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About the Book

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting and not understood a word of what that person responsible for your website is saying, if you’ve ever thought “that doesn’t sound right” but not known what questions to ask, if you’ve ever stared at a graph or a report and realised that you didn’t know if it meant things were getting better or worse, if you’ve ever had that nagging dread that you’re handing money over to someone and not getting a return on it… this is the book for you.

Backed with over a decade of knowledge accumulated working on SEO, website design, eCommerce, and digital transformation across a wide range of industries, The Truth About SEO is the book that every business owner should have – and every SEO consultant should worry about.

About the Author

With over a decade of experience in digital marketing and SEO as Technical Director of a bespoke eCommerce agency, and over twenty years of IT experience, Chris Lynch remembers a time when Google wasn’t the biggest search engine on the planet, people still believed that fax machines wouldn’t be replaced by email, having a smart-phone meant you’d bought a leather case for your Nokia, and a “Face Book” was something serial killers kept under their beds.

Driven by a desire to help businesses succeed regardless of their size or budget, Chris’ plain-speaking and honest approach to building online businesses; combined with his impressive technical acumen; has made him one of the UK’s most popular and sought-after experts.


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The gap between a book being released and the first reader reviews coming in is a strange and nerve-wracking time. In one sense you exist, as a writer, in a state of grace. You did it. The book is out. Achievement unlocked, level up. In another, very real, sense you are now about to find out what people in the real world think of your book. Will it be One Up or Game Over?

Do you want a cookie? How about now? Or now? Maybe now?

I wrote this book mostly because I was tired of finding my industry down on the same list as bankers, double glazing sales, estate agents, and dentists.

An increasing number of searches are local - a trend that has only been growing since the mobile internet and smartphones came to prominence. Today, more than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices and, therefore, it makes a lot of sense that Google surface a special type of search result, called “Google My Business”, if a company or business matches the search in question. We mentioned this before in “Backlinks”.

Google Search Console is like Google Analytics’ less popular, nerdier cousin.

The king of analytical software and something no website should be without.

Pretty important question, right?

Influencer marketing has been one of the hottest trends in digital marketing of recent years. You’ve probably come across influencers, you may even have been “influenced” by one, but you maybe didn’t realise it… 

Before we leave backlinks behind, I’d like to circle back around and revisit what an organic link really is - it’s a vote of confidence.

It should go without saying at this point that once you’ve created a great piece of content, you should share it on as many relevant social media channels as possible.

It’s one of the big questions that gets the SEO conspiracy theorists running for their post-it notes and balls of string… do search engines index social media?

Aren’t adverts the ultimate paid for link? You wouldn’t be 100% wrong there…

Google likes sites that take part in the "egalitarian web", so don't fear linking to other useful sites and don’t listen to scare-mongers who will tell you that you’re “leaking link juice”.

Here are some final thoughts and tips on link building before we talking about ads and social media...

“So, I’m not allowed to buy them, swap them, or sign up to a service that provides them… how the hell am I supposed to get backlinks then?”

To spot a “good” backlink, apply this simple three point test:

Just in case you are still not convinced about the importance of content, let’s briefly revisit the equation the calculates website success:

There’s a reason we call them web pages - they are designed, fundamentally, to be connected together, like points on a spider’s web.

Clear calls to action

Cheaters never prosper. Never copy content from other websites or use generic content

Here’s what Google has to say about writing good web pages, direct from its own help article on SEO:

Our grid still isn’t complete though - we need to write our page descriptions and decide on what keywords/search phrases we are targeting for each one.

There are five types of web page and you can map them to functions in your business to get a better understanding of what they do.

Having decided the tone in which we are going to write the content for our website, we now have to decide what to write. We already know that we need to be writing expertly, with authority. We also know that search engines, just like humans, are looking for useful and timely content. We know we can’t just rip that off from someone else… so where do we start?

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