Post of the Week
Advanced Ecommerce SEO Tactics You Can Copy
Another Post of the Week from the great Kevin Indig - no bias here folks. There's so much crap out there on regurgitated eCommerce SEO tactics, it's so refreshing to read a post like with a lot of practical detail on some advanced tactics.
Content
The Advanced Guide to Keyword Clustering
Long gone are the days where you can create a page to target one keyword, and expect to rank. Some pieces of content are now ranking for literally thousands of keywords. In this post, Tom Casano shows you the propriety process they've engineered to group similar keywords together to do this. Check it out!
Tech
Image Compression Tool by Google
Squoosh was released at the latest Chrome Dev Summit, and is an image compression web app helping cut image file sizes, while also promoting their WebP image-compression format (Sneaky, Sneaky 😉).
Google Reveals JavaScript Rendering Secrets at Chrome Dev Summit 2018
DeepCrawl is just the boss at event summaries, right? In this latest post Rachel Costello describes the key takeaways from the Chrome Dev Summit, including a way to skip Google’s rendering queue by using dynamic rendering.
A/B Testing: 29 Guidelines for Online Experiments (plus a checklist)
Continuing with the theme set last week by including posts outside of the usual SEOsphere, this post outlines 29 guidelines for online experiments. UX is becoming more and more important to increase visibility in search results as Google continues to use user behavioural metrics to validate their algorithm. UX is just another facet of SEO we need to become accustomed to and learn more about. This should provide you with enough information and inspiration to at least start testing, or some advanced testing methods if you are already.
Tools
web.dev
Another useful tool from Google introduced at the Chrome Dev Summit. This tool is based on the Lighthouse extension, which provides a summary score for a set of web performance metrics including accessibility, best practice and SEO (vague metric). You can also login using your Google account and monitor performance over time.
Google made some big changes to their PageSpeed Insights tool last week. The tool is now officially powered by Lighthouse, making the diagnosis of web performance a lot more comprehensive.
The tool also now uses real-world performance metrics powered by the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) segmented from the 'lab' data in Lighthouse. This is such a powerful extension of the tool, as you can now get a real sense of the performance of your website, in your customer's shoes.
It allows you to dig a little deeper. For example, for one of my clients with an extremely slowly First Contentful Paint (FCP) on mobile in the CrUX report, I've been able to dive into the most popular devices and browsers where page speed is a real problem, and then use Web Page Test to provide isolated recommendations for devices and browsers.
Go do your own forensic SEO on real-world data. It also makes consulting and advocating recommendations a whole lot easier.
On to the links...
Andrew Charlton