Over the past year or so, I’ve seen a significant increase in the number of businesses affected by Google algorithmic and manual actions. In most cases, these actions are the result of activities carried out to try to increase performance – either directly in search results, or to indirectly influence AI and generative LLMs. In […]
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The moment you stop investing in brand and lean entirely on performance, you start converting demand you’re no longer creating. That’s the reality check from Lottie Norman, VP of Brand Transformation and Strategy at The Travel Corporation, who joined SALT’s Reza Moaiandin on the latest episode of Flipping the Playbook. For CMOs navigating commoditised markets, […]
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Every CMO knows the feeling. A new technology emerges that promises (or threatens) to reshape your marketing strategy. But the path forward isn’t clear. The metrics aren’t standardised. The benefits are still largely theoretical. AI search is the latest disruption demanding attention, nagging you to do something. Perhaps the safe move is to wait. Marketers […]
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Last week I received an email from an agency trying to sell me content marketing services. The tone assumed a level of familiarity that did not exist. The note was full of punctuation and grammar errors. The company tried to school me on why I should be investing in original content which they could create […]
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On paper, everything seems fine. Your content calendar is full, webinars are scheduled, LinkedIn posts go out like clockwork, and you’re publishing blogs with reassuring regularity. So, why is nothing happening? You’re seeing no increase in leads. No meaningful differentiation. No real change in the market. Just more content being diligently created, published, and then lost in the […]
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AI search is not simply a new interface layered on top of traditional ranking systems. It represents a structural shift in how answers are constructed, how brands are surfaced, and how visibility is measured. With Bing now exposing AI performance data inside Bing Webmaster Tools, the industry is being forced to confront a more complex […]
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Creating separate Markdown-only versions of your website for AI crawlers is unlikely to deliver the results you’re hoping for. You will get far better results by improving your main HTML pages, their structure, and their data signals, rather than trying to serve special bot only content. The appeal of markdown for AI crawlers The idea […]
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The minute you cut off an affiliate that’s bringing you customers and traffic you cannot reach without them, you burn that relationship and they put your competitors there instead. That’s the stark warning from Adam Riemer, marketing strategist, keynote speaker, and columnist, in a recent discussion with Reza Moaiandin on the Flipping the Playbook podcast. It’s a reality check that will have […]
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Content teams are always busy. When they’re not writing blogs, scheduling social posts, or sending out newsletters, they’re researching topics for their next projects. On paper, everything your content team is doing looks and feels productive. But when your leadership team asks what that work is achieving, the answer is sometimes unclear. Traffic and engagement […]
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For over a decade, agencies have trained their clients and stakeholders to equate traffic and rankings with SEO success. But AI search has fundamentally changed how discovery works. The nature of this shift is a big reminder to CMOs, marketers and SEOs that higher rankings and increased traffic are just tactics. While they contribute to a genuine business outcome, they’re not outcomes in themselves. The real objective is brand visibility; ensuring your brand is in front of the right audience with the […]
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SEO strategies don’t usually fail because of poor insight. They fail because fixes don’t get implemented. Every unimplemented SEO fix is a compounding tax on your marketing budget. Regular SEO audits can highlight critical issues and provide you with a list of actions and fixes to improve search performance and address problems with your site, but improving performance relies on being able to […]
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The em dash has emerged as an unlikely villain in marketing circles. According to a growing chorus of voices on Reddit and LinkedIn, this humble punctuation mark is a telltale sign of AI-generated content, prompting writers to debate whether to use the em dash at all. But is it though? Here at SALT, we’ve had internal discussions around whether we should abandon the em dash, lest our […]
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