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Strategy

Articles on deciding what SEO work to do, in what order, and how to judge whether it is working.

All Technical SEO Search AI Search Development Strategy

Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Prioritising SEO work: impact, effort and the dependencies people forget Every audit produces more work than any team can do. Choosing what comes first is the part clients pay for, and where weak engagements show. Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 5 min How to judge an SEO strategy fairly Search traffic moves for many reasons at once. Judging a strategy by a single line on a chart is unfair to the strategy and to the… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 5 min Why a one-off link audit goes stale The links on your pages change without anyone editing them. An audit is a snapshot; the risk lives in what happens after it. Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Link building that Google’s spam policies allow, and the habits they do not Google's spam policies name specific link practices, and they are more concrete than most people expect. Reading them closely shows what the policy prohibits, what it… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 5 min SEO changes that need sign-off before they go live Most SEO changes are safe to make quickly. A few can remove pages from search results in a single release. Those need a named approver and… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 5 min What a client should see in SEO work, and what they shouldn’t Some of the costliest problems in an SEO engagement are about information, not rankings: what the client saw, when they saw it and what they thought… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 5 min In SEO reporting, “unavailable” is better than a guess A report that fills a data gap with a zero or an estimate looks complete and is wrong. The honest version is less tidy and far… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Planning content from evidence: what Google’s helpful content guidance asks A content plan needs a reason for every page, and Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content supplies the questions to test it. This article reads those… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Site structure is a strategy decision: what Google documents about URLs and links Google documents the mechanics of URLs, links and hostnames in some detail, and says openly that several structural choices are the business's to make. This article… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Using Search Console and Analytics together to find where the opportunity is Search Console shows how a site appears in Google; Analytics shows what visitors do once they arrive. This article covers what Google says about combining them,… Read the article →

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What Strategy articles cover

An SEO audit produces more work than any team can do. Strategy is choosing what comes first, what depends on what, and how progress is reported. The articles here cover prioritising SEO work, judging a strategy fairly, what clients should see in SEO reporting, and which changes need sign-off before launch.

The related service is SEO Strategy, which is evidence-led: find where the opportunity actually is, then sequence the work by impact. Articles are written by Dean Cruddace.

Related guides

Sequencing work by impact, effort and dependencies.

Reporting that shows what happened and what it means.

Understand the market

Where the opportunity actually is.

Plan the content

Planning content from evidence rather than assumptions.

About the Strategy category

How should SEO work be prioritised?

By impact, effort and dependencies. The article on prioritising SEO work sets out why the dependencies are the part people forget.

Where does Google say to start when traffic drops?

Google Search Central has a page on debugging drops in Google Search traffic.

What should a client see in SEO reporting?

See what clients should see in SEO reporting, and why unavailable data is not the same as zero.

Editorial standard

What gets published in Strategy, and what doesn’t.

Yes

Original analysis. Experiments with a stated method. Technical breakdowns. Things learned on real projects.

No

Round-ups, recycled advice, and anything published only to have published something.