I put a ton of work into this, and now it's here: Growth Memo Premium launches today.
🚨Starting today, Growth Memo has a paid tier for Marketing and Growth experts who want to improve their skills by learning from the successes of fast-growing companies.🚨
I’ve been using Ahrefs for almost 10 years now.
I can tell you with high confidence that most people don’t nearly squeeze nearly as much out of it as they could (and should).
To give you taste, I want to share my 3 favorite Ahrefs tips with you.
Unfortunately, I was also impacted by Shopify’s layoffs.
Truth is, I am and will be fine. Shopify’s severance package is very generous.
If you’re hiring, keep an eye out for my talented colleagues!
I’ll take the summer off and then decide what’s next in fall. ✌️
People asking me an SEO-specific question.
My brain:
- Don’t say “it depends”
- Don’t say “it depends”
- Don’t say “it depends”
- Don’t say “it depends”
- Don’t say “it depends”
Me:
“It.... depends.”
Google recently launched 3 updates back to back
• Helpful Content Update
• Core Algorithm Update
• Product Reviews Update
I thought a bit about how the updates are connected and what they mean for strategic SEO.
My realizations:
SEO is an execution problem, not a knowledge problem.
Just talked about this with
@5le
last week.
The best SEOs have the resources and back-up to get things done. They don’t know something others don’t.
I'm very impressed with the social media strategy for Apple TV's show Ted Lasso.
Almost every character has their own Twitter account with actual posts that fit the show's narrative:
@TedLasso
@TheCoachBeard
@TheKeeleyJones
@TheTrentCrimm
...
5 ways to improve click-through rates (CTR) in Ecommerce SEO.
I’ve been with Shopify for over 1.5 years now and observed the same mistakes across millions of ecommerce stores.
Stores could drive so much more organic traffic and increase sales but leave CTR wins on the table.
Internal Link optimization has become a very strong SEO lever.
One beef I have is that most Internal link graphs exist in isolation and don't factor in backlinks.
That's why I came up with the TIPR model.
I'm beyond excited to announce that I'm joining
@Shopify
as Director of SEO!
Working with
@luclevesque
,
@morganb
,
@tobi
,
@harleyf
, and many other super talents is an opportunity I couldn't pass.
The difference Shopify can make in the world is profound.
5 hard SEO truths I learned over the last 10 years:
1/ What you know doesn't merely matter as much as what you can get done.
Knowledge is important, but when you can't ship, it doesn't matter what you know.
🤯
1. Google knew publishers make -40% revenue with AMP
2. Google intentionally slowed other results down
3. Google tweaked AdX and forged closed door deals to break header bidding
That’s explosive stuff.
Google is drastically reducing the visibility of FAQ and How-To rich snippets.
After end of this week:
1/ FAQ = only for gov or health sites
2/ How-to = only on desktop
I have questions, like… why?
My thought: they take away too many clicks from Google’s SERP Features.
How to become an "SEO thought leader" in 3 easy steps:
1. Create a bunch of sites in foreign languages
2. Go after keywords with 0 competition but high search volume
3. Show lots of traffic graphs going up and to the right
4. Pretend you have a sophisticated concept
5. Done
Google now provides a tool to measure what page users are likely to visit next, based on data from Google Analytics, driven by machine learning O_O. It's an open source library called guess.js and primarily used for page speed optimization... But I see a couple more use cases ;-)
What are all the jobs of a technical SEO?
I got optimize
1. Crawling & rendering
2. Page experience (CWV, etc.)
3. Internal linking
4. SEO hygiene (solving problematic status codes, etc.)
5. Indexing
6. Mobile optimization
7. Structured Data/Rich Snippets
What else?
Pinterest Trends is live.
Just like Google Trends, it gives you the search volume of a keyword on a relative scale of 0-100.
Plus, it shows you related terms to the ones you searched for.
Very exciting tool for (consumer) topic discovery and trends.
How to scale organic traffic - my first
@conversionxl
article 🙌🏻.
The core points are:
- The SEO approach of Inventory-driven sites is different
- Jobs-to-be-done is a great framework for user intent
- Google looks at intent emotions (and we should, too)
Hot take: if Semrush can visualize PBNs and link schemes, Google can, too.
This new feature shows you the sites in your close neighborhood and how they're interlinked.
Tip: export and compare with competitors.
PS: May or may not have had a hand in this feature👀
The full agency SEO audits have to stop. The time in which you wait 1-2 months for an audit with 30-40 recommendations is over.
With more and more companies working agile, 3-5 good recommendations per month are much better.
💥 I asked 15 of the best technical SEOs in the game for their predictions in 2020.
Technical SEO is exploding (see bombe emoji at the beginning) and getting a grasp for what's coming very important.
Read it all here 👇🏻
Last Thursday was my last day at
@G2dotcom
...
I'm incredibly grateful for the people I worked with, (many) achievements we accomplished, and lessons I learned. Boy, did I learn a lot!
The reason I left was not G2, but another opportunity.
SEO in 2023:
1/ increase review footprint across the web
2/ collaborate with influencers for brand awareness
3/ optimize user experience
4/ snippet optimization
5/ conversion optimization
6/ content creation & tuning
7/ Topic research + user intent clustering
8/ SEO hygiene
"starting today, we’ll show new information on search results that highlights information about the individual creator — like their social handle, follower count or the popularity of their content."
Google's way to combat AI content: prioritize content from verified users.
⚠️ New article ⚠️
I wrote a thing about fixing organic traffic plateaus. Most sites inevitable stagnate after seeing good growth for a while. 📉
I identified 12 main causes that are responsible. 👇🏻
UX matters for SEO. You can have the best content and links but if your main font is gray and thin, users might still bounce and send a negative signal.
Google Docs now provides auto-generated summaries of documents.
The level of accuracy is very high.
Lots of possibilities to use this type of technology in search results as well (summarize a web page)...
When you want to drive traffic to a large site, you have to operate at scale.
Internal linking is one of those levers you can pull and throughout my career, it was always a lever that delivered results in SEO.
That's why I poured my brain out and dropped +5K words on it.
You can work 10 years in SEO and still not predict the exact impact of title optimization.
Lesson: don’t get too tied to your beliefs because there is no 100% certainty.
Is Google killing OTAs?
Booking and Expedia own 80% of the Online Travel Agency (OTA) market.
They spend ~90% of marketing budget on (Google) ads ($10b combined per year).
Now Google rolled out Google Travel.
That's the ⚰️ for OTAs, right?
Not so fast.
New article: "Semantic content optimization with entities" 📈
Entities are one of the hottest topics in SEO right now, but can we optimize content for entities and if yes, how?
That, a little entity case-study, and some tips for content optimization. 👇🏻
Today marks exactly 4 months for me at
@Shopify
.
I learned A LOT about what makes the company so unique and successful in that short amount of time.
1. First-principles thinking. Shopify is very principled, but not dogmatic. "Why are we really doing this?" comes up a lot.
Google and Amazon have been frenemies for a while, but now it’s getting tense.
Google just announced “checkout on Google”, a new, powerful way of directly sending customers to your checkout page from free organic listings.
SEO strategy doesn't have to be complicated.
It comes down to 5 key questions:
1/ What is your objective?
2/ What levers can you pull?
3/ What limitations do you face?
4/ What resources do you need?
5/ What is your competitive advantage?
The most dangerous bias in SEO is to think that any decrease in organic traffic was a Google update and any increase was self-made.
That’s self-serving bias.
I am a proponent of the “SEO becomes more complex and gets harder”, but one important point to make is that as SEOs, there are still tons of things we can do to drive major impact!
No other role, except for maybe product managers, is so horizontally integrated.
Truthfully, I’ve seen a lot of content created by humans that’s far worse than decent AI content.
In my opinion, we shouldn’t measure the quality of content by WHO creates it but by HOW valuable it is.
Marketing, SEO, and Growth have one important thing in common: they’re all easier when done for/with a product that has traction.
If the product has such strong PMF that it sells itself, SEO is dream. It comes easy. Rankings fly.
Without Product-Market/Fit, SEO is a chore.
What SEOs secretly want to hear:
- sure, I can deploy that in the next sprint.
- Why don’t I just write a script to optimize those 3,000 meta titles?
- You need budget for writers? Just let me know how much you need.
- Of course I’ll approve 30K for that new tool.
Here's a hack for becoming a great SEO:
1. Read case studies/talk to other SEOs
2. Replicate what they did
3. Measure the results critically
4. Rinse & repeat for a couple of years
Big win for me this week: Growth Memo crossed 8,000 subscribers!
I set this goal for the end of the year but crossed it one month earlier - thanks to all of you!
Appreciate you all for being loyal readers 🙏!
An audit is not a strategy.
People love audits because they feel like work.
They can go through a checklist and complete tasks.
But you don't gain a competitive advantage with audits.
You gain it with the right strategy.
If you’re into SEO and content, you want to give this a good read. 👏🏻
Nice one,
@glenngabe
“
How Real Feedback From Real People Can Help Site Owners Surface Website Quality Problems”
There's so much confusion about duplicate content and whether it can hurt in terms of SEO. Great answer here by John in the Dec 31 help hangout.
Google doesn't demote for duplicate content...but they may not show all of it to searchers.
#SEO
Google: we usually try not to launch updates at the end of the year
Also Google: oh, also here is a new quality concept, a HCU, a spam update and new rater guidelines
The SEO team at IBM is doing some impressive things!
1️⃣ Despite being a +100 years old brand, attracts more organic than direct traffic (think about that).
I gained a lot of followers over the last months and want to use the new year to reintroduce myself.
You might have found me through a tweet or blog article about SEO, Growth, or leadership.
At the most atomic level, I’m fascinated with systems and connecting ideas.
Google is testing a new feature in Chrome that automatically summarizes any page.
‼️Why it matters: if this feature (called “SGE while browsing”) becomes available for everyone, it’s likely users would spend even less time on sites.
What’s over and underrated in SEO?
My top 3:
📈overrated
1. Core Web Vitals
2. Content length
3. Alt tags
📉underrated
1. Brand combination searches
2. Content depth
3. Visuals
What are yours?
The e-commerce search results on Google go through major changes since Google announced new shopping experiences in 2021.
To understand the impact, I analyzed the layout of 20,000 e-commerce keywords.
Here are 3 insights:
1.5 years after publishing an article about Content Tuning (a.k.a. content refreshes), the concept works better than before.
This is a tool that I - and many other successful SEOs - use every day.
It works because there is more content than ever. The bar keeps rising.
Over the weekend, I analyzed 20,000 keywords and found that only 38% of keywords show 10 organic results on the first page (Desktop).
43% of keywords show 9 results, and 15% show 8!
Once again, SEO has become more competitive.
We can't aim for "the top 10" anymore.
We talk about the benefits of organic traffic. In this essay, I write about its nasty side effects.
It's more than zero-click searches - it's a new reality companies are facing: my speaking theme of the year and the first article I wrote about it.
Woah, the latest Google algo update is AGGRESSIVE!
Some sites are tanking like it’s 2012 and Google just rolled out the first ever Penguin update.
Is that the impact of BERT or something else - whaddayathink?
If you are new to SEO or want to freshen up your knowledge, there's none better than the one and only,
@CyrusShepard
, to explain it:
"Cyrus Shepard presents the best articles to learn SEO"
I���ve seen sites double traffic just by managing Google’s crawl resources more efficiently.
One of my clients is one of the biggest social networks on the market, with over 160M indexed pages.
At that size, you can’t simply crawl the site or track keywords for every page.
New article: "Identifying site structure weaknesses"
"Site structure" is one of the most loosely used terms in SEO.
That's why I attempt to clarify how Internal linking, Taxonomy, Click depth, and URL structure play together and how to optimize them.
A lot of Marketers assume SEO ranks are stable.
Once you rank
#1
(or any position for that purpose), you "made it" and will stay there with a little maintenance work.
It makes sense to think that way because that's how it used to be.
But not anymore.
I just published my notes from the Gary Illyes Q&A at the Bay Area Search meetup in SF on Monday.
Gary dropped some helpful nuggets that I want to make available to the SEO community.
@BaySearch
PS:
@ajkohn
did a great job as interviewer!
Ranking
#1
in organic search is not as complicated as it seems. You can reverse engineer the qualities of the top result and tweak yours accordingly.
However, ranking
#1
for thousands of keywords is a different game. You have combine two frameworks.
Content Marketers and SEOs, check this out: "The Website as an SEO Work of Art"
I very much agree with this. Layout, Design, User Experience - call it what you like. It has an impact on organic traffic and conversions.
via
@rosshudgens
Is deduping Featured Snippets really harmful to traffic? 🤔
I analyzed 2,000 of our snippets and came to a different conclusion than what my gut feeling initially told me.
Check it out 👇🏻