Phil Birtles

🚨 Why companies waste money on paid ads & they don’t even realise it! That’s not scare tactics – it’s a consent tracking issue. We’ve audited dozens of sites over the past year. You’d be amazed how many haven’t properly implemented Consent Mode for Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or Meta. No Consent Mode = ❌ No tracking for users who click ‘Reject all’ ❌ No enhanced conversions ❌ Incomplete or missing data in GA4 ❌ Wasted ad spend you can’t justify And here’s a common misconception: Blocking GTM until consent is granted isn’t enough. Unless your individual tags are configured to respect consent signals, they may still fire — and you’re not compliant. Even worse – many brands think they’re compliant because they’ve got a cookie banner. But: ⚠️ Consent Mode isn’t automatically wired in. Especially when tags are manually added or use old GTM setups. ⚠️ According to the ICO, your banner must give equal prominence to ‘Accept’ and ‘Reject’. You can’t bury the reject option on a second layer. And if you haven’t implemented Consent Mode v2 by now, your data could already be non-compliant — and broken. ✅ Paid traffic showing as ‘Direct’ ✅ Retargeting audiences shrinking ✅ ROAS metrics unreliable ✅ Data loss due to cookieless users (e.g. Safari Incognito) This isn’t just a privacy issue — it’s a data and performance issue. You can’t optimise what you can’t track. 👉 Connect with me and comment “Checklist” below I’ll send you our free GA4/GTM audit checklist to help you fix this. #GoogleAnalytics #ConversionUplift #GA4 #GTM #ServerSide #Stape #BigQuery

109

227 Comments

I'll let you decide if this post is showboating or useful advice 👇 Lumen SEO just had it's most successful 6 months in it's 5 year history with revenues doubling in 6 months and 2x senior hires made last week 📈 But this isn't about me (because I'm responsible for about 30% of that, the rest is my team and my support group 🙏) - this is about you. I'd like to share the key 6 decisions we made that led to this growth - they aren't traditional, they aren't safe and some seem obvious now in hindsight: 1. We have failed more than ever 🚧 Not only that, but we have engineered a system for failure discovery and sharing. Holly's switch to Head of Operations and Experimentation saw the introduction of 'Lumen Labs', a digital space to log, measure and learn from SEO experiments. Monthly 'Discovery Sessions' then followed - a 30 minute space for each team member to share a discovery from any part of their work, even if - and especially if - that discovery is an experiment that failed. 2. We launched a digital product 📱 The SEO Essentials course has only just launched but having a revenue stream that still embodies our values and character, but doesn't require consistent human hourly input has opened the businesses profitability. It also means new entrepreneurs and students can benefit from our discoveries, not just paying clients. 3. Counter benchmarking 🤟 We stopped trying to improve on what our competitors were already doing, and started doing things that they weren't doing at all. This started with making everything video - with a 0% reading rule. Every report, audit and proposal is watchable, with no reading required at any point. Our conversion rate from inquiries doubled as a result. 4. We leaned into AI search 🤖 We started reporting to clients on traffic growth from AI search engines and LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity in December, even before some clients were aware of their importance. We're about to introduce position tracking for AI search, making clients aware of what keywords they are ranking for in AI results separately to Google. It's important not to over-decorate your role as an agency - your job half of the time is to help clients sleep well at night safe in the knowledge that technology isn't out to kill their business. 5. The 32 hour week 📅 You know all about this one 😉 - Talent pool improved, error count reduced and staff well-being improved. 6. We stopped posting about our services 🔎 SEO is boring - it's why people pay us to do it for them. Values, ethics, unconventional HR policies? Now that's emotional stuff. We've experienced more follows, engagement and enquiries after prioritising 'culture' posts over posts about our services. Was this useful? Did it make sense? All questions and challenges welcome as always 💙💬

55

14 Comments

"SEO is dead" We are still doing the same fundamentals we were doing 12 months ago. The only difference is a slightly greater focus on PDP pages and merchant feed optimisations. AI achieves speed to market, but it doesn't magically make you rank higher. cc: Jason Mun Ash Fuller Nicholas Tie Sereena Furse Leslie Tan Judy Kim Darren H. Huang #seo #geo #chatgpt #searchengingoptimisation #results

82

20 Comments

This is your brain on drugs 🧠🍳 No, it's not. This is how search engines, LLMs etc parse your website. Standard Shopify site. Around ~4 default levels: 1. /products/ 2. /collections/ 3. /pages/ 4. /blogs/... 5. + other mandatory function pages. Many of the core pages are crawled first, This is heightened by internal linking, And is a strong ranking factor that these pages are important. A couple posts back, I shared how we removed several levels of a WooCommerce site, and raised product levels to the fore to increase crawl frequency. Hierarchy architecture is crucial, but it's a museum piece of it serves no function. So we must build solutions to increase crawlability, especially in the next 5 years as AI bots mature. -- #ecommerce #technicalseo #internalinking

24

The JBH Link Mapper. What it is, what it does, and how it works for SEO and Digital PR (and GEO). Of all the tools I've been involved in building at JBH, the LinkMapper is one of my favourites. The reason it's my favourite is that it displays inbound links exactly as they should be displayed. This builds on the work by Albert-László Barabási in his famous book, Linked. The link mapper shows you the pages that act as hubs. These are popular pages of a website that gain links, and hubs show popularity. Ideally, your business's core assets should be the most popular. The problem is we live in an era of attention starvation. As a result, many of a brand’s core services, products, or category pages are starved of the necessary links and brand mentions they need for success. Which is where digital PR comes in. Digital PR is the manual process of generating links and brand mentions. And highly skilled digital PR builds these links and brand mentions to the core pages of a business, which are starved of link equity. In some highly competitive environments, adding new links and brand mentions gives almost instantaneous ranking increases leading to revenue. But that's not all. We've seen that the impact of brand mentions and links also leads to near-immediate revenue increases. The reason for this is that in the market, prospects are exposed repeatedly (through high-quality journalism) to a brand's positioning and expertise. Essentially, you're using digital PR to remind people you exist. This is like advertising, content marketing and link building rolled into one. As we move into an AI-powered search era, we already know that digital PR drives almost 75% of success in GEO (generative engine optimisation). The link mapper enables our team to quickly identify and visualise low-quality hubs by categorising links based on domain authority. Using a colour-coded system that works on domain authority, we can see pages that have lots of high-quality links and pages that have weak ones. Because the internet is a free-scaling network, links dissolve over time. Websites get deleted, links get deleted, web pages get deleted. This means you need to regularly update the brand mentions and links related to your brand's most valuable or key assets. Additionally, creating separate assets that become hubs of popularity in their own right can help drive internal links to your core page. An old-fashioned but still hugely successful SEO technique. The map serves as a quick signpost, allowing you to understand the ecology of your website. And it allows you to understand the extent of publicity your brand has gained. In other words, it allows you to quickly gauge your business's 'popularity', as more popular businesses tend to attract more links. I'm going to be writing a more detailed post on this for my newsletter this week. I think you'll love the deep dive. Stay tuned.

31

8 Comments

Genuine request. If you're a company who likes to think 'long term', particularly around something as nebulous and fast-moving as LLMs/AI, please please please understand that KPIs or targets for the work proposed may not exist yet, or may not yet be more than 0.01%...because we're preparing for a different market environment.... ...and that doesn't mean the work is any less valuable.

34

2 Comments

Our CRO 101 and 102 training sessions have been a massive hit for our team's development. We had a resident CRO expert lead both sessions, and the training was very different than your typical agency 'education'. Why? Instead of sending everyone back to their desks with new knowledge, we gave each strategist and associate a specific mission: 1. Take the CRO CART checklist 2. Run through it with one of your clients 3. Identify optimization opportunities The goal was to connect every training investment directly to client value, so we documented the entire process into a repeatable framework: → Deploy the checklist with existing clients → Flag areas where improvements are possible → Convert those findings into strategic conversations → Guide clients toward conversion optimization More clients keep asking about our CRO capability, which means our team’s expertise is hitting exactly what the market wants. When team education has a built-in client application, you get two outcomes: 1. Your people develop practical skills faster 2. Your clients receive optimization opportunities they might not have identified on their own The right investment in education pays for itself (almost) immediately. Agency work demands because everything changes constantly, platforms evolve, algorithms shift, and client expectations grow.

68

13 Comments