Google’s December 2025 Core Update: What It Means for Your Business and How to Adapt
It’s a new year and we’re seeing the affects of another core update from Google, which completed on the 29th December. With ever changing tools and increasing volumes of content across online spaces, this update will be seen by many as a welcome change, as Google just got a lot better at spotting whether you really know what you’re talking about. If you’ve been coasting on thin content, AI-generated pages, or just rephrasing what everyone else says, you’re in trouble. But if you understand what changed, there’s a clear path forward.
Digital Marketing in 2026: Why Your Business Needs an Agency
Right then. Time for some honesty.
Digital marketing in 2026 is no longer just complicated. It is overwhelming for most businesses trying to handle everything alone. We see it all the time at Clever Marketing. People give it a go themselves and fair enough. They hire someone who is good with social media which usually means they post occasionally and hope for the best. Or they patch together a few freelancers who never quite speak to each other. Then suddenly they are tired, the results are flat, and they begin to wonder if digital marketing even works.
It does work. Beautifully. But the way most businesses approach it simply cannot keep up anymore.
Why You Should Leave Paid Advertising Management To The Experts
There is a familiar moment inside many businesses. Someone opens Google Ads with good intentions. A couple of keywords added. A few ads written. Budgets set with a hopeful little shrug. On day one everything looks perfectly fine. The numbers even look encouraging for a short while. Then reality arrives. Costs rise. Conversions wobble. Settings start arguing with each other. Reports turn into a maze nobody wants to enter. The whole thing slowly becomes an expensive guessing game.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Clever Marketing
Clever Marketing will be closed for the holidays from the twenty fourth through to the second of January. After a packed year helping clients grow and delivering a lot of digital work, we are taking a short break to recharge and come back ready for a strong start to 2026.
How Local SEO Really Looks and How Clever Marketing Gets You Ranking Higher
There is something strangely satisfying about seeing your business on a map. Not just a pin. Not just an address. A full grid of coloured circles revealing exactly how you rank as people search for you in the real world around you. The image above comes straight from a Local SEO scan for a business near us. Each circle shows a live search position taken from towns, villages, main roads and even those tiny pockets of countryside where signal becomes more of a hopeful suggestion than a reliable promise.
What Our New Cyber Essentials Accreditation Means For Your Business
We are genuinely excited to share that Clever Marketing is now Cyber Essentials accredited. It is a milestone we are proud of because it reflects something far deeper than ticking a box. It shows that we treat security with the same seriousness as creativity. It shows that we protect your brand with the same care we apply to our own. And it shows that the way we work meets the highest standards of modern cyber hygiene.
Identifying Thin Content for SEO Purposes
What Is Thin Content and Why It Hurts Your Website Every so often we speak to a business owner who says, “We’ve got loads of content on our website, but nothing seems to perform.” When we look closer, the problem is almost always the same. Thin content. In the world of search, “thin content” refers […]
Is Now a Good Time for Businesses to Adopt Bluesky?
Whether you’re on X (formerly Twitter) for personal or business use, you probably noticed a lot of chatter recently about users moving to the alternative social media platform Bluesky. So, is it time for brands to make the leap?
GEO and the Rise of AI Overviews
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is an “upgrade” to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), where we optimise websites and content for appearance in the new AI Overviews. For a quick run-down, here’s an overview of what we’ll be talking about in this post: AI Overviews: Originally introduced as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), these provide direct answers […]
Quality Content Holds Fast in March Core Update
One thing we will not have to be reporting to our clients when we write their March marketing reviews next week is any adverse effects of the Google 5th March Update. Why not? Because it hasn’t affected any of our customers. And again, why not? Because informative, quality content was not the target of the […]