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A complete, evidence-based guide to the Google ranking factors that matter in 2026: relevance, content quality, links, page experience, technical access, user signals, local SEO and AI search.

Hiring an SEO consultancy is easier when you know what the work looks like before you sign. This guide explains what happens at each stage of an engagement, from the first call to the monthly reviews, based on how I run my own consultancy. It should help you judge any consultant’s proposal, not only mine.

An SEO consultant is a specialist who helps businesses improve their presence in Google’s organic search. They evaluate a website’s current performance, uncover technical, content and authority issues that may be holding it back, and create a clear strategy to increase search visibility, attract relevant traffic and generate more business. A SEO strategy may include technical

Why does PageSpeed Insights show “Core Web Vitals Assessment: Failed” while the performance score is high (green circles)? And how can another website have “Core Web Vitals Assessment: Passed” but show a low performance score (red circle)? It is one of the questions I am asked most often, and the answer is simple once you

If your Google rankings dropped suddenly, you are probably asking “why have my Google rankings dropped, and how do I get them back?” After twenty years of diagnosing ranking drops, I find the cause is almost always one of a handful of things. Here are the most common ones, how to check each, and what

Most new patients now find a dentist by searching Google, checking the map results and reading reviews before they ever phone the practice. Increasingly they also ask ChatGPT or read Google’s AI Overview first. Dental clinic SEO is how you make sure your practice is the one they find, trust and book with, for the

Every few months Google announces another core or spam update, and rankings can move overnight. Some sites gain, others drop, and site owners are left wondering what changed. Here are the SEO tactics I use to protect client sites before an update, and what to do if one hits you. What are Google core and

“How do I get my website on Google?” is one of the questions I hear most from business owners with a new site. The good news is that getting a website into Google is free and takes about ten minutes. Getting it to rank for the searches your customers use is a separate job, and

Google Search Console (GSC) changes its layout often, so many older tutorials on how to remove a sitemap from Google Search Console no longer match what you see. These are the steps that work in the current version, checked in October 2026. How to remove a sitemap from Google Search Console Sign in to Google