Helping your business grow through SEO & PPC.

Sacha Redler

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.

Very happy to say Candour is a Scholarship Sponsor for Women in Tech SEO Fest in London next year. This helps cover the cost of tickets for those that otherwise might not be able to attend 🫶

Pleasure to be alongside great people like Google, SISTRIX, SEOFOMO and Oncrawl 🤝

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

Candour logo in black text, centered on a light pink background with a colorful, abstract border. In the top left corner is a small logo that reads, "://WOMEN IN TECH SEO/ FESTIVAL London." In the top right corner, a pink banner reads, "SCHOLARSHIP SPONSOR."

LinkedIn sending you notifications to get you to try Premium:


A still from The Simpsons shows the character Nelson Muntz, a young boy with brown hair and a perpetually sullen expression, sitting at a desk in a classroom. He is intensely reading a crumpled piece of paper in his hands, which has the text "GUESS WHO LIKES YOU." written across the bottom of the image as a caption for his action.

Unsolicited #SEO tip: Having an HSTS-enabled site means that browsers won't even try and access the non-https version, you'll simply see a "307" redirect (which is done locally by the browser). This can be tricky if you're trying to diagnose issues. You can actually use Screaming Frog to test what is happening behind the 307 redirects by disabling "Respect HSTS" policy in Configuration > Spider > Advanced 💡

A screenshot of the "Advanced" tab within a "Spider Configuration" software window. The screen shows a list of checkboxes and configuration options for a web crawler. The visible options include:

Cookie Storage (Dropdown, set to "Session Only")

Ignore Non-Indexable URLs for Issues (Checked)

Ignore Paginated URLs for Duplicate Filters (Checked)

Always Follow Redirects (Unchecked)

Always Follow Canonicals (Unchecked)

Respect noindex (Unchecked)

Respect Canonicals (Unchecked)

Respect Next/Prev (Unchecked)

Respect HSTS Policy (Unchecked, with the mouse cursor hovering over it, highlighting it in a red outline)

Respect Self Referencing Meta Refresh (Unchecked)

Extract Images from srcset Attribute (Unchecked)

Crawl Fragment Identifiers (Unchecked)

Perform HTML Validation (Checked)

Response Timeout (secs) (Input field, set to 20)

5xx Response Retries (Input field, set to 0)

The bottom right corner has an "OK" button.

Google’s December 2025 Core Update has started rolling out, and may take 3 weeks to complete. May the odds ever be in your favour! 🪄

The Google search status dashboard announcing the December 2025 core update 

2025 is nearly over, so we can officially say that Search 'n Stuff was the best SEO conference of the year. If you weren't there, the video below will give you all the FOMO.

If you were in the room, you already know. Unmatched community; world class speakers, and the best accommodation going.

There is a little while left on Early Bird pricing to get budget approval for 2026. The great news? It's coming to both London and Antalya this year.

Don't wait.

SEO updates you ✨NEED✨ to know [15 December]:

⚠️ ​Google's December 2025 core update begins rolling out. As is tradition, Google announces their latest core update just in time for Christmas. The rollout began on 11th December 2025 and may take up to 3 weeks to complete.

📊 ​Google introduces social channels in Google Search Console. This allows users to find clicks, impressions and trending data in the GSC Insights report. This is rolling out for a limited number of sites but may expand in the future.

🔗 ​Google increases the number of inline links in AI Mode. This update includes a slight redesign of the link previews to highlight them more clearly. This, in theory, should increase CTR for links in AI Mode.

📰 ​Google rolls out Preferred Sources globally and adds 'Spotlighting subscriptions' feature. The Spotlighting feature allows you to prioritise your favourite publishers in a dedicated carousel. via Glenn Gabe

📇 ​OpenAI quietly builds an index of webpages and search results. From the Web Search Tool API documentation, it seems that ChatGPT Search uses cached/indexed results for certain answers. via Jérôme Salomon

🕺 ​Google Labs launches Disco, an experimental way to build workflows in your browser. Disco's first feature is GenTabs which can take your open tabs and align them to specific goals you have in mind. via Dan Hinckley

🗣️ ​Google upgrades Live with Search to include Gemini's latest Native Audio. This allows Search Live to respond with a more natural-sounding, expressive voice when providing answers or tips to the user.

💌 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 the awesome Amanda King is talking to Jack Chambers-Ward about using topics, not keywords.

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

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The Battle

Sacha Redler

Mark Williams-Cook

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taplio

The Battle

Sacha Redler

Mark Williams-Cook

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Mark Williams-Cook's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreMark Williams-Cook's LinkedIn Performance