Post of the Week
Expired Domains for SEO: Generating Up to $35K/m With An Affiliate Site
This post from Glen at detailed.com provides some insight on how an old tactic is still performing incredibly well today. A guy called Suumit got in touch with Glen to share a case study on how he launched an Amazon affiliate site from scratch and hit $28,000/m in just eight months by redirecting expired domains. Interesting!
Content
Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer's Journey - Moz
Mapping keywords to the buyer journey makes a lot of sense, so that you can begin to understand the intent behind a keyword. This guide by Matthew Kay maps out the process of harvesting keywords, before aligning keywords to a stage in the buyer's journey. The guide sets out a foundational framework for mapping intent, you should use it, improve it, and automate it.
Tech
Getting the Most out of Google Chrome for Technical SEO
There are so many cool things you can do with Chrome Dev Tools. This post shows 12 of them including a way to capture full site screenshots and a way to make scraping easier.
Become *Everyone's* Trendsetter - Part II In The Sentiment Series
This is a huggggeeeeee follow up post from Tom Rayner, so you'll need 40 minutes spare, and several coffees. This post has so many twist and turns, it's difficult to sum up. I'll use his own words to give you a taster 'But what if you could go beyond Google? What if you could dictate the discourse and the sentiment of a topic, product, or brand - on virtually any medium of traffic you can think of?'.
An introduction to HTTP/2 for SEOs
For those of you that have no idea whatsoever what HTTP/2 is, this is one of the easiest to follow guides I've read on the subject. Tom Anthony uses a truck analogy to perfectly describe the distinction between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 👏
Goooood Morning. Very interesting issue this week - seems like everyone has been publishing knockout content recently. Before we move onto the links, I want to discuss/debate/rant about the subject of one them 'Forecasting SEO Impacts on Organic Traffic'. First point is that the post is one of the most pragmatic approaches to forecasting for SEO I've read so check it out! Second point is that people rarely follow this approach, which means most forecasts are absolute garbage.
There are a couple of reasons forecasting in the industry is poor. I think they're often forced at pitch stage with objectives set as part of the brief which can often force SEOs to string together a set of loose projections (not an excuse - don't do it). In truth though, we simply aren't very good at them. Forecasting is tough, there are so many variables, however we should at least be able to make a reasonable baseline forecast using historical data - forecasting on top of this should be justified by data, but caveated to the hilt.
The main problem I see, is that there's not enough due diligence carried out on historical data to make a reasonable prediction. If you're calculating a base trend, you need to ensure that firstly there's a large enough dataset to work with. You then need some context from the client on historical marketing activities and whether they will activated in the forecasted time period. Getting this part right will set you up for success. I'd love to hear your thoughts on forecasting, as I may follow up with a blog post. Let me know on Twitter!
Andrew Charlton