I hope you are enjoying our slow return to normality. In Sitebulb-land we've been busy working on some updates, which we hope to unveil to you soon. We've also been working on content, and following on from our sponsorship of WTSFest Virtual earlier this year, we are doing more work with the WTS gang, this time bringing some of their contributors' work to Sitebulb's audience in a series of webinars.
The first of which is tomorrow (Wednesday 26th), where we'll be joined by Izzy Wisniewska as she runs us through her process on How to Conduct, Structure and Communicate Technical SEO Audits. She did a similar webinar for the WTS community on one of their workshops and the presentation received fantastic feedback, so we are extremely excited about this encore performance. Check the link above for the webinar details and set a reminder so you don't miss it!
Here's what we've been enjoying lately:
Recent Tech SEO Stuff We Love
TechSEO "Mini" Boost 2021 Session Recordings
via @CatalystSEM
The last conference I went to IRL was TechSEO Boost, waaay back in December '19, enjoying an incredible conference with friends, in snowy Boston. Man that seems so long ago. And though screen recordings are not the same as actually being there with other human beings, these ones are pretty bloody good. If you love tech SEO, you'll love these videos. My favourite was Brian Ta's talk on SEO Experimentation. I had not come across Brian before, so I have also found myself an excellent new follow (another great thing about conferences that I miss. Insert crying face emoji).
3 Gut-wrenching SEO Filters Lessons from an Enterprise In-house SEO
via @Jables321
For some reason I have always found indexing issues around faceted search to be fascinating. Or should I say facetnating (*guffaws*). It's all uphill from here people.
This is a cool case study on how Home Depot used faceted search 'filter pages' to drive traffic, and what happened when things went wrong. This sort of stuff always feels like the definition of technical SEO to me.
Advanced Core Web Vitals: A Technical SEO Guide
via @Jammer_Volts
Jamie has published some great stuff on CWV recently, and she's back with another banger. This one focuses in on the technical aspects of understanding what Core Web Vitals data is actually showing you, and how you can marry up field data with the Lighthouse diagnostic/opportunity audits.
The Almost-Complete Guide to Cumulative Layout Shift
via @jessthebp
As if that wasn't enough CWV goodness, this is a deep dive into one metric into particular: Cumulative Layout Shift. And by deep dive, I mean nearly 8000 words of CLS based goodness. You're going to need a coffee or five.
There is a LOT of stuff here. It'll make your head hurt. But in a good way. And it has a convenient round-up at the end that helps it all make sense again.
Other Cool Stuff You Should Check Out
- Using Regex in GSC to Find Longtail Keywords and Questions
I mean it is literally what it says on the tin. Using regex in GSC to find longtail keywords and questions. Did you really need me to repeat it?
- How To: Schedule Sitebulb Crawls With Email Notifications
This is a cool post from Ian Lurie where he takes world-famous crawling tool Sitebulb and shows you how to hook in Zapier to email you whenever an audit is complete. Particularly perfect for when you run Sitebulb on a server or in the cloud.
- Getting Buy-in Requires Executive Empathy
I'm a big believer that empathy is a superpower in the business world, so I'm a sucker for posts like this, and I particularly enjoyed the part on 'Dealing with CEOs'.
What We've Been Up To
- In case you missed it earlier or got distracted by all the cool shiny posts, we are hosting a webinar tomorrow with Izzy Wisniewska, so don't delay and sign up now!
- Wayne Barker was back with an absolute beast of a post on Duplicate Content for SEO, which also happens to be littered with his customary pop culture references and enjoyable riffs and rambles.
- Geoff put together a handy bookmarklet for the new Schema Markup Validator, which is currently in beta (h/t to schema maestro Dave Ojeda for this suggestion).
- Wayne also provided us with his Ultimate Guide to Redirects for SEO which is both super clear and comprehensive. Got any junior SEOs who need to learn about redirects? Send 'em here.
