E-mail:
jsem@patrikpilous.cz
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC for short) is a free Google tool that shows you how your website looks from the search engine’s point of view. It shows the queries you appear...
Erika Fashion case study with 436,000 visits from Google in a year
I started working for Erika Fashion, a women’s fashion client (erikafashion.cz and erikafashion.sk), as an outsourced SEO consultant and link builder in April 2024, and I...
Keyword cannibalisation, how to find it and what to do about it
Keyword cannibalisation happens when two or more pages on the same website target the same query with the same intent and Google keeps switching between them. None of them then...
How to build a marketing strategy, with a step-by-step process and an example
A marketing strategy is a decision about who you will sell to, what you will sell and how, so that the company meets its business goal. The plan, campaigns and posts are simply...
Who a CMO is and what they really do in a company
A CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) is the person in a company’s leadership who is responsible for what marketing delivers in revenue and customers. Not for how many...
USP, or unique selling proposition, and how to find yours
A USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is a unique selling argument. It is one specific thing that only you offer, or that only you can clearly state and prove, and that makes a...
Why SEO and AI visibility depend on associations and entities
A brand has two layers in the customer’s mind. The entity, meaning a clear idea of who the brand is, and around it a network of associations that people connect with it....
How to choose an SEO consultant, questions to ask and warning signs
Choose based on four things, not on price. Who will actually work on your website, what they will do in the first 90 days and why in that order, how they will measure results...
What makes my eyes pop out of my head when it comes to pricing development in the age of Claude Code
For years I have been reviewing and writing briefs for developers at my clients. I am not a developer, I am an SEO and marketing consultant. But I am the one who defines what...
Brand positioning explained with brand examples
Brand positioning (positioning značky in Czech) is a marketing term for the unique value a brand gives its customers and for where the brand, with its offer and the way it is...
Survivorship bias
We only see successes because failures have disappeared from view. Abraham Wald’s planes, Bára’s story and how it applies to marketing and analysis.
Cognitive biases in marketing and everyday life, with examples, books and research
A cognitive bias is a systematic or systemic natural error in human thinking that occurs when people process and interpret information around them in a way that illogically...
Customer journey, or a slightly different view of your business
Clients think everyone has long known how people buy from them. In most cases, though, it is just a mix of feelings and unquantified experience. The customer journey is a...
The best advertising slogans that stuck in people’s memory
There aren’t many things I remember well. The exceptions are numbers, years, stories, football line-ups and advertising slogans. Long before I started working in...
SEO pricing. How much it really costs and what you pay for
I have heard the question “how much does SEO cost?” many times, and it really is a tricky one. We dealt with it years ago at the agency, and I have dealt with it as...The bystander effect and why a crowd rarely helps
The more people watch, the fewer of them help. The Kitty Genovese case, the Darley and Latané experiments and why a vague CTA on a website fails.
Backlinks, what they are for, how they evolved and how to earn them effectively
When I started with SEO years ago, link building worked in a surprisingly crude way. On the other hand, the relationship between the links you earned and your rankings was very...
How to build a functional website architecture and structure
One of the first things I look at in a more comprehensive SEO audit or in ongoing collaboration is website structure and architecture. You can have the best content in the...The Dunning-Kruger effect
The less we know, the more confident we are. The story of the lemon juice robber, the confidence curve and how to use the Dunning-Kruger effect in marketing.
How SEO and GEO work, and why they are closer than they seem
When I walk into a client meeting these days, the same question often comes up: “What about AI? Do we want to do GEO? What are we doing wrong if ChatGPT doesn’t...FOMO, the fear of missing out
FOMO is the fear of missing out, which pushes us to act straight away. What the acronym means, FOMO syndrome, stories from flight tickets and social media, and how it is used...Social proof
We see what others do as the right thing to do. The Asch experiment, Cialdini and using social proof in marketing (reviews, numbers, testimonials).
How page indexing works and what it is for
Indexing is the process by which a search engine stores a page in its index. The etymology, the history from registers to Google, and the practical value for SEO.
The Streisand effect
Trying to hide something paradoxically draws more attention to it. The story of Barbra Streisand, reactance and how to avoid the Streisand effect in PR and crisis communication.Paradox of choice
Too many options lead to paralysis and lower satisfaction. The jam experiment, Barry Schwartz and how to narrow your offer so that it sells.
AI Performance and how to use it beyond online PR
AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools gives us a new perspective. According to the product managers behind this release, it is “the first step towards generative engine...Bandwagon effect
We join in with something because others are joining in. The origin of the term bandwagon, Leibenstein and how to show growing popularity, plus its relationship to social proof.
Zeigarnik effect
We remember unfinished tasks better and they won’t leave us alone. Zeigarnik and the waiters, progress bars and how to use the effect, plus its link to the IKEA effect.
My 2025 in marketing
Reading my reviews of previous years (2023, 2024 and the ones I keep just for myself) is extremely interesting and rewarding. Suddenly I can see what I was dealing with at a...