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
- 40 min read
Content and strategyBest SEO for SaaS: what to build, and in what orderMost SaaS blogs start by writing guides, because guides are easy. The searches closest to a signup are the ones where a buyer is already choosing between products. Here is the order that follows from that, what 100 leading SaaS companies' sites actually build, and the whole playbook as a file you can hand to your AI agent. - 34 min read
Keywords and toolsSemrush review 2026: every rating on Trustpilot, G2, Capterra and Reddit, star by starOn Capterra, 2,330 reviews give Semrush 4.6 out of 5. On Trustpilot, 1,421 give it 1.7. I read the reviews at every star level, the Reddit threads, the pricing page and the refund policy, to work out which number to believe and who should pay for it. - 19 min read
AI searchHow to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews: what decides it, and what you can controlEvery AI assistant that cites sources is a search engine with a language model on top. To be cited, a page has to be crawled by the right bot, sit in the right index, rank for one of the searches behind the question, and hold a passage worth quoting. What each company says, what the studies show, and what 229 sites' robots.txt files get right. - 15 min read
Links and authorityDomain Authority vs Domain Reputation: what each one is, who keeps it, and which one can hurt youDomain Authority is Moz's estimate of a site's links, and nothing happens when it's low. Domain reputation is what mailbox providers, blocklists and Google have concluded from how a domain behaves, and it decides where your email lands and whether your site carries a warning. What each one is, how to check it, and what the email records of 245 sites show. - 22 min read
Links and authorityHow to get backlinks: what works, in the order to try itMost guides to getting backlinks are a list of places to ask. The order matters more than the list: win back the links you already have, get listed where your customers look, make one thing worth linking to, then tell the people who'd use it. With numbers from a 249-source catalogue, the outreach email to send, and the shortcuts Google's spam policy names. - 9 min read
Keywords and toolsFree vs paid keyword research tools: what each gets right, and when paying is worth itFree keyword tools give you Google's own data with gaps in it. Paid ones fill every gap with an estimate. The pros and cons of each, what I got when I ran one topic through the free method, and the point at which a subscription starts paying for itself. - 14 min read
Technical SEOrobots.txt: what it blocks, and why it can't remove a page from GoogleA 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
Links and authorityDomain Authority vs Domain Rating: what each score measures, and why Google uses neitherDomain 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
Content and strategyBlog post examples, and what each one gets rightThirteen 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
Technical SEOBreadcrumbs in a website: what the trail is for, and what Google does with itA 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. - 15 min read
Content and strategyTypes of SEO: the ten worth knowing, and the order to do them inEvery 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
Content and strategyTOFU, MOFU and BOFU: what each stage of the funnel is for, and what to make for itTop, 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. - 14 min read
Technical SEOHTTP vs HTTPS: what the S changes, and what it does notThe 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
Keywords and toolsTools to find keywords: what they cost, what they are for, and the free one most people skipPrices 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. - 9 min read
Content and strategyBlog writing format: the ten parts that earn their placeMost 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
Links and authorityBacklinks in SEO: a free dofollow backlink list, and what Google says it's really worthI 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