Varn

18/09/2026

We’re always looking for talented people to join our happy team😊

Varn is the largest and longest-established specialist SEO agency in the South West, based in the beautiful town of Bradford on Avon, and we want you to join us as we grow our business.

Want to work with us? See what roles we have available >> https://varn.co.uk/about-us/vacancies/

Or get in touch to discuss what skills you could bring to our team >> https://varn.co.uk/contact/

15/09/2026

Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) isn't going anywhere.

Google is rolling out native Dashboards inside GA4, with drag-and-drop scorecards, funnels and charts, built right into the Reports section. Convenient, yes. A replacement for Data Studio? Not quite.

In her latest article, Senior Data & Analytics Manager Katie New explains where each tool earns its place, and when to use each tool to get the best from both.

Read the article here >> https://varn.co.uk/insights/new-ga4-dashboards-vs-data-studio-which-reporting-tool-should-you-use/

Google is rolling out a new feature in GA4…dashboards. Learn how built-in GA4 dashboards compare to Data Studio >>

15/09/2026

AI agents are now browsing, comparing and buying on your customers' behalf. Is your brand ready to be recommended?

Our CEO Tom Vaughton and Search & Innovation Director Andy Mollison are heading to Digital Marketing Europe to host 'The Agentic Optimisation Workshop: How to Build an Agent-Ready Brand & Marketing Strategy.'

This hands-on session moves beyond keywords and basic AI summaries, taking attendees deep into the technical and strategic requirements of agentic search: from trust signals and entity-based content architecture to WebMCP, UCP, and how AI agents navigate, book and buy on a site.

📅 When: 10-12 November
📍 Where: Digital Marketing Europe 2026, Vilnius

Whether you're in SEO, content, digital strategy or e-commerce, this workshop will help you prepare your digital estate for a world where the click is no longer guaranteed to be human.

If your strategy isn't built for agents yet, now's the time to change that. Find a link in the comments.

07/09/2026

In the last month, we've had the pleasure of hosting not one, but two work experience placements.

The Varn team were joined by Danielle and Gabriel, who spent their time shadowing experts Exandri and Haris and getting a taste of SEO/GEO & Data agency life.

Thank you both for working so hard. We wish you well for your bright futures ahead ⭐

03/09/2026

AI shopping assistants are changing how people find products online. Instead of scrolling search results, more shoppers are asking AI directly for recommendations, and that shift means ecommerce brands need to look further than traditional SEO.

In his latest article, Search & Innovation Director Andy Mollison, shares what ecommerce GEO actually involves, covering:

🛒 Why crawlable, well-structured sites remain the foundation, even for AI discovery

🛒 How complete product schema (price, availability, reviews, variants) helps AI systems trust and recommend products

🛒 Why your Google Merchant Center feed is now doing more work than ever

🛒 What the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) means for AI agents making purchases directly

🛒 How to actually measure AI visibility, from crawler logs to Search Console to Merchant Center's new AI Performance Insights

Read the full article >> https://varn.co.uk/insights/ecommerce-geo/

01/09/2026

Cloudflare's new AI bot controls go live on 15 September. The default setup blocks 'Training' bots on pages with ads, but Googlebot, Bing and Apple's crawlers handle both training and search indexing. Block one, and you risk blocking the other.

We've already audited and configured this for our clients. If your Cloudflare setup hasn't been checked yet, now's the time.

Read our breakdown of what's changing, why it matters and what to do next >> https://loom.ly/-tQ8K5s

28/08/2026

New research from 5WPR found that bank-owned domains account for less than 7% of all banking-related AI citations.

Global Finance Magazine asked Varn Search & Innovation Director, Andy Mollison:

What are banks doing wrong?

Andy revealed that AI systems are built around language, and that the use of vague claims such as 'we go above and beyond' provide little useful information to help AI platforms understand and surface content.

Andy also addresses how compliance constraints compound the problem, and the ways that winning publishers are getting ahead of competitors with comprehensive, structured content.

Any brand relying on marketing language over concrete, verifiable answers is handing its visibility to someone else's content.

We help brands in the financial service sector get visible wherever customers are searching. Find out more about our SEO/GEO services for the financial sector using the link in the comments below.

27/08/2026

What started as a Gemini response, ended up landing Varn CEO on BBC News… 🌐

When Head of Digital PR Jack Hayes had Gemini proof a press release about our SLT, the curious addition of hyphens in ‘Bradford on Avon’ sparked a fierce debate amongst the Varn team:

Should our hometown be hyphenated?

We spoke with the Mayor, Sam Blackwell, who confirmed that our town’s name is ‘perfect without punctuation’. Naturally, we made it our mission to remove every erroneous hyphen from online mentions and signage across the town.

We wrote to GWR, Google Maps, Tripadvisor, Wikipedia and many more that were using hyphens to ask that they amend, informing local media about the campaign to drum up some local support in finding any more uses of hyphens.

Fast forward a few weeks, and Tom Vaughton found himself outside the Bradford on Avon train station, being interviewed by the BBC about the story.

Google credits the story for the decision to remove hyphens from the town name in its system. We’d call that a success.

25/08/2026

A dashboard is only as good as the person reading it.

You can build the most accurate tracking and the cleanest reports in the world, but if your team doesn't trust what they're looking at, the insights sit unused and decisions default back to gut feel.

In the fifth and final instalment of our Data Journey series, Senior Data Analytics Manager Katie New closes things out with Step 5: Empowering Teams, tailored workshops, drop-in sessions, and technical upskilling designed to give your whole team the confidence to read, question, and act on your data, without waiting on a specialist every time.

Find out more here >> https://varn.co.uk/insights/empowering-teams-building-long-term-data-confidence