ABBA Voyage Review, London

Strange but true, the day after seeing Iron Maiden live at the London Stadium, we went to see ABBA Voyage on Sunday 29th June 2025. Heavy metal one night, cheesy pop the next... it was certainly a weekend of contrasts.

That was partly the idea. Iron Maiden was mainly for me, while ABBA Voyage was mainly for Debs, so it seemed a pretty good way of making a full weekend out of the trip.

This was the 2nd time I'd seen ABBA Voyage and probably the 3rd or 4th time Debs had been. It was originally set up as something of a pop-up event and, if I remember rightly, there was talk of the show eventually travelling around the world. Instead, it seems to have found a permanent home in London, at least for the time being.

When I first heard about bands being recreated using holograms and digital avatars, I imagined something like a glorified video screen, or perhaps an image projected onto glass or smoke. ABBA Voyage is nothing like that.

The digital versions of Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid genuinely appear to move around the stage, walk towards the audience and interact with each other. Huge screens help give the whole thing the scale of a proper arena concert, while the lighting, sound and acoustics add enormously to the illusion. There's also a live band on stage, which makes a bigger difference than you might expect.

Honestly, within about 10 or 15 minutes you completely forget that the four members of ABBA aren't actually standing in front of you. You just buy into the whole thing.

I love the venue too. The purpose-built ABBA Arena somehow manages to feel fairly intimate despite holding a lot of people, with a mixture of standing areas, normal seating and the more private dance booths or 'pods'. We've tried both standing and seated tickets now and, for us, standing wins. You can dance, move around and get more involved, whereas the seats make it feel slightly more relaxed and theatre-like.

The audience certainly plays its part as well. Every time we've been there have been plenty of sequins, platform boots, flared trousers and long wigs. The ABBA avatars are based on how the group looked in the 1970s, so all of that dressing up just adds another layer of nostalgia to the night.

The set isn't completely fixed either. Songs are changed from time to time, so if, like us, you go back every so often, there's usually something slightly different to see.

What really impresses me is how much thought has gone into the whole experience. From arriving by train, to the photo opportunities, the bars and the purpose-built arena itself, everything has been designed around this one show. It never feels like ABBA have simply been dropped into an ordinary concert venue; the entire place exists to make the experience work.

And it really does work.

We've already seen ABBA Voyage several times between us, and I can't imagine this being the last. We'll definitely be back.

Iron Maiden at London Stadium - Run For Your Lives Tour 2025

As part of their Run For Your Lives World Tour, Iron Maiden played the London Stadium on 28 June 2025. It was something of a homecoming, with Maiden's roots firmly planted in this part of East London, where they started playing pubs and clubs around 50 years earlier.

So my wife Debs and I joined around 75,000 other fans for what turned out to be an absolutely amazing gig.

I've been a massive Iron Maiden fan since 1980. Debs kinda liked them, but the chance to see Maiden live, for the 4th time for me, was something we really didn't want to miss.

We turned it into a whole weekend, staying at the ibis in Canning Town. In a slightly bizarre change of musical direction, we then went to see ABBA Voyage the following day. Iron Maiden one night, ABBA the next. That's quite a weekend.

Before the gig I wanted to visit the Maiden pub that had been set up for the occasion, serving, amongst other things, a range of Iron Maiden beers. Unfortunately, it was absolutely rammed and we couldn't get anywhere near the bar.

We also wanted some merch, which turned into an expedition of its own. We queued for well over an hour to buy a couple of hoodies and ended up missing most of Halestorm's set, which I was gutted about.

Thankfully, once Maiden came on, any frustration disappeared pretty quickly.

They were absolutely on top form.

The band had their usual brilliant rapport with the crowd, with Bruce Dickinson regularly pausing between songs to whip 75,000 people into an even bigger frenzy.

One of the big changes on this tour was the stage production. Bands doing stadium shows like this have traditionally relied on enormous painted or printed backdrops, and Maiden themselves have used some fantastic ones over the years. This time they had a huge digital screen instead.

I'd read beforehand that some Maiden purists weren't keen on the idea.

As a fan, I bloody loved it.

It gave them the opportunity to make the backdrop part of the show rather than simply scenery. Right at the beginning, while The Ides of March played, we were taken on an animated journey through East London and some of the places associated with Maiden's early years.

We travelled virtually through streets, roads and alleyways, passing locations including the Ruskin Arms and The Cart & Horses, where Maiden played during those early days. Every recognisable location seemed to get another huge roar from the crowd before the journey eventually brought us face-to-face with Eddie.

For a band already famous for turning its concerts into theatrical productions, the technology suited them perfectly.

During Hallowed Be Thy Name, a digital version of Bruce was chased along a path by a ghoulish apparition. During Powerslave, the visuals seemed to take you right inside Eddie's Egyptian temple. Maiden's traditional giant Eddie also entered the digital age, with a huge 3D version dominating the screen.

It looked stunning.

There had also been a significant change within the band. Bruce Dickinson was, of course, on vocals, Steve Harris on bass, and we still had the three mighty galloping guitars of Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers.

Nicko McBrain had previously announced that he would no longer be touring with Maiden, so behind the drums was Simon Dawson, who also plays alongside Steve Harris in British Lion.

Dawson was brilliant. His relatively stripped-back drum kit somehow seemed perfectly suited to a set drawing so heavily from Maiden's earlier material.

And what a setlist it was.

To the delight of us old-school fans, although there were plenty of much younger Maiden fans around us too, the opening section leaned heavily into the Paul Di'Anno era. After The Ides of March intro came Murders in the Rue Morgue, followed by Wrathchild, Killers and Phantom of the Opera.

Hearing some of those songs live again was something special.

From there we headed into classic Maiden territory with The Number of the Beast, The Clairvoyant, Powerslave and 2 Minutes to Midnight.

One of the biggest treats of the night was the return of the epic Rime of the Ancient Mariner. At nearly 14 minutes long, it's one of those songs that shows exactly what Iron Maiden can do when they're given the freedom to go completely over the top. It hadn't been played live since 2009, so hearing it again was a real moment.

Then came Run to the Hills, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, The Trooper, Hallowed Be Thy Name and Iron Maiden.

Not a bad run of songs!

The encore began, unusually, with Aces High before probably Maiden's ultimate live anthem, Fear of the Dark.

There's something quite spectacular about tens of thousands of people singing the melody to Fear of the Dark together in a stadium. It doesn't matter how many times you've heard the song, being there in the middle of that crowd is completely different.

And then they finished with Wasted Years.

I'm a huge fan of the song anyway, so having that close the biggest Maiden show I'd ever been to was just about perfect.

I've seen Iron Maiden four times now and been a fan since 1980, but this one felt different. Maybe it was the location, the 50th anniversary celebrations, the early material or simply seeing 75,000 people of all ages sharing the same experience.

The new digital production worked brilliantly for me, the band sounded fantastic, and the mix of rarities and enormous Maiden classics made the whole thing feel like a celebration of where they'd come from.

For the casual fans there were songs like Run to the Hills, The Number of the Beast and Fear of the Dark. For those of us who've followed them for decades, we got Killers, Murders in the Rue Morgue and Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Everybody won.

Iron Maiden absolutely smashed it out of the park.

Short Form Video for Business

Short-form video is having a moment. From TikTok to Instagram Reels, businesses are flocking to these platforms to connect with audiences in a new and exciting way. But what exactly is short-form video, and why is it so important for businesses?

What is Short-Form Video? 

Short-form video is essentially any video that is less than 60 seconds long. These videos typically appear as TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. They are usually highly engaging and shareable, making them perfect for capturing attention and building brand awareness.

Why is Short-Form Video Important for Businesses?

It not if you don't want to engage with your customers and market, but if you do want to engage with them, here's some benefits you see fairly quicky.

It's highly engaging. Short-form videos are designed to be watched quickly and easily. This makes them perfect for capturing the attention of busy consumers.

It's shareable. Short-form videos are often shared on social media and other platforms. This can help you reach a wider audience and build brand awareness.

It's cost-effective. Short-form videos are relatively inexpensive to produce. This makes them a great option for businesses of all sizes.

It's versatile. Short-form videos can be used for a variety of purposes, such as product demos, customer testimonials, and behind-the-scenes content.

How Can a Business Use Short-Form Video

Not sure how to use short-form video for your business, here are a few tips that might help you:

Start by identifying your target audience. Who are you trying to reach with your videos? Once you know your target audience, you can create content that is relevant to them.

Keep your videos short and sweet. Remember, you only have a few seconds to capture your audience's attention. Make sure your videos are concise and to the point.

Use high-quality visuals and audio. Your videos should be visually appealing and easy to hear.

Use a strong call to action. What do you want your viewers to do after watching your video? Make sure to include a clear call to action, such as visiting your website or following you on social media.

Promote your videos. Share your videos on social media and other platforms. You can also use paid advertising to reach a wider audience.

OK, I'm convinced that I need to use Short Form Video, but for what?

Product demos. Short-form videos are a great way to show off your products and services.

Customer testimonials. Use short-form videos to share positive customer feedback.

Behind-the-scenes content. Give your audience a glimpse into your company culture with behind-the-scenes videos.

Educational content. Use short-form videos to teach your audience about your products or services.

Interactive content. Encourage your audience to participate in your videos by asking questions or challenges.

Short-form video is a powerful tool that can help businesses of all sizes connect with their audiences. By following these simple tips, you will create engaging and effective short-form videos that will help you achieve your business goals.

Really Simple Keyword Research

Let's remember that Googles aim is to deliver to the user the most relevant results possible. So keyword research should focus around INTENT and TOPIC RELEVANCE to your business.

HEADLINE KEYWORDS

Single words or acronyms i.e. "Beer" - these are the worst type of keywords to optimise for (mainly because the intent is not clear, and typically usersresearch and more information), as intent is not clear, traffic will be poor and conversions will be low, but worst of all is that competition will be massively high and you'll need a ton of money and manpower to rank successfully for them.

BODY KEYWORDS 

Typically these are 2-3 word keywords i.e. "Best Beer" - while the intent of the searcher is a little clearer, it's still not 100% clear what they are trying to achieve with their search. These terms are often very competitive, because as keywords they are generally easier to find, this high competitiveness and therefore expensive in time and money to rank well for.

LONG TAIL KEYWORDS

4 or more words i.e. "Best Beer From The Supermarket" , these are the best type to optimise for as the intent of the searcher is much clearer. It will also be a much less competitive keyword.

It's important in the early stages of keyword research that 100% of keywords identified should be based on INTENT, yes search volume is important, but INTENT will ensure that anyone that finds your site WILL BE more likely to purchase. Your conversion rate will be higher, and will likely generate more good quality leads, plus competition will be lower, meaning ranking high for these keywords will be much easier.

PHASE 1 - EXISTING KEYWORDS

Use your existing searches and keyword data to give you inspiration for your keyword analysis, the easiest place to find these is in your Google Search Console, Google is already suggesting that you are ranking well for these keyworks, so it will be easier for you to take advantage of them.

Categorise these keywords into:

LOW HANGING FRUIT - keywords that are currently ranking from positions 2 to 15. Remember to prioritise keywords that based on INTENT and RELVANCE to your business.

EXISTING KEYWORDS - these are ranking from position 16 to 50. Make these your second priority keywords to look at.

POSSIBLE OPPORTUNITIES - these are keywords that are ranking from position 51 to 100. These keywords are outside of the top 50, so would suggest that you are simply not putting enough effort into these pages. On these look at the long tail key phrases and consider writing a blog post around each phrase.

PHASE 2 - KEYWORD DISCOVERY

Use SEMRUSH to help you discover new keywords (you can create a free account).
Navigate to 'Keyword Magic Tool' to discover for free some new ideas for keywords.

• Start looking at Keywords that are ranked at VERY EASY.
• Create a list of possible new keywords for you to rank for.
• Once you have a list of possible keywords, I sometimes like to search for these on Wikipedia and that can sometimes provide you with additional topics and keywords that are highly relevant to your site.  Use these new and related phrases in SEMRUSH to get more keywords.

PHASE 3 - ALSO ASKED

At the bottom of any Google search is a section that is often forgotten about called 'People Also Searched For', you can use some of these as your keywords, or try alsoasked.com to get a clearer picture and more potential keywords. 

Again, enter one of your best keywords into the search bar and it will provide you with a list of relevant phrases and questions that searches are looking for right now. These tend to make great topics for blog posts, and the chances are your competitors will not be using any of these terms.  Now while these won't bring you lots of traffic, they will make your site more relevant in the eyes of Google.


IMPORTANT:
When it comes to creating content one your website, remember to use only ONE PRIMARY KEYWORD.
Your Primary Keyword MUST address the intend of the searcher. To help decide what your primary keywords should be consider:

• What are you currently ranking well for
• Aim for keywords that have a search volume of at least 200 searches per month
• Only choose a primary keyword with a low competition
• Consider the intend of the searcher
• Make it hyper relevant to your offering
• Click potential - linked to intent, if someone searches for this primary keyword and finds your listing, how likely are they to click through to your site!

Is Your Business Known For Being Reliable and “Getting The Job Done”? – Then Beware!

It’s a myth in modern business that having a reputation for being “reliable” and being known for “getting the job done” makes you valuable and indispensable to your customers.

It’s all part of the fabric of business, but you need to be known for more than this because if your customer ever looks for more, they won’t come banging on your door.

Today, as a business you need to be known as someone that can improve and enhance the results of customers, you need to prove that you can solve their problems and move them forward.

If you fall at any of these fences, then your customers could cut you loose if they ever need a supplier that can go that extra mile for them, and because they see you as a capable business that does a great job, it could be a difficult decision for them, but it’s a decision that they WILL make if they need to.

The truth of the matter is that today you need to be known as a business that adds value – there is therefore an importance to define where and how you can add this value.

Most of this stems from having a real partnership with your customers and truly understanding them and the market(s) in which they operate; this will allow you to not only fully understand any problems that is given to you (so you can provide the very best solution), but you can also add value by spotting opportunities for your customers before they do.

Working in this way will lead you to become indispensable and ensure that your customers never want to lose you as a partner.

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This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in July 2017

New, unconfirmed Google ranking update ‘Fred’ shakes the SEO world!

"New, unconfirmed Google ranking update ‘Fred’ shakes the SEO world!"

I love this headline from searchengineland; we get this news a couple of time a year and it never fails to make me laugh!

It looks as if Google could have released yes another algorithm change that take a long hard look at the quality of a websites links before deciding whether that sites ranking needs to be improved or demoted.

But again it, this new ‘Fred’ update seems to have caught the SEO industry off-guard as is sending waves of panic across the community, but why this always makes me laugh is that if these SEO practitioners did their job right in the first place and looked to place good quality content on webpages with good quality (not spammy) links linking to the content then there wouldn’t be a problem.

The worry look on the faces of SEO professionals out there is a clear sign that they know that they have done something bad (black hat SEO) in the past and they are scared that their past is going to come along and bite them in their @rse.

I for one (as well as others like me), sit back and actually watch our ranking improving; I was struggling with one competitive term that seemed stuck as #8 suddenly yesterday leapt to #2, and I’m seeing positive moves across a range of sites and keywords.

I’m sitting pretty, I just wish all of my colleagues would learn and start doing their jobs properly!

Why is it so hard to rank well on Google?

I have recently been involved with a discussion about ranking on Google on LinkedIn, it has become more difficult to rank highly now, but why, these are my notes on it.

Any web marketer or somebody who owns a website realises (or should realise) the importance of high search engine rankings. Any webmaster who is serious about succeeding online should know that you need to be on the first page of Google results, but more importantly you need to be at positions 1, 2 or 3.

There was a time when achieving high search engine ranks was not really very difficult, all you had to do was create content, didn’t particularly need to be useful or of high quality, dump some keywords in it loads of times and *BANG* you were done and could with little effort rank highly.

Google changed a few its indicators around 2005, so with the same content you just had to throw some links in (predominately from link farms, article networks, blog networks and directories) and you ranked well.

From about 2007, things really started to get really difficult, and as every year marches forward Google just keep making the SEO role more and more difficult.

Today, there is a huge amount of competition out there in all markets. Achieving a page one rank in Google (and the rest of the search engines) has become extremely tough, unless of course you are working smart.

Working smart will often mean here the ability to choose the right set of tools – tools that can rocket your web visibility by taking your website from the lower ends of search engine results all the way to very top. See a previous post - Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review.

A page one rank is all you need to rocket your web traffic that will blow your mind, however, traffic is just one side of the coin and if you want to convert traffic then you need to look at Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), but that’s a completely different subject.

Anyway, the real reason why it’s more difficult to rank on Google is that they want to present the very best results to us searchers, and their tweaks and modifications to their algorithm is all just designed to ensure that the sites that are well liked, with the best content rise to the top – it’s that simple really.

Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review

IBP SEO software, also known as Internet Business Promoter, is still available, but it is now called SEO Goat. The IBP SEO tool still works in much the same way as described below.

I’ll say right from the start that the way most SEO software products try to rank your webpages doesn’t really work. They can help you decide which keywords to use and where they should go on your page, but they cannot magically push you to the top of Google.

IBP SEO software, originally from Axandra, took a slightly different approach. Instead of looking at your page on its own, it analysed the pages already ranking in the top 10 and then gave you a report based on what those successful pages were doing.

I’ve been working in digital marketing for more years than I care to remember and, to be honest, Internet Business Promoter, or IBP as it was better known, was one of the most useful SEO tools I ever used.

Obviously, it’s a good idea to analyse your pages to make sure they are well optimised for your chosen keyword or keywords. But Google doesn’t work from a simple checklist.

Google doesn’t care about your optimisation in isolation. It wants to know how useful your site is compared with the other sites competing for the same search term. That is why it makes sense to compare your page against the current top 10 results.

And that is exactly what the IBP SEO tool does.

How the IBP SEO tool works

Once you enter your primary keyword, IBP runs a search on Google, or your preferred search engine, and analyses the top ranking pages for that term.

It looks at where those pages have used their keywords, how often they have used them, whether they appear in the title, description, headings, bold text, and other important areas of the page.

It then presents the results in an easy-to-follow report. In simple terms, that report becomes your roadmap for updating your page so it can better compete with the pages already ranking well.

This on-page SEO analysis is not the end of it. IBP also looks at inbound links, so you can see whether your page needs more authority as well as better optimisation.

That matters because SEO is rarely just about one thing. A well-optimised page with weak links may still struggle. A badly structured page with strong links may also underperform. You usually need both.

One of the great things about IBP is that it does not promise a shortcut to SEO success. It gives you structured advice, but it still takes time, effort, and a bit of judgement.

And, just like anything else in SEO, there is no guarantee it will work.

What IBP included

IBP was originally a suite of SEO tools from Axandra. These tools allowed you to:

1. Research keywords in your niche or market
2. Optimise your website for those keywords
3. Find link opportunities to help improve rankings
4. Track your website’s position in the search results

SEO has moved on since IBP first came out. Google now looks at far more than keyword placement. Page quality, trust, user behaviour, site speed, content depth, links, and overall site experience all play a part.

That does not make IBP useless. Far from it. It just means you need to treat it as one tool, not the whole answer.

Used properly, the IBP SEO software gives you a clear way to compare your page against the pages already ranking. That can be very useful, especially if you are trying to work out why a competitor is above you.

But you should not expect magic.

Even if your page looked very similar to the pages in the top 10, and even if you had more links pointing to it, Google could still be looking at other signals. Design, site structure, bounce rate, time on site, old penalties, brand strength, and content quality can all make a difference.

So all in all, if you are serious about improving rankings and want a structured way to optimise your pages, IBP, now SEO Goat, is still worth looking at.

Download it for a free trial.