Post of the Week
TechSEO Boost 2018 Livestream
Last week I featured the blog 'Kevin Indig - Internal Link Building on Steroids' as my Post of the Week. Little did I know that Catalyst Digital had released recordings from the event. Mind blown 💣. This is a must watch for all technical SEOs.
News
Google’s Site Quality Algorithm Patent
This post analyses a Google patent dated from 2012 to 2015 called 'Classifying Sites as Low Quality Sites'. It uses a method to categorise websites as low quality by ranking the links. Although there's no guarantee that Google is applying the factors outlined in patents, it makes sense to review and analyse them, so we can learn some more about Google's way of thinking.
Content
How to Build an SEO Business Case That Your Boss Can’t Say No To
Another post from SEJ this week. If you work in-house or agency, you'll need to present a viable business case to invest in SEO. This post presents 10 pragmatic steps to help you do that.
3 Ways to Make Your Research Better Today – HubSpot – Medium
Mentioned in my introduction. Go read!
Tools
Project Sloth
This was one of my top finds from the TechSEO Boost 2018 Livestream. Dan Taylor from SALT.agency spoke about using Cloudflare Workers, as a way of implementing SEO solutions such as hreflang, meta tags, and even redirects, using serverless JavaScript functions. This helps to bypass the obstacles faced from clients running on older platforms and legacy tech stacks. Project Sloth, in Alpha, leverages Cloudflare Workers but allows the non-techy to alter client websites.
Discover Exploding Trends Before They Take Off
Now this is a pretty cool find! The tool tracks data across Google, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon and more to identify trending topics. In fact it's so good that you could probably spot trends before they're trends.
Bringing the best of Google tools to WordPress
This is big. Google has a plugin in Beta which integrates Search Console, Analytics, Adsense and PageSpeed Insights directly into your Wordpress dashboard 🔥
There's an article I've featured this week which really caught my attention. Although it was published in September, I've only just stumbled upon it. The somewhat boringly titled '3 Ways to Make Your Research Better Today' is so much more than that. It's what we do for all of our clients, solve problems (sometimes 😉). I've been working in SEO for some time now, and I think while most of us are natural problem solvers, it usually comes without a process or framework; it's inconsistent.
The author uses the This McKinsey framework as steps to solve a business problem and then deconstructs a problem using issue trees and MECE. I've seen this before on the Distilled blog, which should add some SEO context to this. Breaking down problems and exhausting all angles, helps add confidence to the recommendations we're proposing. This also makes consulting a whole lot easier, right? You can let clients know where you are in the problem solving process, and justify why you're not going down particular routes.
Add more structure to your problem solving.
On to the links...
Andrew Charlton