Mersudin Forbes Digital

Providing transformative change at pace to a portfolio of SEO clients and Digital Agencies.

Fractional SEO Advisory
Agency Consulting (SEO/Process/Client Services)
SaaS Growth Consulting

Portfolio SEO & Agency Advisory

Multiply - Shopify SEO Specialists

Founder

Cyber-Duck, a CACI business

SEO Strategy Advisory

John Charcol - Independent Mortgage Expertise

Interim SEO Director

Succeed Digital Consulting Ltd

Head of SEO Strategy (Advisory)

Datahive360

Innovation & Growth Advisor

British Wireless for the Blind Fund

Marketing Advisor (Volunteer Role)

Newchip Accelerator

Mentoring Startup Founders on product and search marketing.

Startup Mentor

Sleeping Giant Media

Client Services Director

Associate Client Services Director

Senior Search Account Manager

Search Account Manager SEO / PPC

Senior Search Account Executive

Search Account Executive

Dall Int. - Digital Alliance International

Member

Portfolio SEO Director & Agency Advisor

I advise some of the largest independent digital agencies across Europe and the US on delivering ROI-driven SEO as well as some of the largest sites in their markets.

I step in, bring teams and processes into the future and make them more output and ROI focused. 

I also help agencies scale their operational service processes while building capable teams. 

Additionally, I service a few direct SEO clients to practice what I preach. The people I work with see drastically improved client retention, Organic growth and ROI.  

I own 10 (some are for testing) websites for SEO hypothesis and learning distribution.

I also speak about technology application to improve business efficiency and output using AI and integrated software solutions.

Mersudin Forbes

Check out this job at Arsenal Football Club: Senior SEO Executive

Might be worth waiting until the December run in before applying.

Technologist | SEO | AI Search | MMA | Ultra Runner

Over the past 3 years, I have been involved in many projects that went beyond just SEO. 

Many spanning areas of new and emerging technology and how it is applied to business success. 

Such as:
- Business improvement
- Process alingment
- Operational efficiency
- Innovation enablement 
- Agentic uses beyond AI hype blog post creation

Louis W. and I have had many discussions about creating a business that not only builds our own SaaS products, but helps businesses achieve actual success in innovation, new tooling and preparing for the agentic future. 

So this is how CodeHawks was born. 

An automation studio and micro-SaaS lab.

Drop me a line if you want to chat.

Couple of things that move the needle:

1. Using AlsoAsked and inLinks to understand user intent for your existing content.
2. Using inLinks for automated internal linking within your content. 
3. Using Similar.ai to create related category link modules. 
4. Using Similar.ai to find and publish category gaps for your products.
5. Using Keyword Insights and inLinks  to find and publish content/entity gaps. 

What does all of this do? Create assets for your ICP, which is architecturally sound for users to navigate. 

A winning combination. 

I’ll film a video for this soon.

Open article: Turn missed searches into revenue by similar.ai

I am keeping a list of all the grifters who called themselves “GEO experts” and are now renaming to “AI Search” or “AI SEO”.

It’s a thankless task, but someone has to keep the receipts.

Send this to your GEO friends when they start talking crap.

May this McDonald’s coffee bless your day.

Unless you want to launch a website on Christmas Eve.

Then don’t even bother emailing me.

No alternative text description for this image

Building another marketing funnel process for CodeHawks has been fun today. 

We are ready to beta test agentchecker.ai as Louis W. has been a busy bee making that work to spec.

Alongside this, I also had time to build the following apps: 

(You can try and guess what the apps do based on the names as I tried to make the names 80/90's esque):

- GapMaster
- Know
- VibeWall

I am not hiring on behalf of Arsenal Football Club ffs. 

🤦‍♂️😂

The stats are in:

After months of research, I can confirm that 92% of GEO experts wear dry robes. 

Astounding find.

Over the past 3 years and a bit of consulting, I have learned a lot.

But most notably, I have learned the correct usage of emojis in Slack or any community communications. 

Examples:


👍 - This does NOT mean:”Message received and I agree.”

This in fact means:”Fine. Whatever you say. I also hate you.”

🙂 - This does NOT mean:”I am happy about this.”

This in fact means:”I am staring deep into your soul and will bury you in my back garden the next time we are alone. I also hate you.”

LOL/😆 - This does NOT mean:”
I find this funny.”

This in fact means:”I am old.”

🙀 - This does NOT mean:”Even my cat was surprised.”

This in fact means:”This is shocking!”

Anyway. I will share some more key learnings with you soon.

Sam Wright

Blink - The Shopify marketing agency for stores with large product catalogues

Blink is a specialist marketing agency for large catalogue Shopify stores. Our focus on repeatability and data-driven solutions enables us to consistently achieve 100% revenue growth within 12 months for our clients.

Managing Director

Macaroni Software

Ad-Rank Media

Ad-Rank was an integrated digital agency with offices in London and Norwich.

Operations Director

LANA Communications

Freelance content strategy and SEO. Clients include major eCommerce websites, technology start-ups with VC backing and large business publications.

Owner

White Digital Media

Responsible for managing the day-to-day running of the editorial team, in particular ensuring that all deadlines were met and that all content was to the required standard. Also included six week period as Acting Editor.

Deputy Editor

Maintained up to 20 news channels, while writing features, news articles and case studies for the various publications and websites in the White Digital Media portfolio.

Junior Editor

I’ve been working in SEO since 2007, and eCommerce even longer – my first business was selling second-hand records online way back in 2002. 

Blink was founded in 2011 and has since gone on to become one of the country’s leading eCommerce SEO agencies. We focus on Shopify, particularly stores with larger product catalogues. We've built a very specialist team around this approach, including data scientists and engineers and software developers. 

This has led us to build Macaroni - our SaaS platform for Shopify. Macaroni solves the most frequent challenges we face for Shopify projects and has made us at least 20x more productive. 

We can confidently say that no agency delivers at the speed and scale that we do. 

Blink was also one of the first agencies in the UK to implement a 4-day working week. We’ve been operating this way since 2018 and it’s been one of the best decisions we’ve made as a business. 

Feel free to connect if you’d like to find out more, or if you’d just like to chat about SEO, data, eCommerce or digital marketing!

Blink is a specialist eCommerce SEO agency. We use data science to help businesses grow organic revenue and build long-lasting customer relationships.

It is time for me to share an unusually strong opinion - your channel partner is not your CMO.

I usually try to keep things neutral here, to the point I'm like an inert gas floating around LinkedIn, but over the past few years we've seen a dangerous pattern emerge, specifically in the sub-£5M brand space.

Because trust in agencies is at an all-time low, brands are (understandably) fracturing their marketing. They hire specialists: one for email, one for SEO, one for PPC.

To build trust, these partners often go above and beyond. They offer commercial advice, and step into the strategic void.

This feels great - like they really care. But it can also be a trap. Here is the reality:

1. GA4 has been a disaster. Many brands no longer use it as a central source of truth.

2. This creates siloed reporting. Without a central truth, every channel partner reports on their own platform metrics.

3. Then there is incrementality gap. When no one is looking at the whole picture, things slip through the net. 

How many times have you added up all of your sales across Google Ads, Facebook, Meta, etc., and found that it's 30% over your total revenue? 

Channel complexity have skyrocketed. Execution is harder than ever. But without someone sitting above the channels to interpret how they interrelate, you are flying blind.

Commercial thinking from agencies is necessary, but it is not a substitute for a CMO. You need someone who understands incrementality, manages the chaos, and acts as the conductor for all these soloists.
 
We're lucky to have worked with some of the very best in the Shopify space. If anyone would like any recommendations, please feel free to drop me a message.

Helping large catalogue Shopify stores cut CACs & scale | Building tools to democratise SEO for all merchants

I genuinely think that product data enrichment is becoming one of the strongest moats in ecommerce.

Too many brands still treat it as housekeeping - a colour here, a material there - when the real opportunity is in the deeper attributes.

Use-cases, sub-materials, fit details and emotional cues genuinely help people buy, and they’re exactly the signals that search engines and AI discovery models respond to.

The issue is that Shopify and Google will never go far enough for any serious category. Their taxonomies stay broad because they have to. They can label something as leather, but they can’t reliably distinguish between the types that influence value and intent. They can spot a general neckline, but not the nuance that separates one customer’s preference from another.

The brands who define their own schema and enrich products against it - even if it starts being far from perfer - will have a real, compounding advantage.

I’ve been looking ahead to next year’s schedule, and it got me thinking about what actually makes industry events worth the time.

One of the issues I’ve found with ecom events is that they are often too broad to be really useful for lots of brands. 

You might find yourself sitting next to a founder of a subscription store doing £2m revenue on Shopify, while across the table is a retailer managing £10m on Magento. 

On paper, everyone is in the same industry, but the reality is that the challenges they face - and the problems they are trying to solve - are usually completely different.

In my experience, the real value in these conversations comes from swapping notes on the specific tactics that have worked and the hurdles that are currently in the way. You get that clarity when you speak to people who are exactly like you, or ideally just a step or two ahead on the same path.

That is why I’m thinking of doing something different in the new year. I want to set up a dinner event focused strictly on a specific profile. Since our area of expertise is large catalogue Shopify brands turning over £5m, the plan is to bring a group of these operators together. 

The aim is that when everyone is facing the same complexity, it's easier to have a genuine exchange on the tech and tactics that are actually working right now.

We are looking at hosting this in Birmingham. I'd love to get feedback on this as an idea. And if you are interested in attending, drop me a message!

So, I've had a bit more time to digest the new Shopify Editions. My main takeaway?

A massive validation of exactly what we’ve been building at Blink.

For the last few years, we’ve been banging the drum on data granularity. We’ve been obsessing over detailed attributes and taxonomy, often while the rest of the industry was focused on basic keyword optimisation.

With the announcement of Agentic Storefronts, Shopify has just confirmed that this is the future.

The new update makes it clear: we are moving away from simple filtering and into a world of context.

If your data isn't structured to answer those questions, you’re going to be invisible to the next generation of AI search tools.

While there’s plenty of hype in the announcement - and honestly, features like Sidekick are still struggling with the "last mile" of execution in our tests - the overall direction data is crystal clear.

I’ve recorded a video breakdown of what this actually means for your SEO and PPC strategy, and why your merchandising team will be even more of a valuable asset than they already are.

Watch the full video: https://lnkd.in/et_tC8Re

Read the blog: https://lnkd.in/euwcRHYp

I haven't shared this for a while, so thought I would be good to put it out there again!

By default, Shopify includes the collection name in the URL if a product is linked to multiple collections. 

For example: www-mysite-com/collections/womens-accessories/products/leather-gloves-red

This creates quite a lot of mess, particularly with canonicalisation. 

Most guides suggest changing your Liquid templates from this:

{{ product.url | within: collection }}

To this:

{{ product.url }}

While this works for most cases, it won’t catch all these links - for example, quite often some will be hardcoded in blog content or created by third party apps.

To solve this, we created a Liquid snippet that removes /collections/ and the collection name if /products/ is present and consistently standardises URLs across your site, no matter how they were linked.

If you'd like the code drop me a message!

I've been working with a new PIM on Shopify that is excellent for brands selling on multiple marketplaces - eBay, Onbuy, John Lewis etc.

It's genuinely the best I've seen for a long time. If anyone's looking out for a new solution, give me a shout. Happy to do an introduction!

Here’s a pretty big announcement from OpenAI right before Black Friday - a shopping research tool that builds its own product roundups by reading and interpreting whatever data it can find. 

Instead of relying on articles or pre-curated lists, it generates comparisons such as “the quietest cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment” by assessing attributes, reviews and specifications. 

For large-catalogue brands, this is another step towards a world where AI systems form their own view of your products based on the information you give them.

The question, again, is whether that information is structured in a way that can actually be used. Attributes need to be complete and consistent, and the supporting signals - especially reviews - need to reinforce the claims you want to be visible for. 

I'm imagining publishers of product roundups might be a touch worried by this, but from what we've seen so far, this kind of content is likely to be a key source.

Open article: Introducing shopping research in ChatGPT by openai.com

I really liked 🧲 Adam Kitchen's recent post about how the email industry has changed, so I’m stealing his format. It’s a great summary, and it made me think about how much SEO has shifted since I started in 2007.

Back then most people hadn’t heard of SEO. Then everyone had heard of it and thought it was a bit grubby. Now it’s become one of the foundations of AI-driven discovery. 

Working with hundreds of eCommerce teams (especially large-catalogue Shopify stores) a few patterns stand out:

* Tracking is still the biggest barrier

Organic search often makes up around 20% of revenue for large catalogue stores, usually the second biggest channel after Google Ads. But because tracking is so messy, GA4 might show 5-8%, and many teams barely look at the data. 

When the numbers are broken, the channel gets ignored. We’ve spent years trying to educate around this, and it still feels like shouting into the void.

* Internal capability has exploded

Ten years ago, most knowledge sat with agencies. Today, a marketing manager at a £5m Shopify brand often understands more about their platform, customers and product than the average SEO. AI has accelerated this. The consultant’s role is changing fast.

* SEO is now platform-specific

Local, SaaS and e-commerce used to feel similar. They don’t any more. Execution is shaped by the platform, its constraints and its data structures. Depth beats breadth, and there’s no room for generalists.

* The hourly retainer model rarely works

Large catalogue brands don’t need ten hours of manual tweaks a month. They need hundreds of structural changes, new categories and templates, and huge amounts of product-data work. Without software and engineered processes, the economics simply don’t add up.

* Data literacy is a real bottleneck

Ecommerce teams are strong operators, but trust in GA4 has collapsed. With fragmented reporting across multiple agencies, understanding incrementality has become harder than ever.

* SEO sits inside the product.

Taxonomy, templates, attributes and structure are closer to product and engineering than marketing. That means you end up solving problems most brands don’t even classify as SEO.

And then there’s AI.

It's been said many times, but SEO is becoming fundamental to AI-driven product discovery. AI systems rely on structured, machine-readable product data and clean architecture. This is the biggest shift in discovery since Facebook Ads.

But - and this is the important bit - AI discovery is platform-specific. Preparing a Shopify catalogue for AI search is nothing like Adobe or SaaS. How you execute is completely different. Depth of platform expertise matters more now than at any point in my career.

Here's a fun one - what’s the biggest turnaround you’ve ever seen a single eCommerce manager/director pull off on a store?

I ask because over the past few months we’ve been speaking with a brand that wasn’t in a position to move forward straight away. 

This is for very normal reasons, like budgets, internal alignment etc. At the same time, they were speaking with dev partners, systems providers, and a few other specialists. Again, nothing unusual.

What is different is the execution. When we first spoke, revenue was down 95% year on year. A few months later, they’re up around 20% year on year in Q4. And this is a one-person team.

I can genuinely count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen something like this play out.

I’m not saying advice from us, or anyone else involved, caused it. Advice is cheap. Doing the work is very much the hard part.

So, what's the biggest turnaround you've all seen? 

And I swear, if anyone uses this as an example to pitch their services by saying they've grown a business by 1 million percent in three months, I will express my displeasure in the most extreme way possible. 

As I am an awkward Englishman, this means I will tut under my breath and then possibly delete your comment.

There is a lot of advice floating around on LinkedIn about individual SEO tactics for Shopify stores. We see endless posts about creating more collections, optimising your collections, or fixing internal linking.

The reality is that all of this is absolute table stakes.

For a scaling Shopify store, these are tactics that might work in isolation, but they rarely have a tangible impact on their own. The difference between fiddling at the edges and doing something that actually drives revenue is building the systems to operationalise all this.

It is easy to say that collections are important, but building a structure that allows for complex parent-child relationships on Shopify is not straightforward. 

There is a real risk of over-granularisation. If you go too deep, you end up providing a poor user experience, creating pages with no search volume, and cannibalising the traffic you already have. If you don't go deep enough, you miss the opportunity entirely.

Knowing where that line sits requires a real understanding of your taxonomy and exactly how people search for your store. This is precisely why we built Macalytics - The Shopify SEO app and our other tooling - because you can't guess your way through that level of complexity.

Then you run into the technical constraints. Is your theme actually capable of supporting a deeper taxonomy? You can’t dump everything into a mega menu - things need to be linked internally in a way that makes sense. This quickly shifts from an SEO task to a design, CRO and UX implementation challenge.

Once you have the structure, you have to handle the content. You can't leave hundreds of new sub-categories empty; they need description copy so users and search engines understand what they are about. 

At the scale required for a large store, this becomes an operations challenge rather than a copywriting one. This is why our process involves generating description copy based on AI and sending it live directly through our tooling.

Often, however, we find that we can’t even build the categories in the first place because the underlying product data hasn't been updated correctly.

If the product data isn't right, you have no real understanding of what your taxonomy should be. You have to optimise at the earliest point possible - working with merchandising teams to enrich the product data structure and make sure the attribute framework supports the strategy.

This systemic approach even applies to how you handle AI. Everyone talks about FAQs as an effective strategy, but generic content rarely works. You need specific answers derived from real customer support tickets. Then, while Shopify has Knowledge Base for feeding information into AI, it doesn't publish that content to the site. To make it work, you need to build a system that links the two things up.

It is one thing to discuss the theory, but quite another to see the machinery working. If you want to see what this looks like in the real world, drop me a message.

New #BlinkTank now live!

A lot of moving parts this week - Shopify tweaks, analytics updates, and some interesting shifts in how AI is interpreting the web.

This edition touches on:

* Why ARIA tags and clean structure matter more than ever with Atlas browsing

* What we’re seeing with Shopify’s Test Drive Markets release

* Meta EMQ guidance that answers questions we’ve been asked for years

* A practical GA4 resource that’s actually useful

* A handful of tools and updates worth keeping in your back pocket

And at the end, a note about Macalytics. The response since launch has been better than we expected, and we’re now looking for the right investors to help us take it into the next stage. If you’re curious, all the detail is inside.

Hi everyone! We’re deep into Q4 now but the pace of updates across Shopify, search and analytics doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Here are some things

Open article: This week’s roundup for Shopify and search by Sam Wright • 3 min read

This week’s roundup for Shopify and search

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