Marketing
SEO and growth, with the numbers attached
Written from running this, not from selling it. I do growth on both sides, organic search and paid, at a company whose customers are traders, and I build the tools when buying them does not work out. Where there is a claim here there is a figure behind it, counted rather than remembered, and the things that did not work stay in.
- app downloads, organic and paid
- 1L+
- companies' reporting layers built
- 4
- link tactics catalogued at TheDoFollow
- 172
- sides of growth run at once
- 2
Written so far
slowly, and only
when I have the data
- 14 min read
robots.txtA robots.txt file asks crawlers not to fetch parts of a site. It does not keep pages out of Google, and on this site I had to delete a line from it to do exactly that. What the file controls, what Google ignores in it, and what I found in 221 real ones. - 10 min read
Domain Authority vs Domain RatingDomain Authority is Moz's score and Domain Rating is Ahrefs'. Both estimate how strong a site's backlinks are, both are relative, and neither comes from Google. What goes into each one, why the same site gets different numbers, and how to use them without being misled. - 14 min read
Blog post examplesThirteen real blog posts, one for each common type, from a Paul Graham essay to a Cloudflare outage report and a Zerodha Varsity chapter. For each one, the thing worth copying and the thing to avoid, and what they have in common when you count. - 14 min read
Breadcrumbs in a websiteA breadcrumb trail shows where a page sits in a site, with a link to each level above it. When a site needs one and when it does not, how to build it for people, screen readers and Google, and what I found when I checked 14 guides to breadcrumbs for a trail of their own. - 14 min read
Types of SEOEvery type of SEO helps a page through one of the three stages Google puts it through. What each of the ten covers, how to tell it is working, the order to do them in, and what Google actually says about AI search. - 10 min read
TOFU, MOFU and BOFUTop, middle and bottom of the funnel, checked against the way Google itself describes search intent. What a reader is thinking at each stage, what to publish for them, what to measure, and the mistake that leaves most content stuck at the top. - 13 min read
HTTP vs HTTPSThe S means the connection is encrypted and the site has proved its name with a certificate. What that hides from someone on your Wi-Fi, what it costs in speed, what Chrome and Google now do about it, and the thing it has never meant. - 13 min read
Tools to find keywordsPrices checked against each vendor's own page on 10 October 2026, not copied from another listicle. What each tool is genuinely good at, what it costs over a year once seats and annual billing are counted, and why the best keyword tool for a site that already exists is free. - 8 min read
Blog writing formatMost advice about blog format is really advice about length. This is the other thing: where the eye goes, what each part is for, and the three conventions that stopped working without anyone updating the guides. - 9 min read
Backlinks in SEOI catalogued 249 places that hand out free dofollow links. The median was DR 27, two were above DR 80, and Google's spam policy names most of the category outright. Here is the whole picture, with the numbers.
Take the data with you
the spreadsheet
behind the first piece
What is coming
named, so I have
to actually write them
Organic and paid, run togetherHow you tell which one is actually working when both are on.
Indexing at scaleWhat gets a large page set indexed, and what silently does not.
A lakh downloads, split by channelHonestly, including the channels that did nothing.
What D2C cost me in inventoryUnit economics learned the expensive way at Maati.
one at a time