The Details

2025, another difficult year! This time, the complexity really down to the number of challenges all of us involved in digital marketing have had to overcome – so pretty much anyone with a business that is not bricks and mortar based!

Instead of providing a single case study here I thought I would highlight a proportion of the work done – this is not the full extent – I have also built 4 websites this year, two were built for the WordPress platform and involved significant design and structural work and two have been built on a REACT framework and this platform opened up for me due to advances in AI, the results are all pleasing – and hard graft pays off! One of the most relevant developments here is a site I have built to complement my growing range of digital tools – offered to all clients – https://answers-hub.club this is a specially designed template and managed service option for those of you looking to revamp your existing blog content – not only do you get a nice design refresh, but also a managed service to help you really boost your SEO performance. A full content rework, logical topical structure and content scraping protection – very much brought into creation for bringing sites into the AI era!

So below is a list of some of the tools utilised between Dec 2024 and November 2025.

Background inforation

I offer a range of SEO, audit and development services alongside expertise in GA4 and tagging, tracking and reporting. My typical client is an SME with a turnover of £2M + however, I also provide packages suitable for small businesses and as a freelancer can provide support to agency or large corporate teams.

Timescale

Initial 6 month periods are always provided by me to prove viability of works, some elements can be and are delivered more quickly and usually, digital marketing wins that translate to performance gains can be achieved within 3 months for a business that is established and in a position to act on the information required to improve their business digital signals.

My Site in  a year

The reason I wanted to show this chart, is because what my site has had to contend with this year is very similar to most professional services, SaaS businesses and those that offer a degree of consultation. Essentially, we have had some big Google Algorithm changes for about 18 months – most of them concerned with trust signals and content quality and content helpfulness… the most recent coined ‘perspective’ update in September had a really dramatic hit across most sites. Combine these updates with – GTG – server side tracking and CMPs and the full emergence of AI and Chat search and you can begin to understand why this year has left us feeling a more than bit burned out!

Aside from my main site – I also am promoting and operating a suite of digital tools – to get these visible in AI and AEO essential – and as such I have achieved some good solid positions as well as new citations for the latest new releases 🙂

Background information

The period in 2024 and early 2025 – the client I was working on enjoyed a product specific focus that brought profitable but marginalised products back into the spotlight, first, delivering increases in visibility and then holding the commercially valuable queries in a stable 1-5 position and working on AEO snippets and featured snippets for appropriate keywords and trying to achieve better CTR for quality, matched traffic.

The next part of 2025 alongside building a couple of websites I provided full site SEO to a small local business offering services within the home improvements sector. The client specifically wanted to widen his local SEO to achieve position 1-3 on queries for other localities, this was achieved within months 3-6 and although the September update did hit – it also combined with a time of year that enquiries always fall.

Rather than getting too hung-up on this performance- checks were run on the GTG set-up and other page performance/technical issues and the decision made to also optimise for AI – the resulting AEO snippets and ongoing work here to also implement voice search results in the highest performing home voice search – Alexa.

Another example of a natural client – ie – one that has’nt got a permanent extensive SEO budget in place is one that I provide, mostly consultancy for, but initially audited and implemented their tracking and CRO via re-vamping and optimising their GA4 set-up and implementing GTG – server side tracking, allowing this particular client some much needed performance boosts- due to a very outdated code base and sprawl of legacy code dependencies.

Here, again the ‘perspective’ update hit – however, this was about the same time we implemented GA4 – as a result although the reporting clear-out of bot traffic is noticable – the click volume actually increased!