SEO articles for people who actually work on real pages
Each article ends in something checkable: a pass condition, a decision, or a fix you can apply to a page you already published. Grouped by the part of the job they belong to.
On-page mechanics
The checkable rules: headings, keywords, answer placement, audits. See the tool this cluster supports.
The on-page SEO checklist that is actually checkable
Twenty-one on-page items, each with a pass condition you can verify in under a minute — and the ones that are worth ignoring.
9 min read
How to run a content audit on a page you already published
A page-level SEO content audit that ends in one of five decisions — refresh, rewrite, merge, prune or leave alone — instead of a spreadsheet nobody actions.
7 min read
One H1 per page: what actually breaks when you use two
Two H1s will not get a page penalised — but they do cost you clarity for assistive technology and extraction systems. Here is the honest version of the rule.
7 min read
Heading hierarchy: H2/H3 rules, skipped levels and why they matter
A heading tree is a table of contents you already wrote. These are the rules that keep it readable by people, screen readers and extraction systems.
8 min read
Answer-first writing: structuring sections so they can be quoted
Snippets, AI Overviews and assistants all quote passages, not pages. Answer-first structure is the difference between a section that can be lifted and one that cannot.
7 min read
Keyword density is not a target — it is a warning light
There is no ideal percentage. Density is a diagnostic that tells you a page may be repetitive; the fix is almost never "remove three mentions".
7 min read
Research & briefs
What to decide before a single sentence is written. See the tool this cluster supports.
An SEO content brief template that a writer can actually work from
Nine fields, each one a decision that would otherwise be made badly during drafting. Everything else in a brief is decoration.
7 min read
Using Google Autocomplete for keyword research, without a paid tool
Autocomplete shows real query phrasing, not search volume. Used for what it measures, it is the fastest free source of subtopics and long-tail variants.
6 min read
How to read a SERP before you write a single word
The results page is a published specification of what Google currently believes the query deserves. Reading it takes ten minutes and settles four decisions.
7 min read
The four search intent types, and how to tell them apart on a real SERP
Intent is not a property of the words in a query. It is what the results page shows people accepted, and that is the only place you can read it reliably.
7 min read