Post of the Week
The Entity & Language Series: Entity-First Indexing with Mobile-First Crawling (5 Part Series)
This is maaaaaaaaaasive series by the mega talented Cindy Krum. Although the series is speculative, I think it provides some sound rationale and argument that Google's mobile-first-index has been grossly oversimplified. Cindy instead calls mobile-first-indexing 'entity-first' indexing, as she believes the update is more about entity classification and translation than it is about different user-agents. Check it out!
Content
Identify missing phrases in your content using the SEMrush or Search Console API
I think this is a strategy most of you will use, but perhaps you haven't thought about automating or scaling it in this way. This quick tutorial by the guys at Builtvisible uses SEMrush or Google Search Console's API to identify missing phrases from your content that you're visible for on Google.
Case Study
Inside Google Marketing: 3 ways we think about SEO
This is fascinating insight from Google's own search optimisation team on their approach to SEO. They outline the importance of small, incremental changes which has resulted in significant gains over time for their Google My Business marketing site, alongside many other pragmatic ways to scale and drive organic traffic.
CRO
What Happens When SEO and CRO Conflict?
I love the conversation that Distilled has inspired around how SEO and CRO interact with each other. In this post, they discuss which SEO changes do and don't impact CRO and vice versa, as well as a hypothetical CRO testing scenario which outlines the business impact of siloing SEO and CRO.
Tools
Is your HTML bloated? A flamegraph can tell you why
Csaba Palfi, a software developer and devops consultant, has developed a simple tool which helps to diagnose where your HTML payload bytes come from.
Discover GoDaddy Expiring Domains
This is such a cool tool if you're in the market for expiring domains. They've included a multitude of SEO metrics such as Page Authority, Domain Authority and backlinks, which you can use to sort and filter expiring domains.
11 Little-Known Features In The SEO Spider | Screaming Frog
Correct Screaming Frog... I didn't know a lot about some of these features! Check it out 💡
Google has annoyed me this week. I had a feeling it was coming, but John Mueller confirmed that Google will discontinue some features available on the old Search Console. Specifically, he said that the crawl errors report was not useful. I mean what are they using as a proxy for usefulness? 🤔
I don't know about you, but the crawl errors report has often been a goldmine for discovering both server errors and 404s that would be difficult to identify in a regular crawl; the coverage report just isn't the same. In many ways I feel Google has approached the new Search Console completely wrong and is culling important features unnecessarily - which feature is next for the chop? 😒
Andrew Charlton