Mark Williams-Cook

Director at Candour, Founder of AlsoAsked.com, organiser of SearchNorwich - I help organisations grow with SEO.

𝐇𝐢, 𝐈'𝐦 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤 - 𝐈'𝐯𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐄𝐎 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐲 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲:
🏢 Director at Candour - an SEO agency based in Norwich (contact us for SEO + web builds)
🗣️ Founder of AlsoAsked - a search intent research SaaS tool (subscribe for the best intent tool on the planet)
🐕 Co-owner of TopDog Harnesses - a UK-based e-commerce business (make your dog look cute)

𝐎𝐧 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐝𝐈𝐧, 𝐈'𝐦 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫:
💌 Core Updates SEO newsletter (It's free https://coreupdates.com)
💭 Daily 'unsolicited' SEO tips (Hit the bell for a tip every day on LI)
🎙️ Search with Candour podcast (http://search.withcandour.co.uk/)
👨‍🏫 My top-rated SEO course on Udemy (https://t.ly/JCR-)

𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐥 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐦𝐞:
✔️ If you're a fellow SEO and want to chat
✔️ You're at a business, you want SEO, and have a budget for it
✔️ You'd like to personally berate me for any of my SEO tips
✔️ You would really like more pictures of my dog, Snoop

𝐏𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐦𝐞:
❌ Asking for SEO advice for your website for free
❌ Are a person offering guest posting, links, websites or anything in digital
❌ Generally, anyone if all you want to do is sell to me, you get the idea
❌ No, i don't need your lead generation service

𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐦 𝐒𝐄𝐎 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬/𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬:
🏆 Candour has donated >£25,000 to charity this year
🏆 Featured in Wall Street Journal, BBC News, SearchEngineLand
🏆 International speaker at SERPConf, SEODay, Tech SEO Summit, semKRK, Zagreb SEO, BrightonSEO, Search'n'Stuff and more
🏆 Awarded $13,337 Google security bug bounty for search endpoint exploit (donated)
🏆 Published in 4 SEO books
🏆 Built the first (and still most popular) live PAA research SaaS tool
🏆 Moved UK's largest voucher website from 400k to 1.2M visitors per month in <6 months
🏆 Built 'AutoStumble' social media blackhat tool which I used to ⬇️
🏆 Get 90,000,000 YouTube views and be one of the first paid YouTube partners (yes, it was a 🐈 video)
🏆 Designed the first iteration of the CIM 'Digital Bootcamp' being brought on as a faculty speaker
🏆 Run successful SEO campaigns for Expedia, ViaGoGo, Mazda, Hitachi, FatFace, Vax, HotDealsUK, CheapFlights, and a load more
🏆 Made, SEO'd and flipped 5 businesses including Viral news site (>1M organic visitors in first 12 months), Scuba Diving community site with >4000 members, a bunch of gallery and media websites.

Founder at AlsoAsked

Unsolicited #SEO tip: When you hear a GEO person saying the SEO is dead, and it is all about being mentioned in AI, ask them where the AI gets those URLs from and watch them do this:

Follow me for 22+ years of SEO experience, unsolicited SEO tips, experiments and grift avoidance!

Abe Simpson walking in, taking his hat off, then doing a 180 and putting it back on and leaving

Unpopular AI opinion: Doing the data analysis yourself is an important learning exercise. Using AI to review and anaylse data in your race to be more 'efficient' means you cheat yourself out of important thought and discovery processes that drive creativity, innovation, and utimately things that make you win.

Unsolicited #SEO tip: How do I know whether it is okay to use AI to write my content end to end? I have one simple rule of thumb for that ⤵️ 

Would your user be disappointed to know what they are reading was written by AI? If yes, then it is one of the strongest signals not to use AI in this way. Two examples:

😒 "Expert-written" guide to SEO. I would stop reading if I knew it was written by AI (I could also just ask AI myself!). This would be an example of when not to use AI.

😁 A summary of 2,600 reviews for a product. Perfect! I don't mind that AI produced this, it's a great use case, and it is helpful to me to see on average what people like/dislike about a product. I'm not bothered a human didn't write it.

Unsolicited #SEO tip: The Google exploit we found showed Google classifies almost all queries into one of eight 'refined query semantic classes', they are:

🌟 Short fact
🌟 Bool (short for Boolean – yes/no questions)
🌟 Other
🌟 Instruction
🌟 Definition
🌟 Reason
🌟 Comparison
🌟 Consequence

I fine-tuned DistilBERT model trained on 4.8M queries so you can see how Google classifies queries; and made it a free tool for you. 🤝 

Link to tool in comments, along with more info. Have fun! [click "recent" and scroll on comments if LinkedIn is being difficult]. ⤵️

A screenshot of a web tool titled "Refined Query Semantic Class Classifier" by Mark Williams-Cook. It shows a text input field with five search queries and a "Prediction Results" table below it. The table classifies the queries into semantic categories: "dog leads" as OTHER, "how to train a dog to sit" as INSTRUCTION, "are dogs better pets than cats?" as COMPARISON, "how long does it talk to walk around chester zoo?" as SHORT_FACT, and "does protein help build muscle?" as BOOL.

In no particular order, here are some brilliant women I know in the SEO space outside of the Candour team, who are all amazing:

🌟 Bengü Sarıca Dinçer - analytics and measurement queen
🌟 Giulia Panozzo - applying actual science to search
🌟 chima mmeje🏳️‍🌈 - FCDC founder, always lifting others
🌟 Areej AbuAli - Founder of Women in Tech SEO
🌟 Yagmur Simsek - Search 'n' Stuff Founder (among 1000 other things)
🌟 Tamara Novitović - Knows everything worthwhile on link building
🌟 Shelley Walsh - OG who runs brilliant IMHO YouTube SEO channel
🌟 Dawn Anderson - One of the most knowledge SEOs on IR in the field
🌟 Natalia Witczyk - International expert with recent focus on China
🌟 Aleyda Solís - It's Aleyda :D she runs SEOFOMO
🌟 Emina Demiri - Brilliant speaker on ethnical AI use in search
🌟 Eva Mermingi - Founder of Athens SEO (you're going right?)
🌟 Laura Iancu - Apart from fantastic SEO, amazing photographer
🌟 Lily Ray - Consistently great analysis, sense and strategy
🌟 Iva Jovanovic - Heap space/con and Belgrade SEO organiser & 188
🌟 Faezeh Shafiee - Super-experienced content specialist
🌟 Alison Moss - Don't get much more SEO XP than working in igaming
🌟 Gokce Yesilbas - Great speaker doing TR search content on YT
🌟 Jo O'Reilly - Digital PR powerhouse (and SearchNorwich speaker :D)
🌟 Gabi Troxler - Founder of the double-inverted pyramid
🌟 Jo Furnival - The mastermind of the Sitebulb content you see
🌟 Jo Juliana Turnbull - Organiser of many things, including SearchLondon
🌟 Muskan Singh 🐸 - Freelance content strategy and writing for B2B SaaS
🌟 Dena Warren - Ecommerce SEO bod and recent SWC guest
🌟 Nikki Pilkington - Antidote for a lot of the SEO space
🌟 Louise L. - Ahrefs content and someone I want to see speak!
🌟 Clara Soteras Acosta - News SEO and Discover

The post is full, sorry if I missed you and huge thanks to all the brilliant women here - feel free to tag people in the comments I missed! 🫶

Unsolicited #SEO tip: The best optimisation tip for JavaScript is, if you don’t *need* to use JS, then don’t 🙂 via Martin Splitt at last year's Tech SEO Summit

A photograph of a presentation slide at a technical conference titled "JS Perf Tip #1." The main text humorously states, "Don't use JavaScript*," followed by a small-print disclaimer: "*) If you see this as a screenshot, there's context missing." The background features a desert landscape with an animal skull, and the bottom of the slide includes the hashtag #techseosummit.

taplio

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