
The agency wants to start the rebuild. The marketing lead wants to start the rebuild. The partners want to start the rebuild. Six months later, the project is over budget, three months late and not doing what the partners thought it would do. This is what happens when “we need a new website” is treated
The build slips. The agency comes back to renegotiate scope. The marketing lead looks at the contract and finds a four page statement of work that says “deliver a website.” This is a problem. The fix is to make sure it doesn’t happen. The agency wrote thirty pages. Use them. In the RFP response, the
Five years of digital audits inside law firms. Different sizes. Different practice areas. Different agencies. Different CMS platforms. The same five issues come up in nearly every audit. If you’re a marketing lead at a mid size firm and you don’t have the budget for a full audit right now, here’s the version you can
Every time I run a CMS evaluation for a law firm, the same thing happens. The IT team has a preference. The agency has a preference. The marketing team has a preference. The partners don’t have a preference because they don’t know what a CMS is, but they’ve been told the new one will be
Most marketing leads I meet treat the RFP as a final step. Discovery is done. Now we send it out and pick an agency. I’d argue the opposite. The RFP is the centrepiece of the discovery. It’s the document that proves you know what you want. Everything that came before it (the audit, the personas,