It's September you guys. And covid is still a thing (collective sigh).
BUT the kids are back at school (YES!!!!!!!!!), so we all need to make up for lost time and get reading more tech SEO goodness.
Before we get to that, I want to do a little shoutout to a giveaway Aleyda is running on her blog, for women in the SEO community to win access to the ROAR Together! Online Accelerator, which is an online coaching community ran by the brilliant Kirsty Hulse. We've lent our support, and we're just hoping to raise a little more awareness for the opportunity, so please share (and enter!).
Recent Tech SEO Stuff We Love
How to Identify Questions & Optimize Your Site for Q&A, FAQ & More
via @lilyraynyc
Generating content ideas is an ongoing battle for digital marketers and content teams alike. In this article Lily puts forward the case that 'identifying and answering searchers’ questions should be a key component of any SEO strategy' and I'd argue it should be the first port of call when defining a content strategy in general.
This post also highlights how 'question and answer content' also dovetails nicely with structured data, and I expect for a lot of client sites this is a great starting point for getting structured data implemented across the website.
Structured Data For Ecommerce (VIDEO)
via @jonoalderson & @marthavanberkel
I am very taken with this new webinar series on structured data from SEMrush. Martha and Jono again do a fantastic job of distilling the virtues of schema markup, this time with a focus on ecommerce. It's worth watching this video alone to see how excited Jono gets when Martha mentions @id (about 7 minutes in).
Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate
via @CyrusShepard
Title tags aren't exactly the sexiest topic going, but we all still need to optimize them! In this post Cyrus shares the results of A/B testing experiments (using SearchPilot) where they removed the boilerplate for certain pages types on the Moz site. The results (and takeaways) are pretty interesting, and won't necessarily fit your expectations...
Internal Linking for SEO: best practices, strategies, axioms
via @Kevin_Indig
Kevin's post is also on the subject of challenging expectations and long-held beliefs, as he delves into internal linking once again. A large chunk of this post is based around internal linking 'axioms' (things we all just assume are true and have become 'received wisdom' in the SEO world), examining whether they still hold up. It's good stuff!
Other Stuff You Should Check Out
- A collection of illustrations explaining SEO terminology and concepts
This is genuinely awesome - 12 images of SEO concepts you find yourself needing to explain all the time (e.g. canonical URLs), which are total free to use (in client reports, blog posts etc...) and/or customise yourself in Figma. Mr Sam Underwood, we all owe you one!
- How I accidentally found people’s bank statements online while trying to build links
This is fun, and also kinda scary. While working on an interesting-sounding link building strategy, Mark stumbled upon a series of massive security breaches by companies that most definitely should be doing better...
- How my Content Audit Process Secured a 6-Figure Sale of my Website
I've always loved content audits, and I've always loved case studies. Here is a content audit case study which results in $$$. What more could you want?
What We've Been Up To
- We had our first ever guest post, from the super awesome Maret from Mobe Digital, on 'The Importance of Topic Clusters'.
- I also actually wrote something myself, a snazzy number that answers the perennial question (of Summer 2020): how are we supposed to validate structured markup once the SDTT goes away?!?
- I joined Steve McLeod on his podcast Bootstrapped where I discussed how me and Geoff annoy Gareth, why we chose to build Sitebulb as a desktop application, and I why I think it's ok to swear at our customers in the release notes.
- I made a video showcasing our new 'Content Search' feature, with a bunch of use-cases and examples - check it out here.
ASIDE: I need a favour... Our fledgling YouTube channel has a pathetic 42 subscribers. Do us a solid and give us a subscribe won't ya? I'll buy you a pint next time I see you...
