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.

Mark Williams-Cook

Candour

Candour. We create beautifully effective brands, websites and marketing.

Our mission is to help companies make our clients the first choice for their customers.

Digital Marketing Director

TopDog Harnesses

Designer harnesses for dogs. UK-based e-commerce.

Owner

Alsoasked

The best People Ask research tool on the planet.

Founder at AlsoAsked

YouTube

I was invited in the first year of the programme to become a YouTube partner. One of my videos produced 88 million views and was one of the top 10 of all time comedy videos on YouTube.

Cats are really popular on the internet.

Partner

AFK Apparel

AFK (Away From Keyboard) Apparel is a fashion label aimed primarily at gamers. It is an e-commerce business I have started with the aim of doing a couple of things I enjoy  and raising some money for charity at the same time.

AFK works with local businesses for production and with designers from USA, Canada, France and the UK with a revenue split on their used designs. 

As of 2017, AFK exclusively sells on the Game.co.uk marketplace.

Managing Director

Selesti

I came into Selesti to lead the digital marketing team after acquisition of OMG Search.

During my 18 months, I doubled the revenue of the marketing department and tripled profits through negotiating better contracts with suppliers, increasing efficiency with new in-house processes and winning new key clients for digital marketing such as Hitachi DMG.

I was instrumental in the expansion of the Selesti team, finding new talent and planning the strategic growth of the department with the senior management team.

Digital Director

Digerati Marketing Ltd

I started a search blog giving the most straight-up advice and tutorials I could offer. At its peak I had a readership of  over 9,000 subscribers and developed some of the first web-based SEO tools which were very successful.

At Digerati I also partnered with a developer and produced 'AutoStumble' which was one of the first blackhat social media tools, trading over 1 million StumbleUpon votes.

Digerati persists as a holding company for various web business I have created and sold.

SiteVisibility

I took this interim position and helped scope out the business requirement for what eventually became two roles at SiteVisibility. I continued to work for SiteVisibility on a freelance consultancy basis until early 2014.

Head of SEO

Emperor Divers

A break from the tech world, teaching diving and first aid courses to a professional grade. Guiding certified divers and helping people overcome challenges.

PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer

Further Search Marketing

Identifying opportunities within our sector, directing the company's search marketing department alongside our overall business plan.

Search Marketing Director

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
🗣️ Founder of AlsoAsked - a search intent research SaaS tool
🐕 Co-owner of TopDog Harnesses - a UK-based e-commerce business
🎲 Working on Candour's content websites

𝐎𝐧 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐝𝐈𝐧, 𝐈'𝐦 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫:
💌 Core Updates SEO newsletter (It's free https://coreupdates.com)
💭 Daily 'unsolicited' SEO tips (You can see over 500 in my bio link)
👨‍🏫 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 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.

Happy "Cloudflare is fucked again and your clients will no doubt blame you personally" day

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

A screenshot of the Cloudflare System Status page displaying a prominent red headline reading "Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues." Below, an incident report for November 18, 2025, lists a timeline of updates. The most recent update at 12:21 UTC states, "We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts." Previous entries describe an investigation into widespread 500 errors and API failures starting at 11:48 UTC.

SEO updates you ✨NEED✨ to know [10 November]:

📉 CTR drops by 61% when AI Overviews are present and 41% even when AIOs aren't present​. This study by Seer Interactive demonstrates the continuing effects that AIOs are having on both organic and paid CTRs. via Tracy McDonald at Seer Interactive

📊 ​GA4 adds new date ranges; 'last month', 'this month' and 'quarter to date' for reports​. GA4 has added some helpful new reporting features and these specific date ranges have been requested for a long time! via Kyle Rushton McGregor

🕵️ Google tests new agentic features for AI Mode in Labs​. We've seen a version of the event ticket booking previously; these new features have expanded to include making beauty & wellness appointments. via Robby Stein

❓​Google announces deprecation of 'Practice problem (Quiz)' structured data​. This is the latest structured data losing support because of Google's ongoing 'simplifying search results' project.

📰 ​The VP of Product for Google Search recommends digital PR for AI search​. Robby Stein stated that AI "thinks a lot like a person" and that getting mentioned in high-quality article is "useful for the AI to find". via Marina Mogilko

😵 ​Google's Preferred Sources tool is full of spammy sites​. This relatively new feature is supposed to highlight high-quality sites so users can easily find them again, but it appears to be full of spam sites instead. via Roger Montti

🤖 ​ChatGPT's agent mode used Bing API for results 92% of the time​ and selected the top result 63% of the time, with 46% of visits beginning in reading mode, using a text-based browser, according to a new study. via Jes Scholz

💌 If you like this kind of tl;dr news, I curate and send them out weekly to over 12,000 SEOs on the Core Updates newsletter, along with 5 'solicited' SEO tips and a deep dive podcast, this week Jacob Cass 🦩 is talking to Jack Chambers-Ward about what to do when you lose 95% of your traffic 😱 

Links to everything in my first comment (click "Recent" and scroll, because LinkedIn)

A graphic with a bright blue background. It reads "CORE UPDATES" in large, orange 3D-style text, with "FOR SEO professionals" written below in a smaller, italic yellow font.

Unsolicited #SEO tip: When you see people telling you to ditch SEO tools, content teams, or build business-critical workflows with GenAI, consider this:

OpenAI's flagship model, one of the most advanced on the planet, only last week got the "ability" to not use em-dashes *after you've specifically told it not to*. 🤦‍♂️ 

This is the same model that was touted as "PhD-level knowledge in any subject".

Let that sink in. This is what you're going to trust?


A screenshot of a tweet from Sam Altman (@sama), posted on Nov 14.

The tweet text says: "Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do!"

The post has 3.3K comments, 2.5K retweets, 29K likes, and 6.7M views.

Semrush being purchased by Adobe 🫠 ($1.9Bn)

🫷 Do not miss the best opportunity (27 left) to improve your search knowledge and network next year. The best conference of 2026 is doing a zero-risk community crowd fund so you can get in super cheap 👀 

Search 'n Stuff Antalya is happening 1-4 October 2026 which has been my favourite conference for the last two years running, and here's why:

🤝 Most importantly for me, Search 'n Stuff is backed by the most helpful community I've ever been a part of. I've made some really good friends that have helped me massively, and everyone is so welcoming. This year I had the pleasure of seeing and hanging out with Elias Dabbas, Gabi Troxler, Metehan Yeşilyurt, Dixon Jones, Aleyda Solís and many others 🫶 

👨‍🏫 Some of the best speakers in the world, whether it's Arnout Hellemans sharing his experience of working with clients, Dawn Anderson talking about IR, or Andy Chadwick explaining how they bootsrapped a successful SaaS. It's also amazing being able to have professional live translation for English ↔️ Turkish so everyone can talk about the presentations afterwards.

🏨 The location both years has been amazing. 5 star all-inclusive hotels by the beach. Although it did make getting back from lunch on time a challenge sometimes (Arnout and I made it, even if we didn't have time to change out of swimmers! 🩳 😂 )

I'd love to see more people go next year. You can support the crowdfunding edition and get a 1 person ticket for 700 euros or a 2 person ticket for 1,000 euros, which includes both the conference ticket and the stay in the hotel, which is ridiculously good value.

If you sponsor, speak, or the event doesn't go ahead, that cost comes off - so go ahead and sign up on the link in my comment and see you there! 😎 

📷 Bengu Sarica Dincer

Happy to be featured in this year's Moz roundup, alongside some cracking experts like Garrett Sussman, Ramona Joita, Dave Cousin, Success Olagboye, Melissa Popp, Tom Capper, Dr. Pete Meyers, Jono Alderson, Emina Demiri and many more ✨ 

I was giving advice about brands being able to dig into the web searches that are happening in the background with LLMs.

Link in comments [click "Recent"] and scroll if you're struggling to find it.

A promotional graphic for "2026 SEO TRENDS" from Moz, featuring expert Mark Williams-Cook. The text "Top Predictions From Industry Experts" is shown, along with Mark's name, title "Digital Marketing Director," and company "Candour." His headshot is in a circular frame on a purple and blue background.

Unsolicited #SEO tip: Terrified of Javascript? You're not alone, so many SEOs reach out for guidance on all sorts of topics from hydration to auditing to LLMs. Need a great resource? ⤵️ 

You're in luck! Will Kennard has put together a great website with examples, checklists, and guides at js-seo[dot]org

(He's also a pretty great speaker too.. International Search Summit)

I love how Tom Fishburne gets to the heart of so many marketing issues. I've encountered this weird "b2b perception" so many times in my career, as if you are literally marketing to some giant organisation beast. Humans work in businesses, and appreciate humour, candour, and all the things that b2c enjoy.

Have a good weekend, humans! 💙

A comic strip by Tom Fishburne (marketoonist.com) shows four people sitting around a conference table. One person on the left is speaking, holding papers, and says: "Since this is a B2B marketing campaign, remember to make it really, really boring." The other three people look bored, indifferent, or slightly annoyed, also holding papers. Two laptops are visible on the table.

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