Tim Capper

Did you know Google’s "Businesses" label on a Map Pack means your call button has a 99% chance of disappearing? 🤯 This report from @SmallBizEdge is the best data I’ve seen on this yet. Have you checked your niche's label lately? 🔗 smallbizedge.com/reports/map-pa…

Ultra-Practical Local SEO Tasks AI Can Help You With localvisibilitysystem.com/2026/03/16/ult…

SEMrush is unveiling a new brand identity, but has not clarified whether it is pronounced S.E.M or SEM 😂 semrush.com/news/450099-se…

Is Google taking news publishers' traffic away? Sweet mother of media, are they ever. From 2023-2025, referrals from search dropped by almost HALF. Brutal. Insulting. Infuriating. And ironic given that Google is certainly training its AI answers on publishers' work. 🙄

Today marks 16 years since the attempt to trademark 'SEO' was blocked. @Rhea spent two years and ~$17,000 fighting Jason Gambert, who essentially wanted control over who could sell SEO™ as a service. People fairly new to SEO might not know about this story and what a legend she is, so I've shared it on this day for the last few years. In the past, Rhea has also made sure to credit Sarah Bird, Jonathan Hochman, Matthew Foster, and @mvandemar for their part in the victory.

As promised, the climate science obliteration has arrived TODAY. The IPCC's central claims have now been torn apart. The oceans are not “warming” let alone “boiling.” That claim is false. The claimed Earth Energy Imbalance is false. It's no different from zero. Full demolition: Cohler et al. (2026) IPCC's Earth Energy Imbalance Assessment is Based on Physically Invalid Argo-Float-Based Estimates of Global Ocean Heat Content doi.org/10.5281/zenodo… Press Release: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo… Easy-to-Read Summary: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo…

@MarkPreston1969 About right, I'd say

In your opinion, is this #SEO salary table an accurate reflection of reality? (SEO Salary Guide Outside of London)

Calm down already G

@RupertLowe10 Could you bin MTD too, just started this year, and I am wasting so much time with quarterly submissions + my final 5th self-assessment. Thanks

Sole traders. Micro businesses with one or two employees. Freelancers. Plumbers. Electricians. Hairdressers. Mechanics. Accountants. Gardeners. Whatever it is, whoever they are. These are the workers that keep the economy going. Not the big global corporates. Politicians, and those devising the rules, simply do not understand how these people live. Nobody ever even talks about the one or two people operations in Westminster. Saturday morning in the bureaucrat’s world? Friday working from home, so nice easy day to finish off the week. Laptop closed by 15.00. Phone off for the weekend, not a care in the world. Life is sweet. Holiday coming up, mortgage comfortable, pension growing nicely. The sole trader? Getting invoices and paperwork sorted at 6am before the children wake up. Chasing up late payments. Weighing up whether to do that last minute emergency call out, or spend time with the kids on a Saturday. Getting the diary sorted for next week. Phone goes and goes all weekend. It is never-ending. It does not stop. It’s two different worlds honestly. The issue is that the latter entirely funds the former, and the former is hellbent on making life as difficult as possible for productive Britain. I want to be really clear about what Restore Britain would do. Two things. Crush parasitic Britain. Unleash productive Britain. First. Scrap IR35. It has created years of confusion, fear and chaos for contractors and small operators. It has pushed countless self-employed people into pointless paperwork and rigid inflexibility. Doesn’t work. It’s a right pain in the arse for millions. Scrap it. Second, we will double the VAT threshold. The current threshold traps thousands of small businesses just as they begin to grow. Many deliberately stop expanding to avoid the enormous administrative burden of VAT and the brutal cost hikes which drive demand away. The evidence of is obvious. Thousands hover just below the threshold, refusing to grow, hire or pay more tax. It is ABSURD. Restore Britain would double the VAT threshold so small businesses can grow without being punished for success. This is absolutely necessary. An important one - we would dramatically simplify the tax system for sole traders and micro-businesses (and everyone else, but that's separate). Instead of forcing small operators through pages of complicated accounting rules designed for large corporations, we will introduce a far simplified tax regime for businesses below a certain size. Less paperwork, fewer forms, clearer rules. More money for them, less for the accountants and parasitic professional class. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? Next. We will end the endless culture of inspections and bureaucratic interference from the bureaucrats. Too many small businesses now live in fear of accidental breaches - whether it’s health and safety nonsense, employment law complexity, ridiculous data laws or constantly changing compliance requirements. The stress is immense. If you are a sole trader or micro-business acting in good faith, the system should support you, not threaten you. Restore Britain will free them from endless regulatory suffocation. The mental health release on that is worth it alone. Means a lot to me, this one. Restore Britain will make it easier for tradespeople to hire apprentices. This is important. One of the biggest problems small businesses face is bringing in the next generation. The current system is too complicated, too expensive and too rigid for small firms. Restore Britain will introduce simple, flexible apprenticeship schemes designed specifically for small businesses and trades. Up next, we will simplify planning and licensing rules. For small builders, tradespeople and contractors - planning restrictions and local bureaucracy can delay work for months and add unnecessary costs. I detest planning departments more than I can describe in language appropriate for a Saturday morning. These jumped-up empire-building little runts running councils across Britain will have their power stripped away from them. We will let people do business, we will let business owners run their businesses without the sneering council worker’s constant box ticking. Not complicated. We will restore respect for the self-employed. Look at how they were treated during lockdown. Like dirt. Entirely abandoned whilst others were paid to do nothing. That must be addressed, and they must be compensated. The excluded must finally be recognised. That wrong must be rectified. Under a Restore Britain Government, their efforts will be appreciated, celebrated and most importantly? Rewarded. This is the key point. Let’s not pretend otherwise. The five golden rules of business. What’s in it for me? We will radically slash tax and raise thresholds. Tax on dividends would be hacked down so that success pays. More work, pays. Effort, pays. If the electrician does that last minute job on a Saturday, it will be worth their time. They will be rewarded, not HMRC. Restore Britain will slash the bureaucracy, simplify the rules, cut the taxes. We will give small businesses the freedom they need to thrive, to support their families and to succeed. Parasitic Britain will end. Sole traders and micro businesses finally have a political party that will fight for them. Restore Britain.

Great article from @dawnieando debunking some SEO industry myths about AI and GEO. Dawn is one of the few SEOs who actually understand the information retrieval level of SEO and AI. womenintechseo.com/knowledge/gene…

Will soon be rolled out across Europe -> Google plans to test search changes in Europe, displaying results from competing vertical search services next to its own, seeking to avoid EU fines "The previously unreported changes to its search results will show both vertical search services and Google results, with top-ranked vertical search engines displayed by default, the source said." "Hotels, airlines, restaurants and transport services with real-time data from feeds will sit either below or above the list of vertical search engines." "The changes will soon be rolled out across Europe, initially focusing on searches for lodgings but later adding flights and other services, the source said without providing further details." reuters.com/world/google-t…

Bing updated its guidelines to indicate that SEO/GEO work together, and also included some updated info related to AI search spam and manipulation. Worth a read & I imagine Google is using a similar approach.

Looks like Google has had enough and is subpoenaing everyone to find this Review Seller.

Google suing fake review spammer. It's all fun and games until Google locates the guy and issues a discovery demand for his client list - and then DELETES all his fake reviews from businesses that paid him. 💥

@MarkPreston1969 Totally Just taken on a large property brand that has worked with an agency ( at an extortionate rate ). I have done more for them in 2 months than this "agency" has in 2 years. The piss take from agencies is off the charts.

Over the years, I have seen many businesses getting ripped off by agencies. But... none as bad as I have seen today. And, the worse thing is... This SME business owner told me that he works with that specific agency because he is friends with one of the Directors. Always tread carefully in your conversation...

@MarkPreston1969 Just a little :)

@GuideTwit So, you agree then, Tim...

OMG... I've only been back in the agency world for two minutes. Over the past week I've had 5 sales calls and four out of the five turned around and said... "I want you to get me in ChatGPT as nobody uses Google anymore". (more or less these exact words each time) I then calmly (as my blood is starting to boil inside) show them that my own broadband company is ranked No.1 organically, plus cited and linked to in AI Overviews and AI Mode as the best provider. I then show them that we are also cited and linked to all over ChatGPT. Then, I show them our stats which show that Google Organic is by far the biggest revenue driver, and ChatGPT actually generates a tiny fraction. If business owners are starting to dismiss Google as an organic revenue generator due to all the crazy AI search hype, then a lot of them are going to be in deep sh*t moving forward. #SEO #AI #Search

2026 has not started so well for Local and Google Business Profiles, but you can still make things happen

From @ClaudiaTomina on the Sterling Sky blog... Review Posting Blocks Are Surging. Here’s the Data Plus the Patterns Behind Them sterlingsky.ca/review-posting…

🚨 Microsoft is Introducing AI Performance in @bing Webmaster Tools: A new set of insights that shows how sites content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations 👇 This is the first official AI search visibility dashboard directly provided by platforms 👏 This is what you can see in it: * Total Citations Shows the total number of citations that are displayed as sources in AI-generated answers. * Average Cited Pages Shows the average number of unique pages from your site that are displayed as sources in AI-generated answers per day over the selected time range. * Grounding queries Shows the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers. * Page-level citation activity Shows citation counts for specific URLs from your site, making it easy to see which individual pages are most often referenced across AI-generated answers. * What's not included? No intent or sentiment analysis, or an extract of the answers to check. Also, no data from other brands/sites, only yours. There's room to improve/expand of course, but I'm thankful for this first step. Go to Bing Webmaster tools and check it out 😎🙌 --- I want to thank @facan and team for the fantastic effort in the right direction to give official AI Search data to sites 🙏 Hopefully more platforms like Google and ChatGPT/OpenAI take note! Announcement: blogs.bing.com/webmaster/Febr…