SEO, Strategy, and Shenanigans.
Ireland
Joined April 2019
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I made my first #seomeme following a conversation last night with my mom about SEO. Is it a career milestone when you start making memes about what you do at work? 😅
ALT Dad, what’s that dark place over there? That’s page 2 of search results, no one ever goes there #seo #seomemes
When Quora tells you to Google the thing you already Googled and got a Quora result for...the state of Google is grim right now 🥲 #SEO
Rachel Stires retweeted
"We need very few links to rank pages... Over the years we've made links less important." @methode #serpconf2024 – at Bulgaria
Rachel Stires retweeted
Founder: “Our blog doesn’t bring revenue.”
The blog:
- Big chunks of text
- One big call to action: “Book a demo.”
- Complex and technical
- Provide no unique perspective
- Optimized purely for SEO
Steal our Revenue-Led SEO blog structure instead.
Rachel Stires retweeted
SEO Tip: Use the Wayback Machine + Diffchecker to spy on how your competitors change content over time:
This is a process that I like to do when we known high performing competitors are frequently making updates to their pages. For instance in the affiliate space, competitors are known to update their content at least every year, sometimes every month.
This process makes it extremely easy to visualize these changes:
Rachel Stires retweeted
Here's a little-known fact that SEOs should be aware of: If your robots.txt file is unreachable, GOOGLE WILL NOT CRAWL YOUR ENTIRE SITE.
The first thing Google does when it goes to a given site is to read the robots.txt file. There it gets its instruction about what content it can crawl and what content it can't crawl.
However, if your robots.txt returns a 5xx error for whatever reason, Google will simply just elect to not crawl the entire site. Not only will this impact SEO, but it will cause your Google Ads to get disapproved as well.
In my 10+ years of experience, I can say that I've never known this. We recently just had a client get their ads disapproved suddenly and Google cited this as the reason why.
Just be aware that if you have a robots.txt file and Google can't access it, this will be an extremely high priority issue.
Do you remember when you joined Twitter? I don't! But Twitter certainly does! I've enjoyed chatting shite about SEO with all of ye for 5 years. #MyXAnniversary
Has anyone had any luck with Copilot accurately linking to your site? A client of ours is noticing a lot of random links in Copilot results and I can't seem to find a single guide on this
Rachel Stires retweeted
#SEOtip
Use
^(who|what|where|when|why|how|should|could|did)
Regular expression (RegEx) in Google Search Console to identify frequently asked question queries that your website appears for on SERP.
ALT Regular expression that matches any query starting with these common question words who, what, where, when, why, how, should, could and did
Rachel Stires retweeted
My hot take of the day is that SEO agencies should pretty much never make promises or guarantees about anything.
And I say this as someone that works at one and has always told clients there are no guarantees in SEO.
Today, one of my clients let me know they're letting our agency go in favor of one who "promised they know how to get our traffic back."
And then one of them made this ridiculous song about their marketing team.
One of these is not like the other. 😂
suno.com/song/4885a44f-36bf-…
Rachel Stires retweeted
A comprehensive step by step do develop an Internal Link Audit by @RyanJonesSEO 👌 Check it out 👀
seotesting.com/blog/internal…
Rachel Stires retweeted
If you're in Ecommerce or do Ecommerce SEO for established retailer you want to read this: Another likely consequence of Google's SGE based on its current interface in Beta: Established Brand retailers PLPs will lose organic search traffic that *won't* likely only go to their own PDPs (!) ... but also to other online stores offering the product. This is traffic that they pretty much owned, going to the brand retail PLP. Here's why:
If you do SEO for an established retail brand you know how important branded searches are, a very *high* share of the organic search traffic will come from: [Brand Name] + [Product Line/Category Name], eg: Nike Sneakers, North Face Hoodie. These queries will be ranked in top positions by the brand online store relevant categories/PLPs easily. It's pretty much traffic they have historically "own" and little need to optimize for. But now? Not so much.
Google is generating a PLP like experience in the SGE snapshot directly, with an overall product description and showing the relevant brand products directly there in a clickable product carousel like format... but when you click on any of the brand products, it shows a product knowledge panel that won't only show results from the PDPs of the "brand" site, it will show also PDPs from any online stores/ditributors/etc. that also offer those brand products and optimize their feeds/structured data well to appear there.
Now that commercial, mid funnel, branded organic search traffic that used to go to major brand retail PLPs? A good share of it will be spread across its own PDPs as well as third party online stores PDPs that offer them and optimize them well 😅
Ecommerce: This is the time to optimize your PDPs! 🫡
Rachel Stires retweeted
Yeah, pretty ironic that Google would
- recommend that travel bloggers share first-hand experience of traveling to places
- implement algo updates resulting in many examples of travel bloggers who actually did exactly that, and saw their sites obliterated by HCU and March core updates
- now use SGE to provide even more generic travel advice from a literal AI - not even a human - who, by definition, has never traveled to the place and can never travel to the place.
Google trained its AI on travel bloggers' content. It's currently using that AI to cull travel bloggers from the SERPs. And, next, they will replace bloggers with these results.
Btw - from what I can see of the example itinerary, it's absolutely AWFUL. The Liberty Bell does not take a whole morning lol. It's silly not to combine it with Independence Hall, which is just across the street. And there's no stop for lunch!
Rachel Stires retweeted
Technical SEO Tip: Screaming Frog's "JS Word Count %" report shows you exactly how much of your content is rendered through JavaScript.
When trying to identify how much of your site requires JavaScript to load, it can be difficult to do at scale. Manual reviews can uncover certain elements that require JavaScript to load, but it can be difficult to convey exactly how much content is dependent on JavaScript.
Can't share the client name but I can share that we've seen a 76% growth in organic quotes & 71% growth in sales YoY last month. This coming from a very competitive space for an already successful company feels like it's worth celebrating 🎉 So what did we do? #seo #seocasestudy
We audited anchor text for internal links to add more keywords/variants and less 'click here' and 'brand name'. We also added new internal links pointing to the secondary pages