“You need to blog every week”
You need to answer the questions your buyers actually ask. Six genuinely useful pages beat fifty filler posts, and cost far less to produce.
Digital Marketing & SEO Strategy
Is SEO really that easy? Yes. That’s the uncomfortable bit.
Stop Overpaying For SEOSo easy your mum will understand
Digital Marketing Without The Smoke And Mirrors
Stop paying for digital marketing lies that tell you the answer is always more articles, more blogs, more posts. When (not if) those don’t deliver results, the agency blames the algorithm, the market, your industry — everything except themselves.
I can guarantee that in one hour, yes one hour, I will teach you the basics of SEO that set the foundations for your website. My method and my tools are simple enough that my mum understands them, and so will yours.
When it comes to SEO the only guarantee is that there are no guarantees. What I will give you is at least ten things you can do today to improve your rankings, and I’ll throw most of the myths straight out the window. I’ll stop you wasting money on false promises and no results. I scaled businesses using search — don’t take anyone else’s word for it.
Using Shopify for e-commerce? I’ll show you which apps you actually need and how to optimise the store without an SEO agency in the middle. I’ve run a sock subscription business on Shopify since 2014, so I’m working from my own store, not a case study. If you want a specialist review of your site, there’s the SEO website audit and my free SEO Chrome extension.
Contact RobThe proof is the page you’re on
You Found Me — That’s The Point
I must be doing something right when it comes to SEO and digital marketing, because you’re reading this. I don’t cold call and never have, apart from the first day I started my business. I let people find me instead.
Let me show you how to be found online and why that is the most sustainable way to grow. Anyone who tells you different is kidding themselves, and more to the point they’re trying to fool you into a retainer.
I don’t like people who pretend to be experts without having done the thing in real life. Being paper smart isn’t enough — you need experience. You wouldn’t trust a pilot who had only passed the theory exams, so why choose a business coach who has never run a successful business? When it comes to digital marketing, let me set the record straight and save you money — but more importantly, time.
Where the money goes
How Agencies Quietly Waste Your Budget
I’m not anti-agency. There are good ones. But here is what I’ve seen repeatedly when I open up a client’s marketing spend for the first time.
- Reports instead of results. Twenty pages of impressions and rankings for terms nobody searches, and no line for enquiries.
- Blogs written for nobody. Four articles a month on topics your customers never type into a search box.
- Ads bidding on your own brand. Paying for clicks from people who were already looking for you by name.
- Vanity keywords. Ranking for the broad, glamorous term instead of the boring one that carries actual buying intent.
- No conversion work. Traffic pushed to a page with no clear call to action, then blamed on the traffic.
- Locked-in retainers. Twelve-month agreements with notice periods, sold at the exact moment you were most frustrated.
- Your own data held hostage. Analytics, ad accounts and even the domain registered under the agency’s name, not yours.
The work
The SEO Foundations I Set Up With You
In order. Most businesses never get past step three, and most businesses don’t need to in order to see a difference.
- 1
Work out what people actually type
Not what you call your service — what a customer types when they have the problem. Those are frequently different words, and that gap is where most small business SEO fails.
- 2
One page per thing you sell
A single page listing eight services ranks for none of them. Each service and each location that matters gets its own page with its own honest, useful copy.
- 3
Fix titles, headings and descriptions
Unglamorous, fast and genuinely effective. Most small business sites have duplicate or auto-generated titles doing nothing at all.
- 4
Own your Google Business Profile
For a local business this outperforms almost everything else. Complete it properly, keep it current, and feed it a steady stream of reviews.
- 5
Make the site load and work on a phone
Most of your visitors are on mobile and impatient. Speed and clarity beat design awards every single time.
- 6
Measure enquiries, not rankings
Track phone calls and form submissions. Rankings are a vanity number if the phone isn’t ringing, and a distraction if it is.
Myths I’ll bin for you
Four Things You’ve Been Told That Aren’t True
“SEO takes twelve months minimum”
Competitive national terms take time. Fixing a broken title tag, claiming your profile or building a missing service page can move things in weeks.
“More traffic is always better”
Not if none of it buys. A hundred visitors ready to purchase beat ten thousand who typed something vaguely related.
“Social media replaces search”
Social builds familiarity. Search catches people at the moment they want to spend. You want both, but only one of them has intent.
The payoff
What Changes In The First 90 Days Of Marketing Coaching
Within three months you should understand your own marketing well enough to challenge any invoice you receive. That alone changes the relationship with every supplier you deal with.
Concretely: you’ll know which search terms actually matter to your business, your site will have a proper page for each thing you sell, your Google Business Profile will be complete and gathering reviews, and you’ll be counting enquiries rather than admiring impressions.
The savings tend to be immediate. I’ve taken a client from $5,000 a month in digital marketing spend down to $1,250 while the enquiries held, simply by cutting the work that was never going to produce anything. That is the fastest money I can find in most businesses.
This pillar also depends on the others. Traffic to a business with poor customer service just accelerates the churn, and reviews — which drive local search — come from clients you looked after properly. If you want to see how it all fits, start with the 6 Pillars overview.
Cut The Wasted Marketing SpendWhen it comes to SEO, the only guarantee is that there are no guarantees. Anyone selling you one is selling you something else.
Robert Adelman — The No Bullshit Business Coach
Straight answers
Digital Marketing And SEO Questions, Answered
Can you really teach me the basics of SEO in an hour?
The basics, yes. In an hour I can show you how search engines decide what to show, which terms are worth your effort, how to structure your pages and the ten things you can change straight away.
What an hour won’t give you is the discipline to keep doing it. That’s what the monthly coaching rhythm is for — the knowledge is the easy half.
Should I sack my SEO agency?
Not before you can read what they are doing. Get access to your own analytics, ad accounts and Google Business Profile first — and if any of those are registered in the agency’s name rather than yours, that is a problem to fix today.
Then judge them on enquiries, not reports. Some agencies are genuinely good and worth every dollar. You just need to be able to tell the difference, which is what I teach you.
Is SEO better value than Google Ads?
They do different jobs. Ads buy you enquiries today and stop the moment you stop paying. SEO compounds slowly and keeps working, but it will not save you this quarter.
For most small businesses the sensible answer is ads for immediate cash flow while the search foundations are built underneath. What you should not do is run ads to a website that cannot convert the clicks.
What about AI search and chatbots — is SEO dead?
No, but the goal shifts. AI tools still learn from the same web content, so clear, specific, genuinely useful pages that answer real questions still get surfaced. Vague marketing waffle does not.
Practically it means writing the way a customer asks, being explicit about what you do and where you do it, and keeping your business details consistent everywhere. That was good practice before AI turned up.
I sell on Shopify. Does any of this apply?
All of it, plus some Shopify-specific work. Collection pages, product descriptions written for buyers rather than copied from the supplier, and app bloat that quietly wrecks your load speed.
I’ve run a Shopify subscription business since 2014, so I can tell you which apps earn their monthly fee and which ones you should uninstall this afternoon.
How do I know if my website is any good?
Ask three questions. Does someone landing on it know within five seconds what you do and where? Is there an obvious way to contact you on a phone? Does each service you sell have its own page?
If any answer is no, that is your first job. For a proper look, the SEO website audit goes through it in detail and hands you a prioritised list rather than a lecture.
Do you write the content and build the pages for me?
No. I’m a coach, and content written by someone who has never spoken to your customers reads exactly like that. What I do is show you what to write, review it honestly, and stop you publishing filler.
If you genuinely have no time, I’ll introduce you to writers and developers from my vetted partners and make sure the quote is fair before you agree to it.
How much should a small business spend on digital marketing?
Less than you probably are, and far more deliberately. I’d rather see $1,000 a month spent on things you can measure than $5,000 spread across activity nobody can attribute to a single enquiry.
Start by working out what a new customer is worth to you over their lifetime. Until you know that number, every marketing decision is a guess — and it’s one of the first numbers I make clients calculate.
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