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.

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.

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

It's amazing how many Shopify stores we review have an empty or inconsistent product-type field.

product-type is used by Shopify’s Google app to connect to Merchant Center, and many feed apps as a key input.

It can also be used for automated collections logic, and is becoming more important as AI driven shopping tools like ChatGPT need a consistent way to understand what a product actually is. 

You don’t need a full PIM to fix it (but obviously for bigger stores this does help a lot), just agree a clear taxonomy, standardise product_type, and use it consistently across merchandising and marketing.

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

Check me out being controversial! Most unlike me, I'm effectively the beige Power Ranger on LinkedIn. 

Anyway, I do stand by this. If you're a Shopify store with a large catalogue doing 5 million plus a year, you're much better focusing on things like taxonomy, structure and product data to improve organic revenue than link building. 

These are activities that are in your control and are completely scalable, as well as supporting other channels like paid and improving user experience overall.

Co-Founder Loxa - protecting all retail customers, everywhere | Host of the Retail is Detail Podcast | Exited Founder React News

Is 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 the most overhyped growth hack in ecommerce?

When I asked Sam Wright what tactic he thought was overrated, his answer was instant.

“𝙇𝙞𝙣𝙠 𝙗𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜. 𝙄 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙞𝙩 𝙨𝙤 𝙢𝙪𝙘𝙝, 𝙄 𝙗𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙩 𝙖 𝙗𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙬𝙚 𝙙𝙤𝙣’𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙙𝙤 𝙞𝙩.”

Sam argues that while 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 works for SaaS brands in tight competitive niches, it adds little value for large catalogue retailers. For those with thousands of products, structured taxonomy and rich product data will always outperform backlinks in the long run.

So why do so many Shopify stores still get sold on link building as the silver bullet?

💬 Do you agree with Sam? Is 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 dead for ecommerce, or still worth the time and spend?

🎧 Watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify and Retail is Detail Website.

#retailisdetailpodcast
#retail
#ecommerce

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.

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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