Tony Cooper's weekly notes on search, websites and growth for UK businesses. 64 issues, all of them below.
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Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs, and the developers who build its software are on the list. Why I think that's good news for a small business, written up on tonycooper.co.uk.
Read the full issue →Every issue, newest first, written by Tony Cooper.
Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs, and the developers who build its software are on the list. Why I think that's good news for a small business, written up on tonycooper.co.uk.
Two shops moved from Wix to Shopify on 16 October. The design is what you see on launch day. Whether a Shopify migration worked depends on what came across underneath it: the customers, the stock, the reviews, and every old address Google already knew.
My homepage climbed from 24 to 12 for the search I most want to win, while Search Console's figure for that search fell from 22 to 30. The gap was other pages of mine that Google tried instead, and the check that shows it takes 2 minutes.
Crossdock is the practice I've built for UK merchants whose growth has outrun the back office: the move to Shopify Plus, stock control across warehouses and channels, and accounts that tie without a month-end fight. It starts with a 7-question systems review.
In 1982 a British engineer got a computer into ordinary bedrooms by making it cheap, and the cheapness forced a discipline that outlasted the machine by forty years. I spent a year building a way of working with AI and then found every good idea in it already sitting in that box.
A search can put your page at the top of Google for three months, send 333 impressions, and produce no clicks at all — because the impressions were rank-tracking software belonging to your competitors. What that looks like in Search Console, and the three checks that separate an audience from a machine.
Search Console opens on a 90-day average, and a 90-day average describes a page as it was rather than as it is. The same page read 45 on the default view and 25 on last week — two numbers which came out of the same account, on the same morning, and both offering opposite decisions.
A year of building a business on AI, and the lesson is not the one the tools are sold on. The work got faster. Deciding what was worth doing did not — and the gap between those two things is where a year can quietly go.
A page can sit on the first page of Google thousands of times and produce no clicks at all. The obvious culprit in 2026 is the AI Overview — and when it was tested against a search that clicks perfectly well, that explanation fell over. What the numbers showed instead, and the ten-minute check worth running on your own site.
When one of your emails doesn't arrive, nothing tells you — no bounce, no alert, no red light anywhere. The customer who never replied looks exactly like one who lost interest, and sometimes she never got your email at all. Two minutes to find out whether yours are landing, and what to do if you can't get a date.
I sat down to file my company's corporation tax return this year and the free service I'd always used had shut for good. Here's what it costs to keep a small limited company on the register now — and the one deadline this year that turns into a real problem if you ignore it.
For a fortnight, the only change on one client's website was twenty-one internal links. No new pages, no rewrites, nothing else. Then the rankings moved — and the pages we hadn't touched stayed put. What that accidental experiment proves about the cheapest lever in SEO.
I've cut how often my retainer clients hear from me — in half, on purpose — and it's the opposite of a cutback. Why I moved my main service tier from weekly to fortnightly, and why frequency was never the thing that mattered.
I built a research tool this year to stop me guessing what a client's website needs. Its first real job proved the site plan it was checking had copied a competitor's mistake — and found a gap nobody had spotted.
It's my birthday, so this one's a bit different. A rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum, a program typed in line by line from a magazine, and the reason — forty years on — I still build the way I do for the people I work with.
It's my birthday — and by the office rule, that means I'm the one bringing cake. So here's mine: Daniel Stanica's study of 100 once-successful blogs, what happened to them, and what it means for any business that lives on Google.
Two quotes for the same Shopify shop, a thousand pounds apart, both saying the same three words. Here's what the extra actually buys — and how to tell a builder from a decorator.
I've built a professional website for every trade — plumbers, electricians, cleaners, carpenters and more — at £49 a month. Whether it's for a project of your own or a tradesperson you know, here are the actual sites you can look at right now.
Anthropic have shipped Claude Fable 5 — the most capable model they've ever made, a tier above anything before it — and this week I switched my whole system over to it. Every client gets the upgrade the same morning. Nobody gets an invoice for it. Here's what that means in plain English, and why it's the whole reason I built the business this way.
Google your own business and read the listings properly. Your phone number is probably written three ways, your address two, your name in a couple of versions — and Google can't tell which is the real you. That inconsistency quietly costs you map pack rankings. This week I wrote down what local citations are, why the cheap fixes make it worse, and how I actually clean it up.
Search your own trade in your own town and look at the map pack. The firm on top has forty-three reviews. You've got three — and the call is mostly decided before either of you has spoken. That gap doesn't close with an app. It closes with a six-week system, and this week I wrote down the one I build for every client.
Operators keep hitting the token wall four turns into an AI session and blaming the model. The real problem is the physics they were taught. A short new piece, and the stance that fixes it.
A customer in Aberdeenshire paid £4.99 to ship an order that cost the store £14.99 to deliver. The receipt looked fine. The leak was one layer up — in the rate decision the customer never made consciously. Here's how to find it on any UK Shopify store in five minutes.
I sell Astro builds. I also tell roughly one in five small business owners who ask me to leave WordPress that they should stay where they are. Here's how I tell which twenty percent they're in, and the three questions that decide it.
A page on my site spent ninety days being shown to nine hundred people and earning a single click. The page wasn't broken. The title was. Here's how I found it, and what I changed.
When you migrate from one platform to another, your organic traffic dips while Google works out where you've gone. Paid traffic is the safety net. If nobody plans for it, the net breaks at the moment you need it most.
One line of code was telling Google that every page on a client's website lived at a domain that didn't exist. The site looked fine. You'd have no idea. Google believed the line.
I built a second site this week. There were two audiences arriving at one address looking for different things, and I was serving neither well.
The tools are identical. Everyone has access to the same platforms, the same integrations, the same capabilities. The businesses that win aren't the ones with better tools — they're the ones that built something underneath.
I've built a ticket system for client requests. Every email, every change, every 'can you just...' — logged, tracked, and visible. Nothing sits in an inbox hoping someone remembers it.
Your rankings shifted. Traffic is down. You log into Google Analytics — nothing obvious. You log into Search Console — impressions dropped but you don't know why. You log into SEMrush — the numbers moved but the tool can't tell you what caused it. Each platform shows you a piece. None of them show you the picture.
Every platform you use has a dashboard. Every dashboard has a login. Every login has a 2FA code. And somewhere between the third password reset and the fourth authentication app, you stopped doing the work you sat down to do.
Code is a commodity. The thinking is the price of entry. AI solved execution -- but knowing what to build, when to build it, and who should build it is the skill that separates businesses that grow from businesses that spin.
Eleven template websites for tradespeople, all ranking in Google within days of going live. No ads, no backlinks, no tricks. Here's the real data from Google Search Console.
Most Google Ads campaigns waste money because nobody looked at the data. I analysed 13,682 search terms from five years of campaigns to rebuild one from scratch. Here's what I found.
I've been running my business through AI every day for a year. Not dabbling - building, shipping, serving clients. Here's the architecture that emerged.
Most agencies charge thousands upfront for a website you'll outgrow in two years. There's a better way: £49/month, no upfront costs, and a site that actually gets maintained.
Most business websites have SEO issues hiding in plain sight - missing titles, broken links, duplicate content. I'll find them for free. Then fix them for £497.
Forget mockups and promises. Here are four trade websites running on £49/month. Click them. Check the speed. See what your business could look like by Friday.
I just launched janahelps.co.uk - a cleaning company that was paying Wix £31/month for slow loading and platform lock-in. Now she's on the same infrastructure as major tech companies.
New year energy fades fast. That website you've been meaning to sort? Here's the reality: from first conversation to live site in one week. £49/month. No setup fee.
January 1st. Most inboxes are full of 'new year, new me' fluff. Here's something actually useful instead - what happens when you bet your business on stock.
Everyone's talking about AI replacing jobs. Here's what happened when I spent a year building a boutique digital agency alongside an AI partner - the wins, the failures, and what's genuinely different now.
Most dashboards show you what you want to hear. Followers, impressions, traffic - numbers that feel good but change nothing. Here's how to build a dashboard that shows you what you need to know: capacity metrics that reveal whether your business can handle what's coming.
Most agencies scale by hiring more people and hoping quality survives. Here's the capacity validation approach: perfect at N clients, test at N+1, improve constraints, repeat. Event-based milestones, not arbitrary timelines.
Restaurant kitchens don't wing it - they prep everything before service begins. Here's how I apply mise en place protocols to deliver client work systematically, and why this only works at boutique scale.
AI is stateless, so it starts every session from zero - and documentation doesn't enforce behaviour. Here's how I built systematic intelligence through 542 wiki pages that give AI operational consciousness in one command.
Last week I explained what AI can't do. This week: how metaphors solve the strategic drift problem. The Palantír, The Conductor, The Monday Service - this is infrastructure for thought.
SQLite handles 304 tables and complete financial tracking without complaints. But AI can't make strategic decisions, maintain client relationships, or know when boring technology is wrong. Here's what actually requires human expertise.
Django has 20 years of training data. SQLite is simple enough that AI understands it perfectly. Astro components are predictable. Tailwind utilities compose naturally. That's why boring technology wins in the AI era.
Prompt engineering isn't about precise specifications. It's applied pattern recognition with verbal flourish. The AI has seen HubSpot thousands of times. Just ask for it.
Astro, Tailwind, Django, SQLite - the unsexy technologies that let AI development tools deliver 40x velocity. When pattern recognition works, innovation becomes predictable.
Enterprise-grade Astro websites for £49/month - laughably equivalent to two UK pub pints per week. The Escudero Auto case study that proves modern tooling delivers better results at incredible pricing.
Transparency as competitive moat - publishing 18 versions, 316 commits, and 90 days of continuous improvement while competitors hide imperfections
Inside the architectural transformation that enables multiple developers, microservices preparation, API versioning, and white-label deployment - scaling from £1,294 MRR to £15k MRR
Inside look at the production-ready SEO intelligence platform that manages client portfolios and delivers enterprise-grade capabilities
How building a business platform is exactly like playing Zelda - every level unlocks the next inevitable challenge
How building my own reporting system transformed client relationships and why custom beats generic every time
How tool addiction was killing productivity and client delivery - the wake-up call that changed everything
Everything in SEO flows from getting the RIGHT 20 keywords - not 200, not 2000. Plus why Carlos at Escudero Auto chose my Ignite plan to transform his online presence.
How I discovered AI agents aren't different programmes - they're the same brain wearing different specs. And why that changes everything for your business.
Everything I've learned about AI development in 3 months. Plus: Real client wins and the exact prompts that work.
How I ditched Ahrefs (£199), SEMrush (£190), BrightLocal (£45), and ContentStudio (£75) to build my own unified platform that actually delivers results.
How I'm building features in 90 minutes that previously took days. Plus: Why I ditched Wix for Astro.