Post of the Week
How I Increased Organic Revenue By €850,000+ By Predicting A Keyword's Future Latent Intent
Google constantly changes search engine results as a result of the latent intent for a keyword. This can be as a result of, but is not limited to, seasonality, brand and sentiment. In this post, Tom Rayner describes how he has been able to unearth several ways of finding which sentiment Google is likely to take notice of and adapt on-site content to react to it.
News
Improving Search for the next 20 years
I've summarised this post in my commentary, but this is a must read. Their blog post links out to articles describing features which illustrate their intent for the future of search.
Tech
WPO Stats - Web Performance Experiments and Case Studies
I stumbled upon this blog last week, and just had to share it. They've curated case studies and experiments from global brands on how web performance optimisation has impacted key business metrics.
How to Run Lighthouse Reports for Multiple Pages
These guys regularly churn out quality, practical content, so I'm not surprised with how great this post is.
Used the Lighthouse report to audit an individual page's performance? James Mcnulty has outlined a way to scale this with Node.js, so that you can audit multiple pages, and evaluate the results in Google Sheets.
Case Study
Marginal losses: the hidden reason your SEO performance is lagging
Distilled has now amassed a huge volume of data via their ODN platform, so have multiple examples where SEO tests have been unsuccessful.
It turns out that proposing changes based on best practice is no longer an option anymore; we're wrong a lot of the time, and this can have significant, and often hidden, implications on performance. Check out the post by Will Critchlow to learn more on how regular testing can help string together many small improvements, with compound returns on organic traffic.
Last week marked Google's 20th Birthday, and with that they outlined how they're going to improve search in the next 20 years. It's exciting, if not a little bit scary!
They described 3 fundamental shifts in how they're going to be thinking about search going forward:
Where does it looks like Google is heading? Well, with the introduction of smarter ways to retrace search history and an improved content discovery platform, Google is transitioning from being 'search-only.'
They want users to not only use the search engine as a means of finding information, but to re-engage with that information along longer journey's such as planning a trip, or buying a house. Google holds more information than all of the libraries in the world combined. Using this data, their discovery engine will help make it easier for users to find new content aligned to their interests, without searching for it.
How do we plan for a future where we'll have less control than we already do?
Andrew Charlton