Post of the Week
12 "No-BS" Ways to Increase Organic SEO Traffic (with Case Studies)
Our post of the week comes from Robbie Richards with 12 ways he has helped to increase organic traffic (with Case Studies). This guy has generated over 1,000,000 pageviews on his blog from only 28 posts, so listen up! 😉 What I love about this post is that it provides step-by-step instructions for each example, so the advice is very actionable. Beware...this is a monster of a post (10,000 words), so grab a brew. ☕
News
Report: Google mobile speed update has no impact on general mobile rankings
In July, Google started rolling out the mobile page speed update but has it impacted mobile rankings yet? A study by SEO Powersuite, looking at +30,0000 keywords, doesn't think so. Check out how they arrived at their conclusion here.
Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines Updated: Beneficial Purpose, Creator Reputation & More
Big news this week as Google released an updated version of the Search Quality Rate Guidelines, and then it 404'd...oops 🙈 Jokes aside, Jennifer Slegg has produced yet another mammoth breakdown of what has changed, and all you need to know.
Content
Description Vs Body: How Are Search Snippets Formed [Research]
A very interesting piece from Kirill at Serpstat on the information Google uses from a website to generate a search snippet. If you're looking to acquire search snippets as part of your SEO strategy, this post should definitely help inform which direction you take. Enjoy!
Outreach
Playing detective: how to identify bad backlinks
Since the last Penguin update, do we even need to carry out backlink audits anymore? The team at Distilled seem to think so, and have provided a handy guide on how to go about identifying them.
Case Study
Content Pruning Case Study: How QuickBooks Doubled Its Traffic
Although content pruning can be pretty risky without some serious preparation, for larger websites especially, it can an extremely effective tactic. Will Waggoner, SEO lead at QuickBooks, shows us how removing 2,000 posts from the QuickBooks Resource Center led to a 20% increase in organic traffic in just two weeks!
Welcome to the first edition of The Weekly SEO! 😀 Matt and I will be sharing what we think are the best posts from each week, so you can keep up-to-date with changes in the industry and new ways of optimisation for search engines.
It's been a busy one recently in the World of SEO. Rumours of a Core Broad algorithm update were confirmed by Google last week, with some webmasters reporting a 30-40% decrease in traffic overnight. Yikes! 😮
Google has also updated their Search Quality Rater Guidelines, now placing a greater emphasis on the reputation of the author, as well as the purpose of the content for a user. I'm always intrigued by the Rater Guidelines, as it's one of the very few pieces of information we have from Google which describes how they evaluate websites. If human checkers are evaluating in this way, I'm sure they'll be feeding this criteria into their algorithm.
Andrew Charlton