Raysmithmarketing

Raysmithmarketing Ray Smith Marketing builds and redesigns websites, shoots video, runs social accounts, and does SEO. The goal is straightforward: more traffic, more leads.

16/09/2026

Your marketing looks busy. But is it actually making you money?

Most businesses don't have a visibility problem. They have a conversion problem. We've spent 12 years fixing that for accountants, solicitors, dental practices, insurance brokers and construction firms.

SEO, paid media, brand, social, AI training and analytics, measured in revenue, not vanity metrics.

https://www.raysmithmarketing.co.uk

A poor brief is the most common reason agency engagements fail.Not the wrong agency. Not the budget. The brief.Most brie...
21/08/2026

A poor brief is the most common reason agency engagements fail.

Not the wrong agency. Not the budget. The brief.

Most briefs describe the deliverable — a new website, a campaign, more followers — and skip the part that actually matters: what has to change in the business, and how you will know it has.

There is one question most clients never answer, and it is the one that separates work that lands from work that gets politely signed off and quietly ignored.

What to include, what to leave out, and the question worth answering before you send it.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/how-to-brief-a-marketing-agency

Sessions up. Engagement strong. Revenue flat.If that describes your last marketing review, the problem is not your marke...
20/08/2026

Sessions up. Engagement strong. Revenue flat.

If that describes your last marketing review, the problem is not your marketing. It is your measurement.

Email open rate is the clearest example. Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates it by 15 to 25 percentage points depending on your audience. A reported 60 percent open rate is partly Apple's servers pre-loading an image, not people reading. Click rate is the honest signal now.

Most dashboards are built to look reassuring rather than to be useful.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/your-dashboard-is-lying

The average Google Ads account wastes between 30 and 50 percent of its monthly budget.That is not bad luck or a competit...
19/08/2026

The average Google Ads account wastes between 30 and 50 percent of its monthly budget.

That is not bad luck or a competitive market. It is structural, and it comes down to three things that show up in nearly every account we audit.

Broad match without a disciplined negative keyword list. Landing pages that do not match what the ad promised. And campaigns funded below the 30 conversions a month that automated bidding needs to stop guessing.

Each one silently drains spend. Together they are why the cost per lead sits at £180 when it should not.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/why-google-ads-waste-budget

The advice to post consistently is correct. The way most businesses have interpreted it is not.Consistent came to mean d...
17/08/2026

The advice to post consistently is correct. The way most businesses have interpreted it is not.

Consistent came to mean daily. So the calendar gets filled, and filling it becomes the job. Quality drops to meet the schedule, engagement falls, and the response is usually to post more.

Three posts a week that are worth reading will outperform seven that exist to keep a streak alive. The audience is not counting your posts. They are deciding whether you are worth following.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/posting-every-day-making-it-worse

You probably do not have a marketing problem.When campaigns underperform across every channel at once, the cause is rare...
14/08/2026

You probably do not have a marketing problem.

When campaigns underperform across every channel at once, the cause is rarely the campaigns. It is that the business has not settled who it is for, what makes it different, and why anyone should choose it over the alternative.

No amount of ad spend fixes that. It just distributes the confusion more widely.

That is a brand strategy problem wearing a marketing problem's clothes.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/you-dont-have-a-marketing-problem

Every leadership team is talking about AI. Most are not sure what to actually do with it.The honest answer, after using ...
12/08/2026

Every leadership team is talking about AI. Most are not sure what to actually do with it.

The honest answer, after using these tools daily: they are very good at first drafts, summarising long documents, restructuring messy notes, and getting past a blank page.

They are poor at knowing your customer, judging what matters, and telling you when the strategy underneath is wrong.

Useful where it saves real time. Expensive where it replaces thinking.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/what-ai-tools-actually-do

Google or Meta is the wrong first question.The question that actually decides it: are people already searching for what ...
10/08/2026

Google or Meta is the wrong first question.

The question that actually decides it: are people already searching for what you sell?

If they are, Google captures demand that exists. If they are not, Google Ads cannot create it — and Meta, which interrupts people who were not looking, becomes the better channel.

There is a second filter most businesses skip. Below roughly £300 margin per sale, paid search economics do not work unless your conversion rate is exceptional.

How to think about it properly before you spend.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/google-ads-vs-meta-ads

Your best article is not ranking, and the instinct is to assume it needs to be better written.Usually it does not.The pr...
07/08/2026

Your best article is not ranking, and the instinct is to assume it needs to be better written.

Usually it does not.

The problem is more structural, and more fixable. The page targets a query nobody searches. Or three of your own pages compete for the same term. Or the site has no authority signals, so quality alone cannot carry it.

Rewriting good content that has one of those problems changes nothing. You end up with a better article that still nobody reads.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/why-your-content-isnt-ranking

Buying AI marketing services will not fix a broken strategy.If you do not know who your customer is, what makes you diff...
05/08/2026

Buying AI marketing services will not fix a broken strategy.

If you do not know who your customer is, what makes you different, or why anyone should choose you, automation will produce more content that says nothing. Faster, and at scale.

That is not an improvement. It is the same problem with better throughput.

Where these tools genuinely save time, and what they cannot do regardless of which one you buy.

https://raysmithmarketing.co.uk/blog/ai-wont-fix-broken-marketing-strategy

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