Post of the Week
SearchStars 2018: Digital marketing is dead - Jono Anderson, Yoast
This isn't a Post of the Week, more a Presentation of the Week. While this presentation is rather visionary, I think the future Jono Alderson paints, is justified by the state of digital marketing in its current form. Give it a watch, and it may change how you do things.
Tech
Programatic SEO (Pt 1): How to Do Keyword Research at Scale
Interesting post on how to scale keyphrase research using Python. For those that don't know what it is, this isn't a snake, but a programming language that'll let you get every possible permutation of a sample of keywords & modifiers.
The SEO Cyborg: How to Resonate with Users & Make Sense to Search Bots
This is such as fantastic post by Alexis Sanders, where she has constructed an enhanced SEO model, that helps to satisfy both users and search engine bots. Check it out!
UX & Performance: Metrics that Matter [Presentation]
UX is becoming increasingly important for search visibility, so it's imperative that you can define and understand the metrics that matter. This presentation by Philip Tellis will show you how!
Tools
GA Effect
This isn't anything new, but a tool I use regularly to determine the causal impact of a change. You can do this in R, Python, or data science software such as Exploratory, but this tool is free and quick to integrate with your GA account.
Announcing Full-Funnel Testing - testing SEO and CRO at the same time
This was revealed at SearchLove London, and is a major update to Distilled's ODN. The software was previously used to test SEO changes, but now you can test both SEO and CRO changes simultaneously. A must read for UX and SEO teams!
Map Rank Tracking For Local SEO - Local Falcon
Another tool mentioned in a presentation at SearchLove London. I can't believe I had never seen this before - this tool enables you to define a radius around your GMB listing so that you can check the rankings of your listing for a particular query, in different locations.
I travelled down to London last week for SearchLove, which was my second time at the conference. It's such a brilliantly run event, with the best in the industry delivering their insight, with practicality. There seemed a central theme running through the event this year, in that we can't just consider ourselves SEO's anymore; the practice of SEO has evolved from that. Tom Capper in his presentation 'The Two-Tiered SERP' found that the correlation between domain authority and rankings for competitive head terms in the top 5 SERPS is diminishing. Instead, Google is using brand and UX signals as a way of identifying the most appropriate results to rank.
What do we do, when satisfying a set of speculated ranking factors, isn't enough? Work outside of the scope of SEO; invest in brand, superior user experience, and product. In my Post of the Week, Jono Alderson sums this up fantastically, and contemplates what the future looks like...
Andrew Charlton