Issue 5

Comment

The biggest news in search last week had to be the secret deal Google struck with Mastercard for millions of dollars in a bid to learn more about how ads impact retail spending. Although I guess this may freak some people out from a privacy perspective, I don't see it being a major issue.

We will only ever see an aggregated number; no personal details, no credit card numbers, no sensitive information. News like this should excite digital marketers, as it enables a better way of tracking online-to-offline. Technology like beacons are great probabalistic indicators of online-to-offline performance, but don't provide the certainty and specificity of using transactional data. What are your thoughts? 🤓

Content

20 Examples Of Truly Engaging Interactive Content

Apparently the number of interactive posts has increased by 33 percent, but the average number of shares has fallen by 62 percent! 😲 People's expectancy of content quality has increased so much, that you need to stand out from the crowd to compete. Fortunately, this article by Buzzsumo walks through 20 examples of content that does just that.

Tech

Regular expressions and XPaths alternatives every SEO needs

Tobias Willmann shows how to get more insight out of your crawls with a whole host of Xpath examples. Check it out!

0.6 seconds is the new slow [Presentation]

Unfortunately I wasn't there to see this presentation at WC024 by Jono Alderson, but he has provided access to his 164 slides on page speed! I really enjoyed going through the slides - there's a ton of valuable insight on his improvements to the Yoast website, as well the importance of increasing the perception of a fast website.

Understand and eliminate spam traffic in Google Analytics

Universal Analytics has made it much easier to spam Google Analytics. This updated article by Search Viu describes some of the vulnerabilities of Google Analytics, and how you can go about eliminating spam inside the platform.

Crawl budget for SEO: the ultimate reference guide

ContentKing has put together a mammoth guide into crawl budget, alongside insight from some of the biggest names in SEO. This is a must read if you'd like to understand more on the topic, or refresh your approach to crawl budget optimisation.

Add structured data to your web pages [Google's Guide]

Google has officially launched its guide for adding structured data. This isn't going to interest any experienced technical SEO, but is a great resource to point clients or new starters towards.

Tools

SERP Simulator - SEO Title & Meta Description Tool

I'm not sure how old this tool is but I stumbled upon it on Twitter, and found it very useful. Not only is it a pretty accurate SERP simulator, it also includes an option to add rich snippets, as well as an option to save/share an image of the simulated result.