Post of the Week
Aggregate & Automate Performance Reporting With Lighthouse & Google Data Studio
This is such a great Lighthouse reporting dashboard on Data Studio by Dan Leibson. He's also open sourced it and the documentation is available on Github. Check it out!
Content
The Detail Principle for Writing Good Blog Posts
An oldy but goody! Devesh Khanal walks through the principles of writing good blog posts - I've genuinely absorbed a ton of useful insight from this article and aim to follow the principles in my own articles.
Topic Clusters: Maximize Your Content's SEO Performance
Very impressed with this guide on topic clusters from Ryan Stewart. Not only does Ryan breakdown how the model works with digestible content and diagrams but he also references real ecommerce examples where he's applied it.
Tech
4 Advanced Ways to Use Chrome DevTools for Technical SEO Audits
Chrome Dev Tools is brilliant resource with a lot of functionality often overlooked by SEOs. Dan Taylor outlines 4 advanced ways to use it from accessibility to usability and page speed.
Machine Learning for SEO: Solving Practical Problems with AI
The machines are coming. Tom Bennet shows how labour-intensive SEO tasks such as language detection and meta description creation can be automated using a public APIs.
It's been a funny old week in SEO. Google mirrored their favicon mobile search design onto desktop and then reverted the change when they received a barrage of negative feedback (not sure I've seen them revert a change as big as this so quickly before). They're looking at new placements for favicons over the coming weeks.
They also made a change to featured snippets by deduplicating results. If you achieve a featured snippet, no longer shall you own the featured snippet as well as a piece of real estate in organic listings. I've got mixed feelings on this. It's likely a positive change if you never had a featured snippet for a query, but likely a negative change if you did. Hm. If you've got any data on the impact of the change, please send it my way!
SEO Twitter wasn't all negative last week, there were also some super useful advice and case studies like this one from Hamlet Batista - showing the world how to do agile SEO.
Andrew Charlton