Pierre-Marie Coupry

Pierre-Marie Coupry

CEO, SM4B

SEO since 2003. Several hundred WordPress sites, now Astro. Starting with his own.

Background

  • 2003First site optimised: a Paris chauffeur-guide’s
  • 2012Opened SM4B, after a first agency in Marrakech
  • 2012–2026Several hundred WordPress sites built or optimised
  • 2026Marrakech City Guide redesigned and migrated to Astro, with no transitional dip
  • 2026Astro4B launched. From optimising to building

Pierre-Marie Coupry did his first SEO work in 2003, on a friend’s site. The friend was a chauffeur-guide in Paris. He was a journalist at the time, covering sustainability.

He moved to Marrakech. With a friend he built a city guide there that reached 30,000 to 40,000 visitors a month. It ran on an ageing CMS, so he migrated it to WordPress. No traffic lost.

The result showed on the local market. Client work followed, and he opened his first agency in Marrakech, mostly in tourism. Alongside it he published his own guides: Marrakech City Guide, Désert Maroc, other destinations. That is still what he writes about.

SM4B opened in 2012. Several hundred WordPress sites built or optimised since. The move to Astro came from the work: security, reliability, load times, deployment that stays simple.

Marrakech City Guide is the case he cites most, because it is his own. In February 2026 a Google update knocked it down: impressions fell from 920 a day to 300. By June it was down to 98 visits from Google for the month. The redesign and the Astro migration were done together, two jobs most people will tell you to keep apart.

The site went back online on 17 July 2026. Impressions started climbing two days later, with no transitional dip. Sixty days on it runs at 31 visits a day from Google against 3 in June, at an average position of 14 where it sat at 20 before the drop.

And the curve is still steepening: 8 visits a day in the first month, 25 in the second, 37 over the past week. The tourist season accounts for part of it. So do the pages published since the rebuild, each bringing in clicks of its own. The volumes are small, but the site is back above where it stood a year ago.

More about SM4B and Astro4B

How these articles are written

This blog is written with the help of an artificial intelligence, Claude, developed by Anthropic. Here is how, in practice.

Topics and angles are chosen by Pierre-Marie Coupry, from the questions our clients ask and the searches the site already appears for in Google Search Console.

Research and writing are done with Claude. Every figure is checked at its source, preferably a primary one: official documentation, published reports, vendors' pricing pages. When a source cannot be opened or verified, the figure is not published.

Measurements come from tools anyone can check: Google Search Console for the sites we run, PageSpeed Insights, and the HTTP Archive for market averages. The cases presented, such as Marrakech City Guide, are real sites you can check online.

Before publication, each article is checked against Google's guidance on helpful content, compared with the top search results on its topic, then reviewed and approved by Pierre-Marie Coupry.

Updates are dated when an article changes in substance. A minor correction does not change the date.

Spotted a mistake? Write to pm.coupry@sm4b.eu.

9 articles

Agency, freelancer or in-house: who should build your Astro site?

Agency, freelancer or in-house team: what each option costs and brings for an Astro site, the questions to ask before you sign, and when a freelancer is enough.

Guide7 min read

Astro and SEO: what the framework does for you, and what is left to do.

Astro serves fast HTML that Google reads straight away. Titles, sitemaps, hreflang, structured data: what it handles on its own, and what you still have to do.

SEO8 min read

Migrating from WordPress to Astro: a step-by-step guide.

Export, 301 and 410 redirects, Search Console monitoring: how to migrate from WordPress to Astro without losing your rankings, with a real case.

Migration13 min read

Astro vs WordPress: the honest comparison.

Astro or WordPress in 2026? HTTP Archive data: 71% vs 48% of sites pass Core Web Vitals. Cost over 3 years, security, editing, and when WordPress wins.

Comparison12 min read

Core Web Vitals in the red: what to do, metric by metric.

Search Console flags poor Core Web Vitals? How to read the report, find the failing metric, fix what you can yourself, and know when to call a developer.

Guide10 min read

Decap CMS: manage your site without a developer.

Decap CMS is free (MIT licence), needs no database and plugs into GitHub. What it lets you do without a developer, its limits, and why we use it.

Tool10 min read

Your WordPress site is slow. Here is why.

A median score of 43 out of 100, one site in two failing Core Web Vitals: the 6 causes of WordPress slowness and what you can do about it.

Performance11 min read

Why we deploy on Cloudflare (and not AWS).

330 cities, unlimited bandwidth, EUR 0/mo. Why Cloudflare for an Astro site, and the four cases where Vercel is the right call.

Infra9 min read

How much does a website cost in 2026.

Real prices and real timelines for a business website in 2026: freelancer, agency, DIY. What you pay, what you get, and what they hide.

Pricing11 min read

Reading is good. Building is better.